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Armine had actually somehow divined his approach. How? Women have the strangest intuitions. They know things that to speak by the card they cannot know. Surely Bella Donna was upon her tower. He stopped at the edge of a field of doura. What was the use of going further?
In truth Tartlet must have got on excellently, for at the end of fifteen days he actually knew fifteen words! He knew that Carefinotu said "birsi" for fire, "aradore" for the sky, "mervira" for the sea, "doura" for a tree, &c. He was as proud of this as if he had taken the first prize for Polynesian at some examination!
Suddenly, with a sharp and cruel abruptness, they ceased. "Al " and silence! The name of the dark man's God was executed upon their lips. Isaacson let go the podded head of the doura. He waited.
The smell of the putrefying corpses which lay around the walls and in the doura crop, together with the unhealthy climate and the filth of the town, was a fertile source of disease. A painful and racking fever afflicted all ranks, and at one time as many as 270 of the 400 regular soldiers were prostrated.
Creeping forward through the high doura, they were able to get within 300 yards of the enclosures. But the intervening space had been carefully cleared of cover, and was swept by the musketry of the defenders. All attempts to cross this ground even the most determined rushes proved vain.
But on this bright April day when we enter the plain of Armageddon, everything is tranquil and joyous. The fields are full of rustling wheat, and bearded barley, and blue-green stalks of beans, and feathery kirsenneh, camel-provender. The peasants in their gay-coloured clothing are ploughing the rich, red-brown soil for the late crop of doura.
Old Horapollo himself weighed it a third time, with a keen eye though his hands trembled a little; all three experiments gave the same result: this gem was heavier by a few grains of doura than that which the merchant's son had weighed, and yet the Jew declared that there was no purer, clearer, or finer emerald in the world than this.
Once, one morning in London, besieged by the commonplace, he had longed for events, tragic, tremendous, horrible even, if only they were unusual, if only they were such as would lift him into sharp activity. Had that longing resulted in now? He put out one lean, dark hand, and pulled at the heavily podded head of a doura plant. And the voices sang on, and on, and on.
And the sakieh raises its wailing, wayward voice and sings to the shadoof; and the shadoof sings to the sakieh; and the lifted water falls and flows away into the green wilderness of doura that, like a miniature forest, spreads on every hand to the low mountains, which do not perturb the spirit, as do the iron mountains of Algeria.
The voices rose in the night, kept perpetually at a high, fierce pitch, like voices of men in a frenzy. Then abruptly they failed, as if the night, wearied with their importunity, had fallen upon the speakers and choked them. And the silence, broken only by the faint rustle of the doura, was startling, was almost dreadful.
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