The footlights were moving forward toward the street of the market. Habib moved with them a few slow paces without effort or will. Again they had all stopped. It could not be more than two hundred yards to the house of the notary and his waiting bride, but by the ancient tradition of Kairwan an hour must be consumed on the way. An hour! An eternity! Panic came over Habib. He turned his hooded eyes for some path of escape. To the right, Houseen! To the left, close at his shoulder, Mohammed Sherif--Mohammed the laughing and the well-beloved--Mohammed, with whom in the long, white days he used to chase lizards by the pool of the Aglabides ... in the long, white, happy days, while beyond the veil of palms the swaying camel palanquins of women, like huge bright blooms, went northward up the Tunis road.... What made him think of that? "_Boom-boom-boom-boom_!" And around the drums beyond the candles he heard them singing: _On the day of the going away of my Love, When the litters, carrying the women of the tribe, Traversed the valley of Dad, like a sea, mirage, They were like ships, great ships, the work of the children of Adoul, Or like the boats of Yamen's sons...._ "_Boom-boom_!" The monotonous pulse, the slow minor slide of sixteenth tones, the stark rests--he felt the hypnotic pulse of the old music tampering with the pulse of his blood. It gave him a queer creeping fright. He shut his eyes, as if that would keep it out. And in the glow of his lids he saw the tents on the naked desert; he saw the forms of veiled women; he saw the horses of warriors coming like a breaker over the sand--the horses of the warriors of God! He pulled the burnoose over his lids to make them dark. And even in the dark he could see. He saw two eyes gazing at his, untroubled, untroubling, out of the desert night. And they were the eyes of any woman--the eyes of his bride, of his sister, his mother, the eyes of his mothers a thousand years dead. "Master!" they said. They were pushing him forward by the elbows, Mohammed and Houseen. He opened his eyes. The crowd swam before him through the yellow glow. Something had made an odd breach in his soul, and through the breach came memories. Memories! There at his left was the smoky shelf of blind Moulay's café--black-faced, white-eyed old Moulay. Moulay was dead now many years, but the men still sat in the same attitudes, holding the same cups, smoking the same _chibouk_ with the same gulping of bubbles as in the happy days. And there between the café and the _souk_ gate was the same whitewashed niche where three lads used to sit with their feet tucked under their little _kashabias_, their _chechias_ awry on their shaven polls, and their lips pursed to spit after the leather legs of the infidel conquerors passing by. The _Roumi_, the French blasphemers, the defilers of the mosque! Spit on the dogs! Spit!