United States or Cyprus ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"I began to laugh, and said: 'And the Marabout has forbidden you to allow yourself to be kissed during the Ramadan? "Oh, yes; I am an Arab woman, and you are a Roumi! "'And it would be a great sin? "'Oh, yes! "'So you ate nothing all day, until sunset? "'No, nothing. "'But you had something to eat after sundown? "'Yes.
"She does not yet know that she loves me," Maïeddine answered. "But when thou hast given me the white stallion El Biod, and I ride beside the girl in her bassour through the long days and the long distances, I shall teach her, in the way the Roumi men teach their women to love." "But if thou shouldst not teach her?" "My life is in it, and I shall teach her," said Maïeddine.
For one can always, even among the Arabs, find some complaisant, native women, who think of the nights of Roumi." He turned to the Arab, who was waiting on me, who was a tall, dark fellow, with bright, black eyes, that flashed beneath his turban, and said to him: "I will call you when I want you, Mohammed."
He did not know that he had been "kidnapped." His impression was that he had deigned to favour a rather agreeable Roumi with his company. Now he was returning to his own people, and would bid his Roumi friend good-bye with the cordiality of one gentleman to another, though with a certain royal condescension fitted to the difference in their positions.
Some order must have gone from him, unknown to the Roumi, while the two men were together. I could coax nothing of the story from the Sidi when he came to me, but he was vexed, and his brows drew together over eyes which for the first time did not seem to look at me with pleasure."
Two fires are burning in the open air, and are surrounded by a host of servants or followers. The Roumi and their host adjourn from the neighborhood of the preparations, and are served under a plane tree beautiful as that whose limbs were hung by Xerxes with bracelets.
How this Roumi had wormed out the hidden truth he could not conceive; but he realized on the instant that the situation was desperate, and his brain seemed to him to become a delicate and intricate piece of mechanism, moving with oiled wheels.
And he drained his absinthe thoughtfully, musing on the marvelous vicissitudes of war, and on the patrician blood, the wasted wit, the Beaumarchais talent, the Mirabeau power, the adventures like a page of fairy tale, the brains whose strength could have guided a scepter, which he had found and known, hidden under the rough uniform of a Zephyr; buried beneath the canvas shirt of a Roumi; lost forever in the wild, lawless escapades of rebellious insubordinates, who closed their days in the stifling darkness of the dungeons of Beylick, or in some obscure skirmish, some midnight vedette, where an Arab flissa severed the cord of the warped life, and the death was unhonored by even a line in the Gazettes du Jour.
She will not wear the veil, but she could give a knife-thrust if he were to look at another woman as he has looked at her, as he will look at her to-morrow. She is proud as a Touareg and there is fierceness in her. But he will never look at another woman as he will look at her to-morrow. The Roumi is not as we are."
I come by permission," he added, as the native hesitated between his fear of a Roumi and his sense of the appalling unfittingness of a private soldier seeking audience of a Spanish princesse. The message was passed about between several of the household; at last a servant of higher authority appeared: "Madame permitted Corporal Victor to be taken to her presence. Would he follow?"
Word Of The Day