lank houses watching him....

To-night, stealing across the sleeping roofs, he felt the star-lit
mosque towers watching him in secret, the pale, silent espionage of
them who could wait. The hush of the desert troubled him. Youth
troubled him. His lips were dry.

He had come to an arbour covered with a vine. Whose it was, on what
house-holder's roof it was reared, he had never known. He entered.

"She is not here." He moistened his lips with his tongue.

He sat down on the stone divan to wait, watching toward the west
through the doorway across which hung a loop of vine, like a snake.

He saw her a long way off, approaching by swift darts and intervals of
immobility, when her whiteness grew a part of the whiteness of the
terrace. It was so he had seen her moving on that first night when,
half tipsy with wine and strangeness, he had pursued, caught her, and
uncovered her face.

To-night she uncovered it herself. She put back the hooded fold of her
_haik_, showing him her face, her scarlet mouth, her wide eyes, long
at the outer corners, her hair aflame with henna.

The hush of a thousand empty miles lay over the city. For an hour
nothing lived but the universe, the bright dust in the sky....

That hush was disrupted. The single long crash of a human throat!
Rolling down over the plain of the housetops!

"_La illah il Allah, Mohammed rassoul'lah! Allah Akbar!_ God is
great!"

One by one the dim towers took it up. The call to prayer rolled
between the stars and the town. It searched the white runways. It
penetrated the vine-bowered arbour. Little by little, tower by tower,
it died. In a _fondouk_ outside the gate a waking camel lifted a
gargling wail. A jackal dog barked in the Oued Zaroud two miles away.
And again the silence of the desert came up over the city walls.

Under the vine Habib whispered: "No, I don't care anything about thy
name. A name is such a little thing. I'll call thee 'Nedjma,' because
we are under the stars."

"_Ai, Nedjmetek_--'Thy Star'!" The girl's lips moved drowsily. In the
dark her eyes shone with a dull, steady lustre, unblinking,
unquestioning, always unquestioning.

That slumberous acquiescence, taken from all her Arab mothers, began
to touch his nerves with the old uneasiness. He took her shoulders
between his hands and shook her roughly, crying in a whisper:

"Why dost thou do nothing but repeat my words? Talk! Say things to me!
Thou art like the rest; thou wouldst try to ma