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Updated: June 23, 2025
As Domini watched her she felt that Irena must have lived at moments magnificently, that despite her almost shattered condition and permanent weariness only cast aside for the moment of the dance she must have known intense joys, that so long as she lived she would possess the capacity for knowing them again.
Irena, holding the daggers above her head, had sprung from the little platform and was dancing on the earthen floor in the midst of the Arabs. Her thin body shook convulsively in time to the music. She marked the accents with her shudders. Excitement had grown in her till she seemed to be in a feverish passion that was half exultant, half despairing.
In it she saw the priest with a fanatical look of warning in his eyes, Count Anteoni beneath the trees of his garden, the perfume-seller in his dark bazaar, Irena with her long throat exposed and her thin arms drooping, the sand-diviner spreading forth his hands, Androvsky galloping upon a horse as if pursued. This last vision returned again and again.
It was a melody that seemed to set the soul of Creation dancing before an ark. The tomtoms accompanied it with an irregular but rhythmical roar which Domini thought was like the deep-voiced shouting of squadrons of fighting men. Irena looked wearily at the knives. Her expression had not changed, and Domini was amazed at her indifference. The eyes of everyone in the room were fixed upon her.
But Irena is the most terrible girl in all Beni-Mora if she loves or if she is angry, the most terrible in all the Sahara." Domini laughed. "Madame does not know her," said Batouch, imperturbably. "But Madame can ask the Arabs. Many of the dancers of Beni-Mora are murdered, each season two or three. But no man would try to murder Irena. No man would dare."
Then, as the hautboys screamed out the tune once more, she held the knives above her head and danced. Irena was not an Ouled Nail. She was a Kabyle woman born in the mountains of Djurdjura, not far from the village of Tamouda. As a child she had lived in one of those chimneyless and windowless mud cottages with red tiled roofs which are so characteristic a feature of La Grande Kabylie.
Her mother helped her with her washing, and she had worn the clothes she had the year before, with the exception of shoes. She had been forced to buy four pairs of these at $2 a pair. They all realized that if Irena could spend a little more for her shoes they would wear longer. "But for shoes," she said, with a little laugh, "two dollars it is the most I ever could pay."
One human weakness might be discovered in me by a clost observer in that rapt hour: I didn't really know how to address the wife of the Duke. And I whispered to Irena Flanders, and, sez I, "If a man is a duke, what would his wife be called?" Sez I, "She'd feel hurt if I slighted her." And sez she, "If one is a duke, the other would naterally be called a drake."
Domini turned away, shook hands with all her dark acquaintances, and climbed up into the train, followed by Androvsky. Batouch sprang upon the step as the porter shut the door. "Madame!" he exclaimed. "What is it, Batouch?" "To-day you have put Hadj to shame." He smiled broadly. "I? How? What have I done?" "Irena is dancing at Onargla, far away in the desert beyond Amara." "Irena! But "
These verses were written both in Arabic and in French, and the poet of Paris and his friends had found them beautiful as the dawn, and as the palm trees of Ourlana by the Artesian wells. All the girls of the Ouled Nails were celebrated in these poems Aishoush and Irena, Fatma and Baali.
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