llow as a bleat:

"Why, then, sire--why, oh! why, then, hast thou allowed me to make of
those others the friends of my spirit, the companions of my mind?"

"They are neither companions nor friends of thine, for God is God!"

"And why hast thou sent me to learn the teaching of the French?"

"When thou settest thy horse against an enemy it is well to have two
lances to thy hand--thine own and his. And it is written, Habib, son
of Habib, that thou shalt be content.... Put off thy shoes now and
come. It is time we were at prayer."

Summer died. Autumn grew. With the approach of winter an obscure
nervousness spread over the land. In the dust of its eight months'
drought, from one day to another, from one glass-dry night to another,
the desert waited for the coming of the rains. The earth cracked. A
cloud sailing lone and high from the coast of Sousse passed under the
moon and everywhere men stirred in their sleep, woke, looked out--from
their tents on the cactus steppes, from _fondouks_ on the camel tracks
of the west, from marble courts of Kairwan.... The cloud passed on and
vanished in the sky. On the plain the earth cracks crept and ramified.
Gaunt beasts tugged at their heel ropes and would not be still. The
jackals came closer to the tents. The city slept again, but in its
sleep it seemed to mutter and twitch....

In the serpent-spotted light under the vine on the housetop Habib
muttered, too, and twitched a little. It was as if the arid months had
got in under his skin and peeled off the coverings of his nerves. The
girl's eyes widened with a gradual, phlegmatic wonder of pain under
the pinch of his blue fingers on her arms. His face was the colour of
the moon.

"Am I a child of three years, that my father should lead me here or
lead me there by the hand? Am I that?"

"Nay, _sidi_, nay."

"Am I a sheep between two wells, that the herder's stick should tell
me, 'Here, and not there, thou shalt drink'? Am I a sheep?"

"Thou art neither child nor sheep, _sidi_, but a lion!"

"Yes, a lion!" A sudden thin exaltation shook him like a fever chill.
"I am more than a lion, Nedjma, I am a man--just as the _Roumi_"
[Romans--_i.e_., Christians.] "are men--men who decide--men who
undertake--agitate--accomplish ... and now, for the last time, I have
decided. A fate has given thy loveliness to me, and no man shall take
it away from me to enjoy. I will take it away from them instead! From
all the men of this Africa, conqu