“No, sidi, no.”

“But talk!  Tell me things about thyself, thy life, thy world.  Talk!  In Paris, now, a man and a woman can talk together—­yes—­as if they were two friends met in a coffeehouse.  And those women can talk!  Ah! in Paris I have known women—­”

The girl stirred now.  Her eyes narrowed; the dark line of her lips thinned.  At last something comprehensible had touched her mind.

“Thou hast known many women, then, sidi!  Thou hast come here but to tell me that?  Me, who am of little beauty in a man’s eyes!”

Habib laughed under his breath.  He shook her again.  He kissed her and kissed her again on her red lips.

“Thou art jealous, then!  But thou canst not comprehend.  Canst thou comprehend this, that thou art more beautiful by many times than any other woman I have ever seen?  Thou art a heaven of loveliness, and I cannot live without thee.  That is true ...  Nedjma.  I am going to take thee for my wife, because I cannot live without thine eyes, thy lips, the fragrance of thy hair....  Yes, I am going to marry thee, my star.  It is written!  It is written!”

For the first time he could not see her eyes.  She had turned them away.  Once again something had come in contact with the smooth, heavy substance of her mind.  He pulled at her.

“Say!  Say, Nedjma!...  It is written!”

“It is not written, sidi.”  The same ungroping acquiescence was in her whisper.  “I have been promised, sidi, to another than thee.”

Habib’s arms let go; her weight sank away in the dark under the vine.  The silence of the dead night crept in and lay between them.

“And in the night of thy marriage, then, thy husband—­or thy father, if thou hast a father—­will kill thee.”

“In-cha-’llah.  If it be the will of God.”

Again the silence came and lay heavy between them.  A minute and another minute went away.  Habib’s wrists were shaking.  His breast began to heave.  With a sudden roughness he took her back, to devour her lips and eyes and hair with the violence of his kisses.

“No, no!  I’ll not have it!  No!  Thou art too beautiful for any other man than I even to look upon!  No, no, no!”

* * * * *

Habib ben Habib walked out of the gate Djelladin.  The day had come; the dawn made a crimson flame in the false-pepper trees.  The life of the gate was already at full tide of sound and colour, braying, gargling, quarrelling—­nomads wading in their flocks, Djlass countrymen, Singalese soldiers, Jewish pack-peddlers, Bedouin women bent double under their stacks of desert fire-grass streaming inward, dust white, dust yellow, and all red in the dawn under the red wall.

The flood ran against him.  It tried to suck him back into the maw of the city.  He fought against it with his shoulders and his knees.  He tried now to run.  It sucked him back.  A wandering Aissaoua plucked at his sleeve and held under his nose a desert viper that gave off metallic rose glints in its slow, pained constrictions.