And presently, late in the night, they laid her body in a palanquin, and set the palanquin upon a running camel, and, while the dancers shrilled their lament amid the sands, they bore her away into the darkness of the dunes towards the south and the tents of her own people. The jackals laughed as she went by. * * * * * But the hedgehog’s foot was left lying upon the floor of her chamber. Not one of the dancers would touch it. That night I was in the café, and, hearing of all these things from Kouïdah, the boy, I went into the court, and gathered up the trinket which had brought a woman to the great silence. Next day I rode on horseback to Tamacine, asked to see the marabout and told him all the story. He listened, smiling like the rising sun in an oleograph, and twisting in his huge hands, that were tinted with the henna, the staff with the apple-green ribbons. When I came to the end I said: “O, holy marabout, tell me one thing.” “Allah is just. I listen.” “If the scorpions had slept with a veiled woman who held the hedgehog’s foot, how would it have been? Would the woman have died or lived?” The marabout did not answer. He looked at me calmly, as at a child who asks questions about the mysteries of life which only the old can understand. “These things,” he said at length, “are hidden from the unbeliever. You are a Roumi. How, then, should you learn such matters?” “But even the Roumi⸺” “In the desert there are mysteries,” continued the marabout, “which even the faithful must not seek to penetrate.” “Then it is useless to⸺” “It is very useless. It is as useless as to try to count the grains of the sand.” I said no more. Mohammed El Aïd Ben Ali Tidjani smiled once more, and beckoned to a negro attendant, who ran with a musical box, one of the gifts of the faithful. “This comes from Paris,” he said, with a spreading complacence. Then there was within the box a sounding click, and there stole forth a tinkling of Auber’s music to _Masaniello_, “Come o’er the moonlit sea!” _THE DESERT DRUM_ I I am not naturally superstitious. The Saharaman is. He has many strange beliefs. When one is at close quarters with him, sees him day by day in his home, the great desert, listens to his dramatic tales of desert lights, visions, sounds, one’s common-sense is apt to be shaken on its throne. Perhaps it is the influence of the solitude and the wide spaces, of those far horizons of the Sahara where the blue deepens along the edge of the world, that turns even a European mind to an Eastern credulity. Who can tell? The truth is that in the Sahara one can believe what one cannot believe in London. And sometimes circumstances—chance if you like to call it so—steps in, and seems to say, “Your belief is well founded.”