The Figure In The Mirage

The Figure In The Mirage, by
Robert Hichens

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Title: The Figure In The Mirage 1905
Author: Robert Hichens
Release Date: November 8, 2007 [EBook #23412]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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FIGURE IN THE MIRAGE ***

Produced by David Widger

THE FIGURE IN THE MIRAGE
By Robert Hichens
Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers

Copyright, 1905
On a windy night of Spring I sat by a great fire that had been built by
Moors on a plain of Morocco under the shadow of a white city, and
talked with a fellow-countryman, stranger to me till that day. We had
met in the morning in a filthy alley of the town, and had forgathered.
He was a wanderer for pleasure like myself, and, learning that he was
staying in a dreary hostelry haunted by fever, I invited him to dine in
my camp, and to pass the night in one of the small peaked tents that
served me and my Moorish attendants as home. He consented gladly.
Dinner was over--no bad one, for Moors can cook, can even make
delicious caramel pudding in desert places--and Mohammed, my
stalwart valet de chambre, had given us most excellent coffee. Now we
smoked by the great fire, looked up at the marvellously bright stars, and
told, as is the way of travellers, tales of our wanderings. My companion,
whom I took at first to be a rather ironic, sceptical, and by nature
"unimaginative globe-trotter--he was a hard-looking, iron-grey man of
middle-age--related the usual tiger story, the time-honoured elephant
anecdote, and a couple of snake yarns of no special value, and I was
beginning to fear that I should get little entertainment from so prosaic a
sportsman, when I chanced to mention the desert.
"Ah!" said my guest, taking his pipe from his mouth, "the desert is the
strangest thing in nature, as woman is the strangest thing in human
nature. And when you get them together--desert and woman--by Jove!"
He paused, then he shot a keen glance at me.
"Ever been in the Sahara?" he said.
I replied in the affirmative, but added that I had as yet only seen the
fringe of it.
"Biskra, I suppose," he rejoined, "and the nearest oasis, Sidi-Okba, and
so on?"
I nodded. I saw I was in for another tale, and anticipated some history
of shooting exploits under the salt mountain of El Outaya.

"Well," he continued, "I know the Sahara pretty fairly, and about the
oddest thing I ever could believe in I heard of and believed in there."
"Something about gazelle?" I queried.
"Gazelle? No--a woman!" he replied..
As he spoke a Moor glided out of the windy darkness, and threw an
armful of dry reeds on the fire. The flames flared up vehemently, and I
saw that the face of my companion had changed. The hardness of it was
smoothed away. Some memory, that held its romance, sat with him.
"A woman," he repeated, knocking the ashes out of his pipe almost
sentimentally--"more than that, a French woman of Paris, with the
nameless charm, the chic, the---- But I'll tell you. Some years ago three
Parisians--a man, his wife, and her unmarried sister, a girl of eighteen,
with an angel and a devil in her dark beauty--came to a great resolve.
They decided that they were tired of the Français, sick of the Bois,
bored to death with the boulevards, that they wanted to see for
themselves the famous French colonies which were for ever being
talked about in the Chamber. They determined to travel. No sooner was
the determination come to than they were off. Hôtel des Colonies,
Marseilles; steamboat, Le Général Chanzy; five o'clock on a splendid,
sunny afternoon--Algiers, with its terraces, its white villas, its palms,
trees, and its Spahis!"
"But----" I began.
He foresaw my objection.
"There were Spahis, and that's a point of my story. Some fête was on in
the town while our Parisians were there. All the African troops were
out--Zouaves, chasseurs, tirailleurs. The Governor went in procession
to perform some ceremony, and in front of his carriage rode sixteen
Spahis--probably got in from that desert camp of theirs near El Outaya.
All this was long before the Tsar visited Paris, and our Parisians had
never before seen the dashing Spahis, had only heard of them, of their
magnificent horses, their turbans and flowing Arab robes, their

gorgeous figures, lustrous eyes, and diabolic