s. A French cook and a taciturn Kabyl completed their
establishment. The villa was a curious compromise between East and West.
Its architect had turned out similar ones in scores at Argenteuil and
Saint Cloud, saving the minaret and the deep verandah which faced the
balmy west. From the precipitous little garden where orange and lime
trees bent beneath their fruit among the underbrush of aloes and cactus,
they could see, far away, the estranging sea.

The Kabyl had slung a hammock for Victoria between a gate-post and a
gigantic clump of palm trees. There she passed most of her days, lazily
swinging in the breeze which tumbled her black hair; while Jack, lying
at her feet in the crisp rough grass, looked long at her sun-warmed
beauty. The days seemed to fly, for they were hardly conscious of the
recurrence of life. It was sunrise, when it was good to go into the
garden and see the blue green night blush softly into salmon pink, then
burst suddenly into tropical radiance: then, vague occupations, a short
walk over stony paths to a cafe where the East and West met; unexpected
food; sleep in the heat of the day under the nets beyond which the
crowding flies buzzed; then the waning of the day, the heat settling
more leaden; sunset, the cold snapping suddenly, the night wind carrying
little puffs of dust, and the muezzin, hands aloft, droning, his face
towards the East, praises of his God.

Holt was totally happy. He felt he had reached Capua, and not even a
thought of his past life could disturb him. He asked for nothing now but
to live without a thought, eating juicy fruit, smoking for an hour the
subtle narghile; he loved to bask in the radiance of the African sun of
Victoria's beauty, which seemed to expand, to enwrap him in perfume like
a heavy narcotic rose. In the early days he tried to work, to attune
himself to the pageant of sunlit life. His will refused to act, and he
found he could not write a line; even rhymes refused to come to him.
Without an effort almost he resigned himself into the soft hands of the
East. He even exaggerated his acceptance by clothing himself in a
burnous and turban, by trying to introduce Algerian food, couscous,
roast kid, date jam, pomegranate jelly. At times they would go into
Algiers, shop in the Rue Bab-Azoum, or search for the true East in what
the French called the high town. But Algiers is not the East; and they
quickly returned to the Villa Mehari, stupefied by the roar of the
tra