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Updated: May 31, 2025
"Well, Merla, if that's your name, will you come with me?" the Englishman said lightly. He knew the tongue well that her brothers spoke, not in any of its refinement and subtlety, but in the ordinary distorted way an Englishman usually speaks a foreign tongue. "I will ask if I may," she returned simply, in a low voice, and drew back into the dark hut behind her. After a moment she reappeared.
"My sister!" said the Soudanese boy, with a regal air, when they stood at the mudhouse door. And some instinct, as he was young and foolish, made the Englishman drag off both goggles and solar topee for a moment, and so Merla looked up and saw him with the sun bright on his light Saxon hair and friendly blue eyes.
The afternoon seemed to get instantly hotter. Merla was one of those human flies that buzz; in crowded streets, at bazaars and in warm weather, she attained to the proportions of a human bluebottle.
Two figures came down from the desert to the Nile out of the flat, heated air of the plain to the divine freshness by the water. Here, in the cool, golden light, they paused slow and reluctant to part. "Good-night, Merla! Are you unhappy that I must go?" The girl raised her face, and looked at him with steadfast eyes. "The sun gilds the black rock, but the rock cannot expect the sun to stay.
"We have no need of fires," was the reply. "The glass roof of our kitchen is so curved that it concentrates the heat of the sun's rays, which are then hot enough to cook anything we wish." "But how do you get along if the day is cloudy, and the sun doesn't shine?" inquired the little girl. "Then we use the hot springs that bubble up in another part of the palace," Merla answered.
Before she left she turned back once more into the byre, and stood looking at the stars that she had communed with so often: a great sadness fell on her thoughts, a chill as after a final parting. As she turned to go, her eyes fell on a grey patch on the byre floor his coat! He had left it behind. Merla gave a little laugh as she picked it up: the parting seemed less final now.
Merla and the earth people watched the busy little creatures for some time before they were themselves observed, but finally Trot gave a laugh when one crab fell on its back and began frantically waving its legs to get right-side-up again.
They turned from the cool, rolling, billowy water inwards towards the desert and the huts of Omdurman, and the heat rose up and struck their cheeks each step they took. Merla stood that morning at her hut doorway looking out out towards the river she could not see, for the banks rise and the desert falls slightly behind them.
An hour later, the moon was well up in the sky, though the light was not yet brilliant, and they parted by the wall of the cattle-byre with promises to meet on the morrow, and he turned and left her standing in the shadow; but some instinct moved him, and he returned and kissed her yet again, and said one more farewell; then he took the narrow track leading down to the river, and Merla knew that she must hasten home; for her father, who had been out in the early evening, would be returning.
"Why should we not go home to my land together?" said Stanhope passionately, in that sudden revolt against the laws of custom that stirs all humanity at times. "Why should I not take you to live with me for always to be my wife? who would forbid me?" Merla shook her head, and pressed hard on his hand lying beside her on the sand.
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