Some expert hand had flicked the delicate flesh off the back in a criss-cross pattern; what was left of the feet lay in a pool of blood, the deep red of which stretched across the hall far into the distance, showing the path along which the child, left by her torturers for dead, had dragged herself. "Poor little, little thing!" whispered Jill, as she made to raise the body in her arms. But the dusky head shook feebly, and a dainty henna-tipped finger pointed to a window across the hall, and Jill, feeling herself pushed away ever so slightly, rose as three words were whispered over and over again: "Vite--allez--mort--vite--allez--mort!" And understanding that there was nothing more to be done she bent and kissed the child upon the cheek and turned away, looking back as she opened the window which gave on to a balcony about ten feet above the level of the deserted street, and even as she looked, saw the door of the room she had just left being pushed back inch by inch as the dying girl, strengthened by love and agony, dragged herself slowly into the room in which lay the man she worshipped asleep. CHAPTER XI Ten o'clock!--half-past!--eleven! The usual noises of a night in an Egyptian town were at their height. The distant and never-ceasing shuffling of slippered or naked feet on stone, or sand, made a dull accompaniment to the sharper notes of men's voices crying their wares of sticky sweetmeat or fruit, and the barking and growling of innumerable dogs. Muffled ejaculations could be heard, little gurgles of laughter, which in Egypt, thanks be to Allah, do not degenerate into giggles, the swish of a whip in the shadow, followed by a woman's cry, and through all, above all, unfinished catches of music. All kinds of humans, including tourists, writers, European officials and desert dilettanti, have affixed every kind of adjective to Egypt's music. Ethereal, melancholy, wailing, plaintive, nebulous, and pathetic are but a few. Why--why try to tie a label to something which slips from the fingers even as they close about it? Why _try_ to describe that which cannot be described? There is, or was, a certain line which in the heat of an Egyptian noon, or the stillness of an Egyptian night, when the first notes of a human voice, or stringed instrument, or rudely cut pipe-reed reach the ears, would creep out of some memory cell. One loved the vagueness of those words: "Out of the nowhere, into here!" Loved the infinite space they opened up with their aloofness and indefiniteness, until, alas! they took concrete shape when chosen as title to the picture of a robust, Royal Academy, Fed-on-Virol looking babe, which doubtless, when trying to grab some passing Olympian butterfly, fell off the lap of the Gods into a sitting position upon Mother Earth.