I was to hear it presently. We had arrived at a chain swung across the black street and, ducking under it, we came into the open market square. I had seen the place a hundred times, by sun and moon and stars, and still familiarity had not quite worn off my first sense of it as a haven between the winds, the anchorage of a remote white port of call lost in the ocean of stone. To-night that illusion was deepened a dozenfold. There is no other metaphor in speech so true as “ships of the desert.” They were here. To-night I knew that I had known before only the small fry of that dry sea world, only the shore-huggers, the humble brotherhood of the coastwise trade. Here to-night was the creature of the main, the deep-sea squadron, the tall fleet. From where we stood, clear to the further shore of dim arcades, the ground was hidden under the mass of kneeling beasts and heaped bales, a tumbled thing, monstrous in sleep. We picked our way through the ruck, lighting matches from time to time when we found ourselves trapped in blind alleys between bales and humps, or felt our way barred by the hairy neck of a camel curving waist-high across the night. Mountains whisked fat tails at us; sleeping legs sprawled from beneath hills of cargo like dead men pinned under wreckage. Borak took hold of my elbow. “This way,” he said. “I hear the voice of Bou Dik.” I heard it too, impassive, obstinate. There was a small fire of brush-roots throwing a glow around a ring of specters in the center of the field of ruin. The burnooses, all the same color of desert dust, might indeed have been winding-sheets; the hooded faces, gaunt, bone-built, played upon by the weak and tricky illumination from beneath, might have been skulls. And in the midst of the communing dead Bou Dik, enveloped in his red robe of authority, was the devil himself presiding. His voice had ceased. As we settled behind him a man got to his feet on the side beyond the fire. With a gesture which had in it something of the trained orator he put back the hood of his burnoose, baring his strong neck and his round, blue-black, kinky-polled negroid head. “Thou hast demanded, sidi, who is this man who is the father of my father. Thou hast demanded whence he comes, whither he goes, what he desires. Now I will tell thee all these things, I, Belkano, who am not without power in the country which is under Kalgou.” He spoke a quaint Arabic in which all the throat-sounds were brought forward and softened--such a tongue, Borak told me, as black boys pick up in the Mohammedan _zaouias_ at Sikasso and Timbuktu--quaint, and yet more easily understood in the Mzab than dialects not so far away, in Tunis, say, or the Moroccan uplands. “The father of my father,” he said, “is a very great and holy man.” In the pause that followed all the eyes turned upon the object deposited at the speaker’s feet. It was discerned to be human.