# The Swinging Caravan/Decadence

pp. 103–128.

### DECADENCE

CLING-CLONG, cling-clong—the tinkle of her massive, sand-molded silver anklets accentuated the soft thud of her feet that showed tiny and bare and stained crimson with henna juice as, with every step, the heels rose above the floppy yellow leather slippers. She passed through the latticed bazaar that filtered the sun on silks and rugs, on copper vessels and clay pots and thin, gold inlaid attar bottles, in ever shifting patterns, rose and heliotrope and elfin green. Around her coiled and screamed the symphony of the mart: a black giant of Fezzan bargaining with a laughing Djerba Jew over a length of cobwebby chebka lace; a Spaniard, whose face seemed in arms, disputing the right of way with a scented Tripolitan dandy, in silken burnoose of ashes-of-roses, a jonquil over his left ear, a bamboo cane in his hand; a bare-legged Bedaw, lean shoulders looped in earth-brown folds of wool, touching palms with a veiled, sinister Touareg of Timbuktoo; an Arab, with hint of Goth and Vandal in the blue of his eyes and the shimmering gold of his beard, discussing an intricate Koranic text with a velvet-cloaked sheykh of the Faith; a scant-bearded Maghrabi stalking along in all the dignity of pride and dirt—silhouettes, standing out sharply, dramatically, from the back ground of raucous Tunisian humanity.
She brushed against the precariously perched stand of a lemonade seller, nearly upsetting it.
"The salute, yah Sidi," came her mumbled apology.
"And on thy own house, yah Lella," was the courtly reply; and she continued on her way, holding herself straight, walking—thought John Maturin, with his quickly observing artist's brain—without the cadenced, sensuous swinging of hips and breasts that he had noticed further north, in Moroccan Jewess and city-bred Algerienne. She was small and very slight, he could tell, in spite of the muslin swathings in broad stripes of violet and orange that covered her from her head to her feet. He wondered how old she might be. For of her face, between the top seam of the haik and the triangular droop of the deep-violet taguia turban, nothing was visible except a broad, snow-white forehead and two eyes, coal-black, perfectly expressionless, almond-shaped, heavy-lidded—the eyes of a race, he thought, not of an individual; eyes that had no soul behind them; or, perhaps, a soul he could not read——?
Cling-clong—she walked along.
As on the preceding days, she threw him a rapid glance. As on the preceding days, she stopped to haggle with the vulpine, parchment-skinned Maltese Jew at the end of the bazaar, over a necklace of moonstones and star-sapphires.
"Kodesh, Yahudi—how much, Jew?" she asked in her low, throaty voice.
"As I told you yesterday and the day before and the day before that, oh mouquera!" came the reply in a bastard mixture of Arabic, French, and Spanish. "Seven thousand francs! And then I am losing—may my wife not sleep with other men!"
"She does—every night!" commented an Arab, while the woman said: "Ma indish, Yahudi—I have not the price, Jew!"
"As you said yesterday and the day before and the day before that! Why waste the time of honest traders?" The Maltese spat. He demanded, addressing the crowd in general, why beggars should bargain. Could then the naked tear their clothes? Could a frog catch cold? Could a harlot boast of her virginity?
There was a roar of laughter. A Sudanese black, statuesque in a long white djebba, his shaven poll crowned by a red tarbush, broke into high-pitched, jungly cachinnations. A tall, hawkish Shareef made metaphorical comment about certain people being noseless and earless, yet clamoring for nose and ear rings. The Maltese, not to be outdone in spice of jest and epigram, added that once he had heard of a bald-headed man who bought himself a golden comb on the rass el aam, the Moslem New Year. More laughter. And the woman gave a faint sigh.
"Akarba h'allama—" she called on Allah for patience and compassion.
She blushed a deep, even rose; John Maturin could tell by the color of her forehead as again she turned, staring at him over her shoulder. Then she went on her way, out of the bazaar, toward the mosque, that untwined its sinuous arabesques of yellow and olive faience beneath the pigeon-blue glare of the sky.
"She is very poor. Shall I go after her? Shall I tell her you want to meet her, yah Sidi?" asked Yussef, the dragoman, whom Maturin had picked up at Tunis and who had accompanied him here to Tugurt, the gateway of the Sahara.
He spoke in execrable, guttural French, and Maturin replied in equally execrable Anglo-Saxon French: "No, no. I've told you so twice daily for the last week."
"But, Sidi. Her figure seems excellent—and doubtless you are a man of warm intestines who..."
"Shut up!"
Yussef shrugged his feline shoulders. "A step in the mud and a harsh word from a master—Allah!—they matter not," he quoted philosophically; and he added, nowise abashed: "She seems pretty. Perhaps she is young. And if you should want to meet her—the necklace..."
Maturin tried not to listen. He felt prey to an unknown, terribly poignant yearning. It was not love, nor exactly passion—how could it be, he asked himself, since he did not know the woman, had not even seen her face? But it was as if, within his subconscious self, a deep layer of unknown desire were stirring, then trembling. It had something to do with this Africa, cosmic, sensuous, cruel, sadistic, that droned and sweated about him, and with the woman's eyes. Black they were. Soulless.
Soulless? Were they? And what was her age, her name, her dreams, her thoughts? Why had she looked at him? Was it just that she wanted the necklace? Was it only a cheap adventure as might happen to him on the Strand or in Bond Street? He did not believe it; did not want to believe it.
He dried his face with his handkerchief. The heat was terrific.
Horizons. Crowds. Somnolence. Tranquillity. Then a sudden blaring and glaring: there, in a nut shell, was Arab Africa as he had seen and felt it, had endeavored these last few months to paint it. And he could paint it—the contours, the colors; and, home in London, the pictures would mean money and fame.
But what was the mystery behind it?
A silent land it seemed, in spite of its sudden raucous screamings and blarings and belchings; a speechless folk, in spite of their high-pitched laughter and guttural exclamations; an incommunicable civilization, in spite of its beauty of fretted stone and broidered silk. And it was all expressed in this woman, veiled, enigmatic, who had glanced at him over her shoulder.
He looked up.
From far away came the tinkle of silver anklets—cling-clong—as she passed around the corner of the mosque into the open street, her burnoose shimmering in the pitiless sun rays with a sort of sinister iridescence. He half turned, about to follow her. Yussef smiled. He winked fraternally at the Maltese Jew.
Maturin reconsidered. He still felt an immense, inarticulate excitement surging through him, but he decided that it was the climate, the massive, jagged heat. He would go back to the hotel and chat with the stout French colonel who presided there over the table d'hôte and the handful of Europeans, officers, a few civilian employees, a sprinkling of tourists. Quinine, that would do the trick, and a glass of iced champagne with his lunch. Resolutely he went on his way, Yussef following at his heels like a rangy, brown and white dog.
Then, quite suddenly, without stopping to analyze the why and wherefore, he changed his mind. He went straight up to the Maltese. He examined the necklace. It was a Moorish antique, fragile, exquisite, unique in design and craftsmanship.
"How much?" he asked.
"Nine thousand francs, Sidi."
"Seven thousand, you told the woman."
"Eight thousand—may I be father to my children!"
"I don't give a God damn if you are or not. Seven thousand—and not another centime!"
"Very well, Sidi."
"Come to the Grand Hotel for the money."
"Shall I bring the necklace, or will you take it now?"
"Neither. Give it to the woman when you see her."
"She comes every day," smiled the Maltese.
"I know. Any idea who she is?"
"Who can tell? These veiled women all look alike, Sidi."
"All right. You give her that necklace." He thought quickly. "No tricks, eh? You won't cheat?"
"Would I dare," laughed the trader, "with all my competitors looking on and listening?"
"I don't suppose you would." Maturin turned to go.
"Sidi!" called the other.
"Well——?"
"Of course—if the woman comes—you want me to give her your address?"
"No," Maturin replied curtly and went on his way, while again Yussef winked fraternally, meaningly, at the Maltese who, his customer out of hearing, remarked to an Arab rug dealer that all guelbis, all Christian dogs, were mad.
"Kter mounn elmoutt ma kench feddenya," commented the Arab passionlessly, meaning that that was so, but that he personally was not worrying about it.
Yet Maltese as well as Arab would have called Maturin doubly mad had they known that the whole, in him, had been only an impulse, a quixotic gesture. For there was no thought in him nor intent except, vaguely, that thus, through the gift of the necklace, he was establishing a certain vicarious contact with this veiled woman and, through her, with all this veiled Moslim life which intrigued his prying Western mind. Once the thing done he tried to dismiss it from his memory with only that night a half-ironical comment that seven thousand francs was a great deal of money for a struggling artist and that he was a damned fool.
"Oh, well—I shall have to paint another picture—and sell it," he said to himself, and he sketched with soft charcoal the outlines of a veiled woman walking—cling-clong—through a crowded bazaar.
It was typical of him that the next day, as almost automatically he went back to the bazaar, he quickly turned and beat a hasty retreat when he saw the woman talking animatedly to the Maltese and saw the latter give her the necklace, then look up and point at him with his thumb. The woman stared, started, and Maturin walked off rapidly, without turning. Nor was it exactly because he was embarrassed, but rather because of a strange fear that he might be disappointed, disillusioned in her; and so, arrived at the ramshackle Tugurt hotel, he told the Greek desk clerk that he was at home to nobody, and spent the rest of the day in his room, painting.
Later in the evening he went out on the balcony of his room and sat down. The sky was rosy red and pallid gold, dipping at the horizon's edge into livid purple, shading to the west into glittering heliotrope. Against it, etched black and deeper black, the spire of the Hussaynyieh mosque rose like a plume of smoke, immobile in the still air. A wooden drum sobbed in the distance.
He looked at the street scene, at the men walking past, slow, dignified, burnoosed, with a sort of grimly resolute swagger. There were, too, a few women, veiled, gliding, furtive, secretive. And all silent, unhurried.
The sudden high laugh of a Scotch spinster, drifting from the hotel patio below, struck his eardrums with an almost physical shock. Came a burst of speech—the hectic, bilious, futile talk of Europeans in the tropics, in French, English, Italian; the usual boastings and international lies; the tail-end of a Parisian gutter joke. Maturin could imagine the stout French colonel rolling the words over his tongue, savoring their nastiness; could imagine the old Scotch spinster's musty virginity bristling half with desire, half with disgust.
Then again silence; the immense, vibrating, swathing silence of the Orient.
Maturin was nervous, dissatisfied with life, with himself. He thought, rather bitterly, that it was different, home in London. Just about this time he would be dining with that girl he used to go around with—what was her name? There would be a jolly party, music, laughter, a dance, a spice of gossip. He remembered the girl's keen epigrams, her sharp, mocking eyes. They were blue, and full of life to over flowing. There was soul in them, energy, vitality. And—came the thought—those other eyes, coal-black, expressionless, hiding the woman's life, her soul, with their opaque depths, as the veil hid her face, her identity! Was she wearing the necklace around her throat? Did the cool metal touch her white, soft flesh? Was she, perhaps, thinking of the donor? Was she puzzling about him as he was about her——?
Deliberately he banished the thought. He told himself that he had painted enough. That last picture, there, on the easel—the woman passing through the bazaar—would have to remain unfinished. He was going home.
He turned to Yussef who was squatting in a corner of the balcony.
"Tomorrow we start overland, to Tunis," he said.
"Oh—already?"
"Yes. I'll catch the first boat to Marseilles."
"It is as the Sidi wishes," replied the dragoman. He bowed with clasped hands and left. A few minutes later he returned with a bottle of boukha—that drink of fermented fig juice invented, it is said, by the Moors driven out of Spain to console themselves for the lost gardens of Granada—and two glasses, which he wiped carefully with a dirty thumb.
"Why two glasses?" asked Maturin.
The reply was shattering in its utter simplicity.
"For yourself and the lady."
"Lady?"
"Yes, Sidi."
"What lady, Yussef?"
"The one to whom you gave the necklace, Sidi. I told her your address."
"Oh——?"
"She asked me."
And before Maturin had time or presence of mind to voice his indignation, the dragoman added: "She comes tonight. Ah—" bowing—"she is already in the Sidi's room. Good night, Sidi! You will find on your dressing table a bottle of oil of amber. Two drops on the woman's breasts to rouse waning passion! I am a most excellent servant!" and, with catlike agility, he swung himself over the railing, out into the street.
For a moment Maturin was speechless with astonishment. Finally his voice returned to him. He leaned over the balcony.
"Yussef!" he called. "Come back. What the devil——"
There was no answer. The dragoman had disappeared.
Downstairs, in the hotel, everything was quiet. The street was deserted. Night had dropped with the tragic suddenness of the tropics.
From the room behind him came a cloying scent of musk, strong as a temple gong.
He turned.
The moon, a bloated thing of copper swinging among the lanky palm trees, threw down a single broad wedge of orange light which fell on a slim, cloaked figure sitting cross-legged on the bed. Coal-black, above the haik, the eyes stared.
Like a man in a dream he walked inside, closed the balcony door, drew the curtains, and switched on the electric light. The woman rose. She came toward him, very slowly, but without the slightest hesitation. An arm's length from him she stopped.
"I have come, Sidi," she said.
She spoke in French, and he noticed that it was not the guttural French of the Arab. It was broken, but had curious undertones, soft and limpid; and, rather ludicrously, it was this that he mentioned first.
"You are not an Arab?" he asked.
"No. I am an Alegia." She swept a tiny hand in a vague gesture. "An Alegia!" she repeated, with a certain note of bitterness. "And once I stood amongst the women in the souk el trouk." She brought out the harsh Arab words with a ringing, metallic challenge.
He looked at her. He could make very little of what she said. Alegia? Souk el trouk? What did it mean? He had heard so many Arab words these last few months, and they had left no impression on him. Should he ask her? Well, he thought, it did not matter. He did not care what particular tribe she belonged to. What he wanted was to read the riddle of her eyes. He wanted to tell her, did not know how. And so he felt embarrassed, tongue-tied.
"I have come to thank you for the necklace, Sidi," she said.
"You like it?"
"Yes, Sidi."
"You—you are wearing it?"
"No."
"No?"
He felt a little hurt.
"I sold it, Sidi."
"Oh—" he slurred; continued: "Then——"
"It was not the jewel that I wanted," she said naïvely, "but the money." And she went on, with a half laugh: "I could not ask you for the money, since 1 did not speak to you in words, since I only asked—over my shoulder. You saw—understood..."
"I understood all right," he replied drily. "But," he demanded, with unintentional brutality, "why did you—well—ask me of all men—me, a foreigner?"
"Because you are a foreigner. Because you will be gone tomorrow—or the next day."
"I see!" He felt slightly annoyed, slightly disappointed. Then his generous nature came uppermost. He put his hand in his pocket. "If you really need money——"
"No. I sold the necklace for six thousand francs. That will last us a year."
"Us?"
"Yes."
"You mean—you and—" with a quick, illogical pang of jealousy, "a man—somebody you love——?"
"No, Sidi," she said very gently. "Somebody who loves me! Somebody who has loved me these twenty years or more. For—Sidi—I am not a young woman. And—see!—here is the thanks for the necklace!"
And, with a sudden gesture, she dropped her veil and showed her face, a perfect oval, marble-white, with a short, straight nose, and hair that curled in a russet cascade with tiny, golden points. With an other gesture she slipped off her single, loose garment. She stood there naked.
"I am not young," she went on. "But—" she asked it defiantly, "I am still very beautiful, eh, Sidi? I can still stir the heart with the promise and sweetness of hidden mysteries."
"Yes," he replied gravely. He stared at her, came a step nearer. There were just a few tiny wrinkles running from the corners of her eyes toward her small ears, and the lips were warm and red and inviting. Her body was very beautiful, with slender hips, tapering legs, and full, high, pointed breasts. She stood very still. Only her left hand trembled a little. Strangely muted she seemed, soundless, mysterious; more mysterious, the queer thought came to him, in her stark nakedness then hidden by veil and garment.
The scent of musk was very strong. He felt dazed beneath the surge of passion that swept over him.
She was speaking. But he hardly listened. It was in his ears like a low murmur, growing softer and softer, limpid sentences running gently into each other, melting into a deep zumming, like the swarming of bees in a lime tree, like—the simile came to him—the inarticulate murmur of summer—summer full-blown, ripe, red as her lips—white as her body...
Then he became conscious of a single sentence she was repeating over and over:
"I came to give thanks for the necklace!"
She turned a little; moved toward the bed. And again the soul of John Maturin made a quixotic gesture. "Stay there," he said, "and don't move."
He drew the easel toward him, ripped off the paper with the unfinished picture, tacked on a new sheet, picked up charcoal and rubber. He worked feverishly; and, fifteen minutes later: "Thank you."
He showed her the rapid sketch that he had done.
She smiled delightedly.
"I?" she asked.
"No."
"No?"
"At least—not yet. But it will be you—if you give me another sitting—if you come back."
"If you come back," he repeated as she bent, very near to him, to look at the picture, her cloudy hair brushing his cheek, her red lips flaming within actual touch of his.
The scent of musk was overpowering. Momentarily he felt conscious of an incontrollable movement; a movement both of revelation and mystery it seemed to him—something that spread its soft tide into every corner of his being, something that established dominion over the secret places of his soul, causing the mighty strings of life within him to quiver with a great pain of longing. Instinctively, at that moment, he knew that the woman felt what he felt, that the impetuous yearning that had leaped full-fledged into his blood was whelming her as it was whelming him.
He heard her speak.
"You really want me to—come back, Sidi?"
"Yes. Yes. Will you?"
"I——"
"Tomorrow? Promise!"
"I—oh——"
"Promise!" he insisted.
She looked at him, questioningly, wonderingly. She trembled a little, in a certain sweet bewilderment, like a child or an animal. And then, as his arms opened, as he was about to crush her to him, she stepped to one side with a quick, gliding motion; picked up her robe and drew it about her.
"No!" she said, as if to herself.
"But—but why—I thought..."
"No, no!" she repeated. An inscrutable expression, like a veil dropping, had come into her coal-black eyes. "Don't you see, Sidi? There is—the picture!" She pointed at it.
"What has it to do with——?"
"It is wrong, Sidi."
"Wrong?"
"Yes."
"How?"
"Because—look—you have drawn me naked—without the veil."
"Your face is still without the veil." He was becoming slightly exasperated.
She smiled. "Sidi," she said, "we always wear the veil—we Moslim women—always, always—from the birth to the grave! And if our body does not, then our soul does. You can never make the picture right, even if I come back a hundred times. You can never know my soul—even though..."
"Yes," he interrupted dully, and there was in his heart like the tolling of a last bell. "I can never make the picture right. You will always wear the veil—always, always." And, suddenly, he turned to the easel. He took the palette knife and slashed the paper into a dozen ragged pieces.
"The picture is—finished?" she asked.
"Yes.
Finished."
"Good-by, Sidi!"
"Good-by!"
He escorted her to the door. She adjusted her face veil. She did not speak another word. Nor did he. She stepped over the threshold. He heard the cling-clong of her silver anklets as she passed through the corridor of the hotel and down the stairs.
He went out on the balcony. He watched her cross the patio, watched her disappear into the night.
The air was very heavy. It was perfumed with earth. Shadows cloaked everything with a thick, clogging silence.
He had seen the woman—he told himself—had talked to her. She had come close to him, physically. But, in his inner, psychic vision, she had glided away, voiceless, viewless, soulless, mute: slightly mocking, slightly unhuman, like all this Arab world. Now that he was alone, it was as if she had never been in this room. So he stood there, nervous, uneasy, looking out toward the south where, a stone's throw from the hotel, the desert rolled up stark and triumphant. The moon had come up, sharp and white, painting the sands with opal and mother-of-pearl, glazing the shotts with shimmering mirrors of salt, crinkling the surface into blanched hollows where the shadows fell deep.
He stepped away from the balcony. He thought that he had never felt more lonely in his life.
Then he turned as he heard a laugh drift from below, heard himself called by name:
"Maturin!"
"Yes?"
"Be careful, mon petit!" It was the French colonel speaking. "Oriental husbands are jealous——"
And Maturin, without replying, stepped into his room.
Next morning, at breakfast, he met Colonel Lemesureur.
"Who was the Arab lady?" asked the latter.
"I didn't..."
"Come on. None of your Anglo-Saxon hypocrisies! I saw her leave your room. Own up. Who was the Arab lady?"
"In the first place she wasn't an Arab..."
"And—in the second—she wasn't a lady?" laughed the Frenchman.
"Look here..."
"No offense meant! Don't be so comically Nordic!" The other smiled into his coffee cup. Then again curiosity overcame him. "You said she wasn't an Arab?"
"She called herself—" Maturin hunted for the word the woman had used—"Oh—an Alegia—something like that
"Impossible!" Lemesureur sat up straight in his chair. "They don't have them any more."
"What is an Alegia?" demanded Maturin.
"A Circassian slave. But that dates back a number of years before we French took a hold of Tunis. They used to have a regular slave market for the girls—over on the souk el trouk——"
"The—what?" Maturin remembered that the woman had used the same words.
"It's the old bazaar where they now sell burnooses and silks. And these Alegias were the pick of the market. Because they were Circassians, of excellent family, and because they were virgins. Why—" the Frenchman smiled. "I think that girl of yours was just an Arab adventuress who tried to make herself important in your eyes—and expensive. Just as every little Paris cocotte calls herself the descendant of some princely Gascon family. I know this town. I've lived here for many years. To my certain knowledge there is only one Alegia left here, and she is—oh—quite a great lady. She is the wife of old Si Mehmet ben Abderrahman. He bought her twenty years ago..."
"Who's the man?" asked Maturin, trying to make the question appear casual.
"A Shareef, a descendant of the Prophet. And once he was a very great gentleman—grand-vizir to Si Sadok, the Bey of Tunis. But now——"
"Now——?"
"Where are the snows of yesteryear?" Lemesureur shrugged his shoulders. "Ruined!"
Maturin looked up sharply. A queer suspicion crossed his mind. "Yes?" he asked.
"Absolutely. The Jews and the Spaniards—money-lenders—have seen to that. Well—it was his own fault—and hers."
"You mean——?"
"Yes. The Alegia's. He paid a fancy price for her in the first place. Something like half a million francs, they say. Soon after he married her. He, a Shareef, a descendant of the Prophet, married a slave—imagine that! There was talk about her being the daughter of a Circassian prince, having been kidnapped—all that ... oh—" the colonel smiled disagreeably—"they always tell those stories when a woman has more than her average of good looks. And then, to please her, he divorced his other two wives, both of them nieces of Si Sadok, the Bey, which naturally did not help him much with his royal master. Then—well—he spent. Everything she wanted, by the dozen—extravagantly. And we Europeans are stingy in comparison with an Arab—who loves——"
He rose and buckled on his sword.
"By the way," he added, "you, being an Anglo-Saxon and an artist, therefore inquisitive on both counts, might like to take a look at the old gentleman's palace. He still has it—and they say it's interesting."
"Would he receive me?"
"He'd be flattered. He likes visitors. It reminds him of his former glory."
And so that afternoon, without his dragoman, Maturin went to look for the palace of Si Mehmet ben Abderrahman. He found it in the northern part of the town, at the end of a deserted, dusty street bordered with aloes and Barbary fig, soaring into the skies with an abandon of spires and balconies and twisted roofs and surrounded by a high-walled, weed-choked garden. Years must have passed since the façade had been white-washed, and now it had taken on a golden tint, like an ancient Spanish cathedral. There was hardly a suspicion left of the arabesques and geometric designs that crusted the marble frames of the windows. A long alley of cypress trees led to the building. Left and right, an exuberant mass of vegetation buried what must once have been carefully tended lawns, with flower parterres of which the out lines were still discernible beneath the riot of green, savage life.
John Maturin was in a curious state of mind. The colonel's remark had quite convinced him that the woman to whom he had given the bracelet, who had visited him in his room, was the former grand-vizir's wife. That part of the mystery was solved, if mystery it was. But what he wanted to probe, to find out, was the human note behind it, the human emotions and enigmas. What were the relations between husband and wife? How did he feel, he, the great, who had fallen so low because of a slave girl's white smile?
And she—the woman ...? He thought of her, and he caught his breath sharply, uncertain whether it was pain or pleasure that predominated. He was conscious of a profound yearning—a yearning more of the spirit than of the flesh—too fugitive to be seized, too vague to be definitely labeled.
He looked at the palace door. It was of ivory, inlaid with jade and dull-gleaming chrysoprase, but splintered, dirty. He wondered what was behind it.
"Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth—" Blake's words came back to him. An image of truth! And what truth could there be behind this veil of eastern womanhood that hid the soul, the life, even after the veil had slipped?
He lifted the great bronze door knocker; dropped it, half-a-dozen times. There was no answer. Complete silence except somewhere, very far away, the tinkle-tinkle of an Arab guitar, and a woman's voice, singing in that quaint, minor wail of Oriental music:
"Allach had eladab, ya khabi
Qloubkoum andkoum irtab Ousli ma teaurabou..."
Again he raised and dropped the bronze knocker. No answer. Then he noticed that the door was slightly ajar, and he pushed it open.
"Hullo! Hullo!" he called.
There was no reply except his own voice coming back to him in a thin, ludicrous echo. So, conscious of a tense, suppressed nervousness, he stepped inside, into a huge, oblong vestibule that was empty and dusty. He gave a start as he heard a sharp chk-tick-chk and saw a scorpion scurrying for cover.
Again he called:
"Hullo! Hullo!"
Again no answer; and, feeling like an intruder, but resolved to see it through, he entered a long suite of apartments, all dusty, without furniture of any kind, only the sumptuous stucco ceilings and the walls covered half-way up with broken faience of silver and peacock-green showing the past grandeur of the house of Si Mehmet ben Abderrahman.
A shiver ran through Maturin. It seemed to him that here, in this abode of decadence, the world had stood still for all time to come, to hear the centuries race past on purposeless wings. The silence weighed on him like a hopeless burden.
Once more he called. His voice lost itself in the vaulted spaces, and he had about decided to retrace his steps when a door opened and a very old, small, bent man shuffled rapidly up to him, dressed in a faded, patched white cotton djebba, his shaven poll without a turban and glistening like a crinkly onion skin, his long beard white and unkempt.
"Ah—Sidi—you wish...?" he inquired, with a polite bow, speaking fair French.
"I am an artist. I have heard about this palace, and I wonder if Si Mehmet would permit me to——?"
"Gladly! Si Mehmet is flattered."
"Oh—you——"
The old man gave a shrill cackle. "I am Si Mehmet," he replied.
Maturin gave a start of surprise. This man was Si Mehmet? This gnarled, bent, rather dirty old man had once been the powerful grand-vizir of Tunis? Poverty? Yes. He had expected it. Tragic, dignified poverty. But there was no trace of dignity left here. Nothing. Just age, and decadence, and—yes—dirt. He looked at the man's face, and he found it rugged, beaten, the face of one whom life had terribly tumbled about. And it was only the light in the eyes—strange, violet-blue eyes—eyes seeming to be fixed unwaveringly on a distant and glorious sight, that redeemed the features from utter, brutal sordidness.
"So they still speak of me down in Tunis?" asked Si Mehmet.
"Yes."
"And you would like to see——?"
"Very much," replied Maturin, terribly embarrassed and ill-at-ease.
Si Mehmet smiled.
"Come with me."
He led the other upstairs and downstairs and upstairs again; through, literally, hundreds of rooms, rooms square and oblong, some supported by double rows of pillars, others with ceilings of stucco and gilt or with walls of fretted, pink marble; still others where the roof had leaked and the deadly moisture of the tropics had crept in, covering the broken mosaic of the floors with red and yellow moss that gleamed like evil things; through wide corridors, supported by columns whose capitals were shaped like pendant lotus forms; past balconies which clung like birds' nests to the sheer side of the palace; through doors of ebony and teak and bronze, fitted with ancient, rusty bayonet locks and swinging brokenly, despondently, from age-worn dowels that fitted into sockets of stone and ivory frames—and everything dusty and dirty.
As they walked, Si Mehmet talked in the garrulous manner of old men, and as he talked both the glory and the pity of his own past life came back to him.
"Look, Sidi!" pointing at the splintered remains of what once had been a table topped with a single, great slab of Bokharan lapis-lazuli. "O Allah, O Thou All-Knowing! If you had seen this house twenty years ago, yah Sidi! The rugs, the trunks and painted boxes filled with precious things, the furniture! A hundred families inhabited this palace of which I was the vizir and Leila Tejelmouk the sultana. And now—? O Allah! O Thou All-Pitiful! O Master!"
They came finally on a balcony—rather a sort of Italian loggia with doors at either end—that over looked the back courtyard.
Maturin looked down.
It was immense, covered with mosaic and stones. But grass and shrubs and low trees had sprung up between the split slabs, and the carved marble benches were rotten with moisture and coated with corrupt vegetation. In the middle there had once been an artificial lake carefully dammed by great embankments. But the dams had shivered and burst. The lake had risen, slimy and thick and green, and there was no life here now except some wild peacocks strut ting proudly on the broken stones, spreading their garish tails under the splendor of the sun.
"A hundred families lived on my bounty," said Si Mehmet. "The chiefs of the outer tribes came and knelt on my threshold. O Allah!"
He pointed; and Maturin, with his artist's eyes, could imagine the scene as it had been: the patio packed with burnoosed desertmen bringing tribute; the noise of the multitude, like that of a distant sea, ebbing and flowing and swirling, eddying out into the marts of Tugurt to tell the tale of the vizir's greatness; the bazaar traders who came to offer their wares to the Circassian slave wife—shawls and jewels and perfumes, rugs and Persian brocades and gold-threaded muslin from far Fyzabad; the soldiers of the guard grounding their black bamboo lances; the sound of metal scabbard tips dragged against the stone pavements as the officers of the night watch made their rounds. Riches and glory and splendor. And now——
"Empty!" came Si Mehmet's thin, aged voice. "Allah! Nothing is left me! Nothing!" And then, with a sudden deep note of pride, a sudden high light flaring up in his eyes like a slow flame, he added:
"Nothing—except she! And—by Allah and by Allah!—it is enough!"
And when just then the door opened and there was the cling-clong of silver anklets, when a veiled figure came into the loggia, Si Mehmet turned quickly.
"Go away!" he said in Arabic. "Go away, O heart of a thousand roses! Dost thou not see, O piece of my soul, that a man is here, a foreigner?"
Then, when she had disappeared, he turned again to the Englishman.
"Allah is indeed Most Great!" he said. "Many were the jewels I gave to Leila Tejelmouk when I was rich. And now, piece by piece, she sells them. For she loves me, and I am poor. Only yesterday she sold an old necklace I had given her once—I had forgotten all about it—a bauble of moonstones and star-sapphires. Ah—" he salaamed deeply toward the east—"Mektoob—it is so written!"
"Mektoob!" said Maturin under his breath.