The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Figure In The Mirage, by Robert Hichens

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Figure In The Mirage
1905

Author: Robert Hichens

Release Date: November 8, 2007 [EBook #23412]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIGURE IN THE MIRAGE ***

Produced by David Widger

THE FIGURE IN THE MIRAGE

By Robert Hichens

Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers

Copyright, 1905

On a windy night of Spring I sat by a great fire that had been built by
Moors on a plain of Morocco under the shadow of a white city, and talked
with a fellow-countryman, stranger to me till that day. We had met in
the morning in a filthy alley of the town, and had forgathered. He was a
wanderer for pleasure like myself, and, learning that he was staying in
a dreary hostelry haunted by fever, I invited him to dine in my camp,
and to pass the night in one of the small peaked tents that served
me and my Moorish attendants as home. He consented gladly. Dinner was
over--no bad one, for Moors can cook, can even make delicious caramel
pudding in desert places--and Mohammed, my stalwart _valet de chambre_,
had given us most excellent coffee. Now we smoked by the great fire,
looked up at the marvellously bright stars, and told, as is the way
of travellers, tales of our wanderings. My companion, whom
I took at first to be a rather ironic, sceptical, and by nature
"unimaginative globe-trotter--he was a hard-looking, iron-grey man of
middle-age--related the usual tiger story, the time-honoured elephant
anecdote, and a couple of snake yarns of no special value, and I was
beginning to fear that I should get little entertainment from so prosaic
a sportsman, when I chanced to mention the desert.

"Ah!" said my guest, taking his pipe from his mouth, "the desert is
the strangest thing in nature, as woman is the strangest thing in human
nature. And when you get them together--desert and woman--by Jove!"

He paused, then he shot a keen glance at me.

"Ever been in the Sahara?" he said.

I replied in the affirmative, but added that I had as yet only seen the
fringe of it.

"Biskra, I suppose," he rejoined, "and the ne