Halima And The Scorpions | Page 5

once more with the cord.
Halima did not move, but she looked upon the scorpion that was black,
and her red lips trembled. Then she closed her hand upon the
hedgehog's foot that hung from her golden girdle, and shut her eyes
beneath her ebon eyebrows.
"Set my brothers upon her!" said Ben-Abid.
The plunger of the wells sprang upon Halima, opened her scarlet
bodice roughly, plunged his claw into her swelling bosom, and
withdrew it--empty.
"Kiss her close, my brothers!" whispered Ben-Abid.
A long murmur, like the growl of the tide upon a shingly beach, arose
once more from the crowd. Halima turned about, and went slowly in at
her lighted doorway, followed by Irena and Boria. The heavy door of
palm was shut behind them. The light was hidden. There was a great
silence. It was broken by Sadok's voice screaming in his beard to
Ben-Abid, "My money! Give me my money!"
He snatched it with a howl, and went capering forth into the darkness.
*****
When the next night fell upon the desert there was a great crowd
assembled in the café of the dancers. The pipers blew into their pipes,
and swayed upon their haunches, turning their glittering eyes to and fro
to see what man had a mind to press a piece of money upon their well

greased foreheads. The dancers came and went, promenading arm in
arm upon the earthen floor, or leaping with hands outstretched and
fingers fluttering. The Kabyle attendant slipped here and there with the
coffee cups, and the wreaths of smoke curled lightly upward towards
the wooden roof.
But Halima came not through the open doorway holding the scarlet
handkerchiefs above her head.
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!"

End of Project Gutenberg's Halima And The Scorpions, by Robert
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