the first sound of which made Victoria's heart
leap. It was the first time she had heard the music of Africa, except a
distant beating of tobols coming from a black tent across desert
spaces, while she had lain at night in the house of Maieddine's friends;
or the faint, pure note of a henna-dyed flute in the hand of some boy
keeper of goats--a note pure as the monotonous purling of water, heard
in the dark.

But this music was so close to her, that it was like the throbbing of
her own heart. And it was no sweet, pure trickle of silver, but the cry
of passion, passion as old and as burning as the desert sands outside
the lighted tent. As she listened, struck into pulsing silence, she
could see the colour of the music; a deep crimson, which flamed into
scarlet as the tom-tom beat, or deepened to violent purple, wicked as
belladonna flowers. The wailing of the raita mingled with the heavy
throbbing of the tom-tom, and filled the girl's heart with a vague
foreboding, a yearning for something she had not known, and did not
understand. Yet it seemed that she must have both known and understood
long ago, before memory recorded anything--perhaps in some forgotten
incarnation. For the music and what it said, monotonously yet fiercely,
was old as the beginnings of the world, old and changeless as the
patterns of the stars embroidered on the astrological scroll of the sky.
The hoarse derbouka, and the languorous ghesbah joined in with the
savage tobol and the strident raita; and under all was the tired
heart-beat of the bendir, dull yet resonant, and curiously exciting to
the nerves.

Victoria's head swam. She wondered if it were wholly the effect of the
African music, or if the lagmi she had sipped was mounting to her brain.
She grew painfully conscious of every physical sense, and it was hard to
sit and listen. She longed to spring up and dance in time to the
droning, and throbbing, and crying of the primitive instruments which
the Negroes played behind the red curtain. She felt that she must dance,
a new, strange dance the idea of which was growing in her mind, and
becoming an obsession. She could see it as if she were looking at a
picture; yet it was only her nerves and her blood that bade her dance.
Her reason told her to sit still. Striving to control herself she shut
her eyes, and would have shut her ears too, if she could. But the music
was loud in them. It made her see desert rivers rising after floods, and
water poundi