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Updated: June 4, 2025
As she sipped the coffee and looked at the pointed head and twisted gaze of Safti, the Princess heard some distant Arab at a street corner singing monotonously a tuneless song, and the scent, the darkness, the reiterated song, and the tall, strange creature standing silently before her gave to her, in their combination, the atmosphere of a dream.
Since Safti had spoken the music meant more to me. I tried to read the player's heart in the endless song it made. Trills, twitterings, grace notes, little runs upward ending in the air surely it was a boy's heart, and not unhappy. "It is coming nearer," I said. "Yes. Ah, it is Smaïn!" Safti's one eye is sharp. I had seen no one.
He drew from his pale blue robe a silver box, opened it, lifted out a pinch of tobacco, and began carefully to roll a cigarette. And all the time he smiled. "A glacial cold crept over my body. As he lit his cigarette I caught hold of Safti, and hurried through the doorway into the blackness of the whirling sand." Here I stopped. "Well?" said young England. "Well?" The doctor did not speak.
"And and your wife, Safti?" I felt that I was very indiscreet; but Safti is good-natured, and has bought quite a number of palm-trees out of his savings when with me. "My wife, Sidi?" "What does she do all the time?" "She remains quietly in my house." "She never goes out?" "Never, except upon the roof to take a little air." "Doesn't she get rather bor " The one eye began to look remarkably vague.
"My dear, you wasted your money," said the companion; and she went to bed with another French novel. That afternoon the Princess implored Safti to sell her the emerald, and as he persistently declined she renewed her lease of it for another forty-eight hours.
What is that?" asked the Princess. "When you are sick he cures you with jewels." "And what can he cure?" said the Princess, still looking at Safti, who was now bargaining vociferously with a fat Arab for a piece of milk-white jade. "All things. I was sick of a fever that comes with the summer. He gave me a stone crushed to a powder, and I was well.
"Tell me when Oreïda comes," I said to Safti, while the Caïd spread forth his ample skirts, and turned a cigarette in his immense black fingers. The dancers came and went. They were amazing trollops, painted until, like the picture of Balzac's madman, they were chaotic, a mere mess of frantic colours. Not for these, I thought, did Smaïn play his flute. The time wore on.
Far away in the desert I heard the sound of a flute, pure sound in the pure air, delicate, sometimes almost comic with the comicality of a child who bends women to kisses and to nonsense-words. We had passed through the sandstorm, Safti and I, over the wastes of saltpetre, and come into a land of palm gardens where there was almost breathless calm.
Many murders have been done in the court on black nights, and no one can say who has done them. For all the time men go in and out to the rooms of the dancers. "'Nevertheless, Safti, I must "I stopped speaking, for at this moment Batouch, the brother of the Caïd of Beni-Kouidar, came slowly in through the doorway from the blackness of the sand-swept court.
Taking the emerald from her finger, he touched her two eyes with it, and it seemed to the Princess that, as he did so, the pain she felt in them withdrew. Her desire for the jewel instantly returned. "Let me wear it," she said, putting forth all her charm to soften the jewel doctor. "Let me take it with me to Russia. I will make you rich." Safti shook his head.
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