ars lying at the gate of the
Mosque spat over their fingers behind his back, and muttered "Bismillah!
In the name of God!" A negro farmer in the Feddan, who was bent double
over a hoof as he was shoeing a bony and scabby mule, lifted his ugly
face, bathed in sweat, and grinned at Israel as he went along. A
group of Reefians, dirty and lean and hollow-eyed, feeding their
gaunt donkeys, and glancing anxiously at the sky over the heads of the
mountains, snarled like dogs as he strode through their midst. The sky
was overcast, and the heads of the mountains were capped with mist.
"Balak!" sounded in Israel's ears from every side. "Arrah!" came
constantly at his heels. A sweet-seller with his wooden tray swung in
front of him, crying, "Sweets, all sweets, O my lord Edrees, sweets,
all sweets," changed the name of the patron saint of candies, and cried,
"Sweets, all sweets, O my lord Israel, sweets, all sweets!" The girl
selling clay peered up impudently into Israel's eyes, and the oven-boy,
answering the loud knocking of the bodiless female arms thrust out at
doors standing ajar, made his wordless call articulate with a mocking
echo of Israel's name.

What matter? Israel could not be wroth with the poor people.
Six-and-twenty years he had gone in and out among them as a slave. This
morning he was a free man, and to-morrow he would be one of themselves.

When he reached the Kasbah, there was something in the air about it that
brought back recollections of the day--now nearly four years past--of
the children's gathering at Katrina's festival. The lusty-lunged Arabs
squatting at the gates among soldiers in white selhams and peaked
shasheeahs the women in blankets standing in the outer court, the dark
passages smelling of damp, the gusts of heavy odour coming from the
inner chambers, and the great patio with the fountain and fig-trees--the
same voluptuous air was over everything. And as on that day so on this,
in the alcove under the horseshoe arch sat Ben Aboo and his Spanish
wife.

Time had dealt with them after their kind, and the swarthy face of the
Kaid was grosser, the short curls under his turban were more grey and
his hazel eyes were now streaked and bleared, but otherwise he was the
same man as before, and Katrina also, save for the loss of some teeth
of the upper row, was the same woman. And if the children had risen up
before Israel's eyes as he stood on the threshold of the patio, he could
not have drawn his breat