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Updated: July 15, 2025
Perhaps if all had gone well with Stanton, if Ahmara had not come again into his life and lost him Sanda's childlike worship, he might have pulled himself together after the starting of the caravan. But, as it was, there were black thoughts to be chased away, and the simplest receipt for replacing them with bright ones was to fill his head with fumes of whisky.
He could not bear to think of his seeing Sanda again after the Ahmara episode. With a man of Stanton's strange, erratic nature and wild impulses, who could be sure whether but Max would not let the thought finish in his mind. Sanda suddenly dropped the subject. Whether this was because she saw that Max disliked it, or whether she had no more to say, he could not guess.
He wished savagely that Ahmara might hear when it was too late of his marriage within a few days after their parting. When the wedding ceremony was over the caravan started on at once, in order to reach, not too late, a certain small oasis on the route where Stanton wished to camp on his marriage night. He described the place glowingly to Max.
"Did it pass off well?" "Well enough," Stanton answered mechanically. For the moment he was indifferent to Ahmara, though her strange face was tragically beautiful. In the pale light the figure of Max St. George became suddenly visible to him. It moved out from behind the tents and walked over to the fire. Stanton, on a quick impulse, called out to Max harshly: "Come here, St. George!
They must wait until the farewell had been given, then they would go on again. The camel-men assented politely, without comment. But Max heard Khadra say to her husband, "It is the Sidi who loved Ahmara. One would think he had forgotten her now. Or is it that he tries this way to forget?"
The sheikh had been hospitable to Stanton, but things were different now. Ahmara would tell about the money and the boxes and bales full of presents. The temptation virtuously to punish those who were left, for the fate of the explorer, would be too great, and the excuse too good. "We shall have to get off after the heat of the day," Max insisted.
Stanton wondered what they were saying; and he stared, frowning, over their heads toward the east, where lay the Libyan desert. They were practically out of the Sahara now. As he gazed, Ahmara came flitting across a moonlit space of sand that lay like a silver lake between the tent and the rest of the camp. "Thou art back, O master of my heart, from thy visit to the sheikh," she said.
Meanwhile, I'll have time for bargaining over her with my wife, and Ahmara can travel with the other women. Several men with their wives have agreed to go only part of the way and get new fellows to join when they leave. That's the only way to shed Ahmara without trouble, as she's landed herself on me. And that's the way I'll take as I said, if Sanda behaves herself." "And if not?
I want you; hurry up!" Ahmara slipped behind Stanton, who took a step forward, and, as he forgot her, she darted into his tent. He kept his temper under provocations almost intolerable; and now he obeyed the truculent summons. "What do you want?" he asked stiffly when he had come near enough to speak in an ordinary tone.
For the men of the caravan there was nothing very startling in this arrangement. The law of their religion and country gave each of them four wives, if he could afford to keep them. Ahmara, darkly beautiful and bejewelled, condescended to travel with the other women of her race, but when the camp was made she moved about proudly, like an eastern queen, and went wherever it was her will to go.
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