of that?

"_Boom-boom-boom-boom_!" And around the drums beyond the candles he
heard them singing:

_On the day of the going away of my Love,
When the litters, carrying the women of the tribe,
Traversed the valley of Dad, like a sea, mirage,
They were like ships, great ships, the work of the children of
Adoul,
Or like the boats of Yamen's sons...._

"_Boom-boom_!" The monotonous pulse, the slow minor slide of sixteenth
tones, the stark rests--he felt the hypnotic pulse of the old music
tampering with the pulse of his blood. It gave him a queer creeping
fright. He shut his eyes, as if that would keep it out. And in the
glow of his lids he saw the tents on the naked desert; he saw the
forms of veiled women; he saw the horses of warriors coming like a
breaker over the sand--the horses of the warriors of God!

He pulled the burnoose over his lids to make them dark. And even in
the dark he could see. He saw two eyes gazing at his, untroubled,
untroubling, out of the desert night. And they were the eyes of any
woman--the eyes of his bride, of his sister, his mother, the eyes of
his mothers a thousand years dead.

"Master!" they said.

They were pushing him forward by the elbows, Mohammed and Houseen. He
opened his eyes. The crowd swam before him through the yellow glow.
Something had made an odd breach in his soul, and through the breach
came memories.

Memories! There at his left was the smoky shelf of blind Moulay's
cafe--black-faced, white-eyed old Moulay. Moulay was dead now many
years, but the men still sat in the same attitudes, holding the same
cups, smoking the same _chibouk_ with the same gulping of bubbles as
in the happy days. And there between the cafe and the _souk_ gate was
the same whitewashed niche where three lads used to sit with their
feet tucked under their little _kashabias_, their _chechias_ awry on
their shaven polls, and their lips pursed to spit after the leather
legs of the infidel conquerors passing by. The _Roumi_, the French
blasphemers, the defilers of the mosque! Spit on the dogs! Spit!

Behind his reverie the drums boomed, the voices chanted. The lament of
drums and voices beat at the back of his brain--while he remembered
the three lads sitting in the niche, waiting from one white day to
another for the coming of Moulay Saa, the Messiah; watching for the
Holy War to begin.

"And I shall ride in the front rank of the horsemen, please God!"

"And I, I shall ride at Mo