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Like his father, he knew that European women who danced were not as the African dancers, the Ouled Naïls and the girls of Djebel Amour. But an Arab may have learned to know many things with his mind which he cannot feel with his heart; and with his heart Maïeddine felt a wish to blind Abderrhaman, because his eyes had seen the intoxicating beauty of Victoria as she danced.
Victoria smiled at them all; at M'Barka and Aichouch, and Aichouch's dignified husband, Si Abderrhaman: at Alonda and the Agha, and at Maïeddine, as, when a child, she would have smiled at her sister, when beginning a dance made up from one of Saidee's stories.
He and his brother-in-law, a stately dark man with a short black beard under an eagle nose, exchanged courtesies which seemed elaborate to Victoria's European ideas, and Si Abderrhaman did not glance at the half-lowered curtains behind which the women sat.
The peninsula was conquered by the Moors in the caliphate of Walid I, 705-715 A.D., and the independent dynasty of the Ommiades was founded by Abderrhaman at Granada in 755 A.D. It was from this latter date that the Spanish Moors began to assume that special character in language, manners, and chivalric enthusiasm which is represented in the present ballads; the spirit of Christian knighthood is here seen blended with Arabian passion, impetuosity, and impulsiveness, and the Spanish language has supplanted, even among Mahometan poets, the oriental idiom.
The dozen cavaliers swept over the desert, making the sand fly up under the horses' hoofs in a yellow spray; and nearing the carriage they spread themselves in a semi-circle, the man Victoria had mistaken for the Agha riding forward to speak to Maïeddine. "It is my brother-in-law, Abderrhaman ben Douadi," exclaimed Maïeddine, waving his hand.
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