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Updated: May 21, 2025
On the horizon toward the coast of Sousse rested a low black wall of cloud. Lightning came out of it from time to time and ran up the sky, soundless, glimmering.... The cry of the morning muezzin rolled down over the town. The lightning showed the figure sprawled face down on the cool stone of the coping of the well.... The court of the house of bel-Kalfate swam in the glow of candles.
From the height of his crimson saddle Si Habib bel-Kalfate awaited the answer of his son. His brown, unlined, black-bearded face, shadowed in the hood of his creamy burnoose, remained serene, benign, urbanely attendant. But if an Arab knows when to wait, he knows also when not to wait. And now it was as if nothing had been said before. "Greeting, my son. I have been seeking thee.
In the city of his birth and rearing, and of the birth and rearing of his Arab fathers generations dead, Habib ben Habib bel-Kalfate looked upon himself in the rebellious, romantic light of a prisoner in exile exile from the streets of Paris where, in his four years, he had tasted the strange delights of the Christian exile from the university where he had dabbled with his keen, light-ballasted mind in the learning of the conqueror.
"Thou art in well-being?" "There is no ill. And thou?" "There is no ill. That the praise be to God, and the prayer!" Bel-Kalfate cleared his throat and lifted the reins from the neck of his mare. "Rest in well-being!" he pronounced. Raoul shrugged his shoulders a little and murmured: "May God multiply thy days!... And yours, too," he added to Habib in French. He bowed and took his leave.
The fright of his soul grew deeper, and suddenly it went out. And in its place there came a black calm. The eyes before him remained transfixed in the space beyond his shoulder. But by and by the painted lips stirred once. "Nekaf!... I am afraid!" Habib turned away and went out of the house. In the house of bel-Kalfate the Jewess danced, still, even in voluptuous motion, a white drift of disdain.
"It comes to me, on thought," pronounced bel-Kalfate, inclining his head toward the notary with an air of courtly deprecation "it comes to me that thou hast been defrauded. And in the same tone, with the same gesture, Hadji Daoud replied: "Nay, master and friend, by the Beard of the Prophet, but I should repay thee the half.
Bel-Kalfate watched him away through the thinning crowd, sitting his saddle stolidly, in an attitude of rumination. When the blue cap had vanished behind the blazing corner of the wool dyers, he threw the reins to his Sudanese stirrup boy and got down to the ground. He took his son's hand. So, palm in palm, at a grave pace, they walked back under the arch into the city.
"In saying that, Sidi Hadji, thou sayest a thing which is at odds with half the truth." They were startled at the voice of Habib coming from behind their backs. "For thy daughter, Sidi Hadji, thy Zina, is surely as lovely as the full moon sinking in the west in the hour before the dawn." The words were fair. But bel-Kalfate was looking at his son's face.
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