There was surely a devil in the watching traveller which was pushing
the angel out of him. Domini had never before seemed to see clearly
the legendary battle of the human heart. But it had never before been
manifested to her audaciously in the human face.
All around the Arabs sat, motionless and at ease, gazing on the curious
dance of which they never tire--a dance which has some ingenuity,
much sensuality and provocation, but little beauty and little mystery,
unless--as happens now and then--an idol-like woman of the South, with
all the enigma of the distant desert in her kohl-tinted eyes, dances
it with the sultry gloom of a half-awakened sphinx, and makes of it a
barbarous manifestation of the nature that lies hidden in the heart of
the sun, a silent cry uttered by a savage body born in a savage land.
In the cafe of Tahar, the Kabyle, there was at present no such woman.
His beauties, huddled together on their narrow bench before a table
decorated with glasses of water and sprigs of orange blossom in earthen
vases, looked dull and cheerless in their gaudy clothes. Their bodies
were well formed, but somnolent.
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