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Smain, from whose velvety eyes the dreams were not banished by the uproar, stood languidly by the porter's tent, gazing at Androvsky. Something in the demeanour of the new visitor seemed to attract him. Domini, meanwhile, had reached the gateway.
She shrank from her own thought, like one startled, and walked on softly in the green darkness. Larbi's flute became more distant. Again and again it repeated the same queer little melody, changing the ornamentation at the fantasy of the player. She looked for him among the trees but saw no one. He must be in some very secret place. Smain touched her. "Look!" he said, and his voice was very low.
Count Anteoni took the glasses from Smain and looked through them, adjusting them carefully to suit his sight. "Ecco!" he said. "I was right. That man is not an Arab." He moved the glasses and glanced at Domini. "You are not the only traveller here, Madame." He looked through the glasses again. "I knew that," she said. "Indeed?" "There is one at my hotel." "Possibly this is he.
Only sometimes she let her strong imagination play utterly at its will. She let it go now as she and Smain turned into the golden diapered shadows of the little path and came into the swaying mystery of the trees. The longing for secrecy, for remoteness, for the beauty of far away had sometimes haunted her, especially in the troubled moments of her life.
Does his lady-love live at Touggourt?" "Yes; she is a dancer." Smaïn smiled. He did not understand French, but he knew we were speaking of his love affair, and he was not afflicted with shyness. As he accompanied us to the village he played again, and I read his nature in the soft sounds of his flute. All that day he stayed with us, and nearly all that day he played.
An Arab is passing below on the desert track, singing to himself as he goes towards his home in the oasis: "No one but God and I Knows what is in my heart." He is singing the song of the freed negroes. When his voice has died away the mother puts the little boy down. It is bed time, and Smain is there to lead him to the white villa, where he will sleep dreamlessly till morning.
Under the trees the sand was yellow, of a shade so voluptuously beautiful that she longed to touch it with her bare feet like Smain. Here and there it rose in symmetrical little pyramids, which hinted at absent gardeners, perhaps enjoying a siesta.
If I had known he was coming I should have told you in order that you might have kept away if you wished to. But now that you are here now that Smain has let you in and the Count and Father Roubier must know of it, I am sure you will stay and govern your dislike. You intend to turn back. I see that. Well, I ask you to stay." She was not thinking of herself, but of him.
"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.
I sat on the edge of an old stone well before the Bordj, while Safti smoked his keef. Near midnight, quivering across the sands, came the faint sound of a flute moving from the village towards the deep obscurity of the palm gardens. I knew that air, those trills, those little runs, those grace notes. "It is Smaïn," I said to Safti. "Yes, Sidi. He will play all night alone among the palms.
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