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Updated: June 17, 2025
At noon they paused, ate some biscuits, then pressed ahead, she driven by her obsession and he, as he believed, by the purposes of Allah. Just as a rosy warmth was invading the upper foliage, Hamoud pushed her from him, and struck at the ground with his gun butt. He had stepped upon a puff adder. He sat down to examine his ankle, on which four tiny pinpricks were visible.
Hamoud raised a rifle from the moss into his lap. Amid the leaves two balls of green fire appeared and disappeared. It was a leopard that had peeped out at them. The drum music swelled through the forest. "To-morrow they will find us," she reflected. "Meanwhile we live in this flesh, subject to its beliefs, still able to trust in its seeming powers of delight."
Round lunch time there came a creaking in the corridor, a knock. It was David in his wheel chair, propelled by Hamoud. "No lunch. And perhaps no dinner. It's only a headache, dear. I shall be all right." "Your voice sounds " "Why not, since I'm suffering a little?" The creaking sound died away. At the first glimmer of dawn she was up.
When she heard Hamoud, in the hall, speaking quickly in Arabic, her body relaxed. She thought: "He has found one of his own people. I am glad. He must have been so lonely all this while!" She heard another voice, deeper and more vibrant. "Yes, Arabic," she said, smiling contentedly. Of a sudden, for some inexplicable reason, she felt as if she were going to faint.
In the shadows it had the aspect of a squatting monster that bared at him the teeth of its wide mouth. As if he had been awaiting this grotesque effect of challenge, he moved toward the hazy windows, and began to curtain them. David murmured listlessly: "Has the doctor gone?" Hamoud gave a slight start.
Above the apex of the pyramid, amid the sheen of the lightning, was revealed a vast figure, naked and indeterminate, dim and yet seeming of a denser texture than the most abysmal beasts, a figure at the same time human and serpentine, that twisted in attitudes of human anguish, yet appeared, like a maddened serpent, to be stinging itself to death. The whole vision vanished. "Hamoud! Hamoud!
Yes, she felt, alone; since even the God of Hamoud could not be aware of this world, in which everything desired by the senses, or apprehensible by them, was going to destruction so futile a tragedy, so contemptible a fleeting dream, a nothingness of which the miserable woman seemed to see herself, at last, as the most insignificant part. "But I have cast it off, left it all behind me!
Lilla emerged from her cabin, crossed the deck, and laid her hands upon the softly quivering rail. Close beside her the darkness gave up a ghost Hamoud, who also stood silent, gazing toward the coast. His robes exhaled an odor of musk and aloes. "Africa, madam," he uttered at last in a voice that lost itself in the clinging darkness and the smothering heat.
Instead of calling at Zanzibar, this time it went clear to Suez! In Suez a fortune-telling dervish, perhaps because he had just seen an American pass by, told Hamoud-bin-Said that his wanderings would take him to America. Hamoud accepted the words of the holy man as a second-hand pronouncement of God. At that time there was even a ship at Suez bound for New York.
But after a time, during which that dark throng had not stirred, she rose and entered her tent. There Hamoud found her standing, swaying slightly, with closed eyes. An invisible hand had brushed across her countenance, effacing the last traces of her beauty. "Do we still go on?" breathed Hamoud. Without opening her eyes she returned, in a loud voice: "He shall not die till I get there."
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