He lifted his eyes and looked at the picture before him.

The room was low, and the lighting bad, the air suffocating, whilst a few particles of sand blown in by the hot wind heralded an approaching storm.

Standing before him with a piece of tawdry gauze about her quite unprepossessing form stood the over aged dancer with a set simper upon her silly vacant face.

“Allah!” ejaculated Hahmed, as he lit a cigarette, whilst Achmed, peeping through the door, suddenly smote his forehead.

Now dancing women were no more to the great man than a troupe of performing collies, but his artistic sense demanded the best, and when it was not forth-coming he felt the same annoyance as you or I would feel if arrayed in purple and fine linen we adorned a box at the opera with our presence, covered with as many diamonds upon it as possible, to find a street singer deputising for a Melba or Caruso.

“Thou dog,” he said pleasantly to the cringing man, who tremblingly explained that indeed he had one better—­yea, even fair to look upon.  “Behold, if thou offerest yet another insult to this mine guest I will have thee and thy woman whipped into the desert and left to die.”

Whereupon Achmed fled precipitately in the wake of her who had annoyed, and snatching a whip beat her smartly on her plump but ill-formed shoulders, the while he urged the prima ballerina of the establishment to anoint herself and depart right quickly to the pacifying of the great Hahmed, which order, alas, put a totally wrong idea into her Tunisian-Arabian pate.

[1]Long native pipe.

CHAPTER LI

La Belle, a rank cross-breed of Tunisian and French with a dash of Arabian, was the one good part of a bad debt which had overwhelmed Achmed when he had inadvertently over-reached himself.

Her body was passable, lithe, sinewy, with a faint hint of rib and a wonderful bust; her brain was good, intuitive in its non-educated state, and subtle from inheritance; her ambition was superb, it knew no limits, it saw no obstacle.

Born in a kennel in Tunis, she had figuratively and literally fought her way to the upper reaches of the gutter, sleeping in filth, eating it, listening to it, living it; dancing for a meal, selling her strangely seductive body for a piastre or so, settling her quarrels with a knife she carried in her coarse, crisp, henna-dyed hair, with one goal before her slanting orange eyes, that of dancer in chief, prima ballerina, or what you will, in some house of good repute; the explanation of which phrase would overtax my oriental knowledge I fear.

Dance she could, if dancing is the correct term for the subtle portraying of every conceivable vice by every conceivable gesture and posture; and she had felt herself content on the day she had for a good round sum sold herself to take up a dancing position of some importance in the house of him who, unknown to her, had got himself entangled in more than one human money-spider’s web.