Here is a large blank house. The court is high, and all about ring little doors of oak. Below is a hall. Its walls are muffled in rugs, its floor is far under carpets. Before the divans are tables, and the tea is spiced. Men in white squat and play upon pipes, and their black eyes gleam. The music’s shrillness shrieks. Now come women. They are four. Unminding loveliness moves within thick brocades and clashing gems. The faces are exquisitely painted. Verdant and nervelessly, they dance. The body is quiet as a tree, the hands are pliant and susurrous like leaves. The male music works.... A stomach wrench, violent as childbirth, shatters upon the mellifluous woman’s body. Above the music comes a cry from her mouth; it is a piercing call made pulsant with the hand clapped periodically to the open lips. It dies; the elemental bodies stir again within the dress and a sleep. But the male music works. The women pause. The musicians turn about, so that they cannot see. With unfeeling hands, the dancers loose the bonds of their thick robes. They step from the splendor fallen to their feet; they are naked. Only the jewels flash and bite upon their musing flesh. They dance. The muscles of their thighs flow upward toward their breasts; the arms twine sleepy. The male music works. The stomach, sudden, as if in unseen violation, wrenches, cascades, in passional response. The shrilling pipes are visited whole upon the naked women. They shriek: their cry, overtoned, fluted, pulsant, marries flesh and iron: blots out the music, and the music falls. The town is asleep. Swarming reeking streets of the town are gray and are shells. The walls stand white under the sky, and over the depths of brooding human darkness. The crescent moon, with the dark sphere visible within its horns, sends scimitar rays into the sleep of Islam. _b._ _Moghreb_ A semi-desert land holds well the squalors and the splendors of its past. This edge of Africa is the western end of the world whence the sun slides down to the sea. The bleak steppes, studded with sage and cactus, rise to sudden mountains; snow fields balance palm groves. It was a harsh place for a great world to grow in. But glories long since dust in Bagdad and Damascus have still their form in the cities of Morocco.