United States or Equatorial Guinea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
His snowy under robe was bound with a blue and red sash from which protruded the silver hilt of his dagger. His tan-colored, clear-cut, delicately bearded face was expressionless, as he said softly: "The morning paper." And she realized that the whole story had been discovered, scattered broadcast. For a time Hamoud regarded the prostration of her spirit from the heights of fatalism.
So it is all a physical phenomenon?" When she had slowly and relentlessly flung this retort at him, for want of a better object for her scorn, she turned her head away. Her eyes fell upon Hamoud who, sitting on his heels near her chair, was watching her face by the light of the talc-sided lanterns that dangled from the tent-fly.
In the light from a window his fine profile appeared for an instant like a presentment of vengeance with something sensual in its look of cruelty. Now and then, in the middle of the night, David became aware that Hamoud had entered the room without a sound, to watch him from the deepest mass of shadows.
The door snapped shut on that hope: the world became fluid again: and Lilla was borne away toward another pity and another remorse. Hamoud opened the front door, and told her: "They are waiting for you." "They? Who is here?" "Mr. Brantome."
When Lilla and David went driving through the country, Hamoud prowled all over the house. He entered the study, to stare at the autographed music framed on the walls, the manuscript strewn over the center table, the open piano.
"Too late," he uttered, and was unveiling his face when she sat up in bed with a scream. Instantly the curtain let in a flash of moonlight. Hamoud stood at the bedside, his hand on the hilt of his dagger. From behind him entered the voices Of the guards calling out to one another. Then a murmur of other voices broke like a wave.
She poured the few drops of perfume into her palms, and held out her hands. "Ah, Hamoud " "Do not speak," he protested, catching her hands in his. "It is this moment for which I became a servant, did things that you will never know of, and followed you here."
At last she dozed, to dream that Hamoud had confronted a lion just as the beast was about to pounce upon Madame Zanidov, who, wearing the dress of oxidized silver barbarically painted, crouched in a moonlit clearing. "No, Hamoud, let him have her!" Hamoud, with a smile, stood aside. Then she saw Lawrence approaching, his face and body wrapped in a white cloth.
Yes, the Omân stock, cruel and remorseless in its pristine state, had deteriorated in the lax paradise of Zanzibar; the old impulses were there, but in abortive form; and the deed that Hamoud's forefathers would have done less indirectly, and without a twinge, aroused in Hamoud that pity which an ironist has called "the mask of weakness."
"Hamoud!" she screamed at last, raising her arms as high as she could, and trying to tear her gaze away from that spectacle. The Arab's pose, as he bent over his enemy, was a frightful burlesque of solicitude. How many times had she not seen him bending thus over David, maybe to smooth his pillow?
Word Of The Day