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Updated: May 28, 2025
For a moment she did not move. "Don't be selfish, Ruby!" She felt fingers touching her waist at the back, gripping her with a sort of tender strongness; and she closed her eyes, and tried to force herself to believe they were Baroudi's fingers of iron. "Or I shall pick you up and lift you out of the way." When Nigel spoke again, she opened her eyes. It was no use.
Yet could this be Baroudi's woman, this painted, jewelled, bedizened creature, almost macawlike in her bright-coloured finery, who remained quite still upon her rugs like the macaw upon its perch indifferent, somnolent surely, or perhaps steadily, enigmatically watchful, with a cigarette between her painted lips, above the chin, on which was tattooed a pattern resembling a little, indigo-coloured beard or "imperial"? Could he be attracted by this face, which, though it seemed young under its thick vesture of paint and collyrium, would surely not be thought pretty by any man who was familiar with the beauties of Europe and America, this face with its heavy features, its sultry, sullen eyes, its plump cheeks, and sensual lips?
Before her, at a short distance, she saw a great green dusk of trees spreading from the river-bank inland, sharply defined, with no ragged edges a dusk that had been planned by man, not left to Nature's dealings. This was not a feathery dusk of palm-trees. She looked steadily, and knew. "Mahmoud Baroudi's orange-gardens!" she said to Ibrahim. "Suttinly!" he replied.
Still, it would have been an act of pretty politeness to you." "Oh, I think the less pretty politeness European women have from these Orientals the better!" she said, almost with a sneer. "You're thinking of that horrible German woman in the Fayyūm. But Baroudi's very well looked on by the English in Egypt. I found that out in Cairo, when I left you to go to the Fayyūm.
Her hands became inert, and her fingers dropped from the tent-pegs. She thought of the other tent, of the smaller tent she had seen, standing apart near Baroudi's. Who was living in that tent? The melody went on, running a wayward course. It might almost be a bird's song softly trilled in some desolate place of the sands, but It died away into the night, and the night wind rose again. Mrs.
He looked down. "Baroudi's men have come already to take me over." "I heard them singing, up in my bedroom. Run along! Don't keep him waiting." With the final words she seemed to make an effort, to try to assume the playful, half-patronizing manner of a pretty woman of the world to a man supposed to adore her; but she allowed her lips to tremble so that he might see she was playing a part.
But" those voices of the singing sailors were beginning almost to obsess her "are all the boatmen Nubians then?" "Nao!" he replied, with a sudden cockney accent. "But these that are singing?" "I say they are Noobian peoples, my lady. They are Mahmoud Baroudi's Noobian peoples." "Baroudi's sailors!" said Mrs. Armine. She sat up straight in her chair. "But Mahmoud Baroudi isn't here, at Luxor?"
Armine listened, sitting absolutely still. Then suddenly she moved, got up, and went swiftly towards the house. Nigel was coming back. Mingling with the voices of the shadûf men she heard the voices of Baroudi's Nubians. When she had reached the house, she went up at once to her bedroom, shut the door, and stood by the open window that gave on to a balcony which faced towards the Nile.
Ibrahim's soft eyes had become suddenly sharp and bright. "Do you know Mahmoud Baroudi, my lady?" "We met him on the ship coming from Naples." "Very big big as Rameses the Second, the statue of the King hisself what you see before you at the Ramesseum eyes large as mine, and hair over them what goes like that!" He put up his brown hands and suddenly sketched Baroudi's curiously shaped eyebrows.
The day was beginning to decline; the boatmen's voices died away; Hassan, in obedience to Ibrahim's order, brought out tea to his mistress in the garden. When he had finished arranging it, he stood near her for a moment, looking across the water to Baroudi's big white dahabeeyah, which was tied up against the bank a little way down the river. In his eyes there were yellow lights.
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