ing sterner than the everyday
existence of his luxurious life had driven him out into the desert,
where, bewitched, as it were of woman, he had followed the Spirit which
ever held out her long fine hand with beckoning finger.

A mere boy? Absurd! Ridiculous!

Not at all; for the high-caste boy of twelve in the Orient is oft-times
as much developed physically and mentally as the Occidental of over
twenty.

He had followed the Spirit where she had beckoned, and, an Arab through
the blood of his father, had caught her and crushed the body, slender
to gauntness, in his arms; had twined his fingers in the coarse, black
hair and pulled it back from the different-coloured eyes; had sought
the crimson mouth until his lips had rasped with the kisses a-grit with
sand; slept with his hands clutching her tattered robes of saffron,
purple and of gold; torn the misty veil from before her face and
dreamed with her cool breath, which is the wind of dawn, upon his face.

He loved her and to her had pitched his tents.

He prayed that he might be with her when he died, and, convinced that
his prayer would be answered, he had pitched him a funeral tent between
those of Purple and of Gold.

Bewitched of the desert, the colour of the tents resembled those in
which she decks herself in the passing of a day and a night.

Outwardly they were just ordinary Bedouin tents, the tan and brown of
camel-hide; flat-roofed and square, giving a full-grown man room in
which to move and stand to his full stature without the fear--as in the
peaked affair called bell--of bringing the whole thing down upon his
crown. They lifted at each side to allow the desert wind to enter at
any hour it listed; or the moon to pierce him with silvery spear; or
the stars to blaze like jewels before his eyes, as he waited for sleep
on a rug upon the sand.

The one in which he slept was hung inside with satin curtains of
deepest purple, with here and there a star of silver, which glittered
in the light of the cut-crystal lamp which hung from the cross-pole.
The Persian rug upon the floor was grey and old rose and faintest
yellow, and glistened like the skin of woman; of the ordinary
furnishings of an ordinary bedroom there was no sign--you would have to
go much farther afield to find the tent with all the paraphernalia of
the toilet. Just as you would have to go still farther and towards the
west, to where were pitched the stables, and the quarters of the
special