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Updated: June 13, 2025
Silky-soft rugs from Persia lined her bassourah on the side where she would sit, the balance being kept on the other by her luggage wrapped in bundles; and the whole was curtained with sumptuous djerbi, striped in rainbow tints.
Max turned away his eyes as Stanton took the bride out of her bassourah and half carried her toward their tent without waiting to thank the man who had placed it. Max busied himself feverishly in superintending the arrangements of the camp, which Stanton had asked him as his "lieutenant" to undertake that night. The kneeling camels were tethered in long lines.
The women servants already out of their bassourah came hurrying along to join her, silver bracelets a-jingle, chattering encouragement in Arab, scarcely a word of which could Sanda understand. Inside the house was a queer kind of vestibule, evidently intended for defence, with a jutting screen of wall behind the door, and then a passage with a sharp turn in it, and seats along the sides.
As he spoke, Sanda appeared at the door of the mean little tent hired for her at Touggourt. From the shelter of the bassourah, close by on the sand, Khadra peeped out. The search was made quickly and almost without words. If the power of France had not been behind the soldier and the girl whom Ben Râana now hated, he would have reverted "enlightened" man as he was to primitive methods.
On the roof of the mosque bassourah frames were in the making, splendid bassourahs, which, when finished, would be the property of the great marabout, greatest of all living marabouts, lord of the Zaouïa, lord of the desert and its people, as far as the eye could reach, and farther.
It would be easy, or almost easy, if no accident happened, Ourïeda argued, for her to go away veiled and swathed in the bassourah, while Sanda lay in bed in a darkened room. At Touggourt the veiled lady would be met by that Captain Amaranthe and his wife of whom Sanda had spoken: they must be written to immediately and told to expect Mademoiselle DeLisle.
"Are there more?" "Yes." "Tell me, please. Anyway, the greatest, or I shan't believe in any." Max was silent for an instant. Then he said in a voice so low she could hardly hear it, bending down from her bassourah, "For giving me back my faith in women." "I? But you hadn't lost it." "I was in danger of losing it, with most of my mental and moral baggage. Through you I've kept the lot."
If in his heart Sanda's father could ever secretly pardon a deserter, it must be of his own accord, not because of what that deserter had to say on his own behalf. Out of the little caravan Max had to discharge, Stanton kept the mehari with the bassourah which Sanda had ridden during the journey from Ben Râana's douar.
Max hurried the caravan on as fast as it could go among the sand billows, fearing that the Arabs' superstition might cause a stampede. With every stride of the camels' long, four-jointed legs, the music swelled; and at the crest of a higher dune than any they had climbed, Sanda, leaning out of her bassourah, gave a cry.
Sanda's mehari was led in front of the eastern door, which was pulled ajar in a secretive way. One of the big negroes helped her out of the bassourah as usual, when he had forced the white camel to its knees; and to her surprise the other black man made of his long white burnous a kind of screen behind which she might pass without being seen.
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