dow of the gate,
prowling the little square inside. He smoked twenty cigarettes. He
yawned three times twenty times. At last he went out got into the car
and drove away.

As the throb of the engine grew faint a figure in European clothes and
a long-tasselled _chechia_ crept out from the dark of a door arch
along the street. It advanced toward the gate. It started back at a
sound. It rallied again, a figure bedeviled by vacillation. It came as
far as the well in the centre of the little square.

On the horizon toward the coast of Sousse rested a low black wall of
cloud. Lightning came out of it from time to time and ran up the sky,
soundless, glimmering.... The cry of the morning muezzin rolled down
over the town. The lightning showed the figure sprawled face down on
the cool stone of the coping of the well....

The court of the house of bel-Kalfate swam in the glow of candles. A
striped awning shut out the night sky, heavy with clouds, and the
women, crowding for stolen peeps on the flat roof. A confusion of
voices, raillery, laughter, eddied around the arcaded walls, and thin
music bound it together with a monotonous count of notes.

Through the doorway from the marble _entresol_ where he stood Habib
could see his father, cross-legged on a dais, with the notary. They
sat hand in hand like big children, conversing gravely. With them was
the _caid_ of Kairwan, the _cadi_, ben Iskhar, and a dark-skinned
cousin from the oases of the Djerid in the south. Their garments
shone; there was perfume in their beards. On a rostrum beyond and
above the crowded heads the musicians swayed at their work--_tabouka_
players with strong, nervous thumbs; an oily, gross lutist; an
organist, watching everything with the lizard eyes of the hashish
taker. Among them, behind a taborette piled with bait of food and
drink, the Jewish dancing woman from Algiers lolled in her cushions, a
drift of white disdain....

He saw it all through a kind of mist. It was as if time had halted,
and he was still at the steaming _hammam_ of the afternoon, his spirit
and his flesh undone, and all about him in the perfumed vapour of the
bath the white bodies of his boyhood comrades glimmering luminous and
opalescent.

His flesh was still asleep, and so was his soul. The hand of his
father city had come closer about him, and for a moment it seemed that
he was too weary, or too lazy, to push it away. For a little while he
drifted with the warm and perfumed cl