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To the Arab's suppleness, mobility, imagination, artistic feeling, democratic tendencies, and anarchic individualism, the Turk opposes his slowness, gravity, sense of discipline and regularity, innate militarism. The Turkish master has always felt disdain for the 'artistic canaille, whose pose, gesticulations, and indiscipline, shock him profoundly.
Not a sign on the Arab's face, this dweller of the desert, whose forefathers in wonderment had watched the ways of wisdom with which Solomon in all his glory had ruled more than one fair and obstreperous woman among the scented Eastern sands. Face to face they stood, whilst the racing blood fled from the girl's face down to the finger-tips of her contradictory hands.
"That cannot be," he replied. "I must take him back with me. He will be properly and fairly tried by a civil court. If he is innocent he will be released." "And if he is not innocent?" asked the Arab. "He is charged with many murders. For any one of these, if he is proved guilty, he will have to die." The Arab's left hand was hidden beneath his burnous.
The governor had noticed the old man's gestures as he repeatedly put his hand to his mouth, and while his wife, Orion, and the widow were besieging the merchant with questions, he whispered a few words to one of the slaves. The man vanished, and returned bringing in, by his master's orders, a long strip of carpet which he laid in front of the Arab's brown and strong but delicately-formed feet.
The leopard perhaps was dreaming of the days when he was wont to chase the deer through the jungle, for suddenly his spotted body quivered and his long tail shot out like a stiffened serpent. The Arab's sandaled foot came down on the tapering end, and with a scream of rage the beast sprang up.
Scarce had the words left his lips when the Somali chief poised his spear and hurled it forward with such force and accuracy of aim that it passed through the Arab's body and the point came out at the back. With a cry he dropped on the sand.
They were heavily laden with meat, which is the Arab's great source of happiness; therefore in a few minutes the whole party was busily employed in cutting the flesh into long thin strips to dry. These were hung in festoons over the surrounding trees, while the fires were heaped with tidbits of all descriptions.
He jumped out of his individuality in a twinkling, and entered into the sentiments of his race, replying, from the pinnacle of a splendid conceit, with affected humility of manner: 'You can look on them without perturbation but we! . . . And after this profoundly comic interjection, he added, in deep tones, 'The very face of a woman! Our representative of temperate notions demurely consented that the Arab's pride of inflammability should insist on the prudery of the veil as the civilizing medium of his race.
With a quick smile Said's eyes met his. With an easy swing of his graceful body he drew his horse nearer to the spirited stallion Craven was riding but did not speak. The ready flow of conversation that was habitual had apparently forsaken him. The young Arab's silence was welcome, Craven had himself no desire to speak. The dawn wind was blowing cool against his forehead, soothing him.
"If you're working up to a burnous and painted legs for me again, my dear chap, it's no good," Stephen returned with the calmness of desperation. "I've done with that sort of nonsense; but I won't trust myself out of the train till I see the Arab's back. Then I'll make a bolt for it and dodge him, till the new train's run along the platform and he's safely in it."
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