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Upon approaching the great open-faced tent of the Sheikh, there is a hurrying movement among the attendants to prepare a suitable raised seat, for they know at a glance that I am an Englishman, and likewise are aware that an Englishman cannot sit cross-legged like an Asiatic; at first, I am rather surprised at their evident ready recognition of my nationality, but I soon afterwards discover the reason.
The God who Looks after Small Things had caused the visitor that day to receive two weeks' delayed mails in one from a casual postman, and the whole heavy bundle of newspapers, tied with a strap, he dangled as bait. At the edge of the beach, cross-legged, undressed to his sky-blue army shirt, sat a lean, ginger-haired man, on guard over a dozen heaps of clothing.
'Oh, my child, my child! shouted Judy, 'he's gone for ever from me. Mick and the rest of the children ran to the other side of the bridge, and looking over, they saw him coming out from under the arch of the bridge, sitting cross-legged on the top of a white-headed wave, and playing away on the pipes as merrily as if nothing had happened.
The riders sat cross-legged upon the skins, and to Escombe who was piloted by Tiahuana it seemed that the slightest inclination, right or left as the case might be, throwing a trifle more weight on one knee than the other, and thus causing one part of the skin to press more hardly than another upon the snow, was all that was needed for steering purposes; for the toboggan-like skins swept downward straight as the flight of an arrow, save when some black fang of rock protruded through the snow fair in the track, when a slight slope of the body sufficed to cause a swerve that carried the adventurous riders safely clear of the obstacle.
At one of the many camp-fires on the edge of the road I saw the Arkansas colonel sitting cross-legged on the ground, in trousers, socks and undershirt, playing poker. Out in the open country how sweet was the silence. Not yet have I forgotten one bright star of that night's sky. My mother and I had studied the stars together. Lately Camille, her letter said, had learned them with her.
When she was sixteen "all the nice boys in town," as her mother said, crowded the Adamses' small veranda and steps, or sat near by, cross-legged on the lawn, on summer evenings; and at eighteen she had replaced the boys with "the older men."
Then he deposited the butterfly-net and tin case he had been carrying, accepted a cigarette, and hoisting himself onto the corner of a heavy wooden pedestal which held the periwigged bust of an eighteenth-century Coryston, he flung an arm affectionately round the bust's neck, and sat cross-legged, smoking and pondering.
In a box of this kind two or three men sat cross-legged; many had even spread a light tent over their heads. Suddenly I heard my name called by a female voice. I started, and thought I must be mistaken, for whom in the world could I meet here who knew my Christian name? But once more a voice cried very distinctly, "Ida!
It seemed that the thread of an idea ran through song and dance alike, and that the hillmen and beyond-the-hills-men, who sat back-to- the-wall and watched, could follow the meaning of it. They began to crowd closer, to squat cross-legged on the floor, in circles one outside the other, until the European three became the center of three rings of men who stared at them with owls' solemnity.
True, some looks of veiled hostility were directed against "Captain Alden's" strangely masked face, as the woman sat there cross-legged like the rest, indifferently smoking cigarettes. For what the Arab cannot understand is always antipathetic to him. But this hostility was not marked. The spirits of the Legion, including those of the Master himself, rose with a sense of greater security.
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