He told Domini that he had been in Paris, where he had been the guest of
a French poet who adored the East; that he himself was "instructed," and
not like other Arabs; that he smoked the hashish and could sing the love
songs of the Sahara; that he had travelled far in the desert, to Souf
and to Ouargla beyond the ramparts of the Dunes; that he composed
verses in the night when the uninstructed, the brawlers, the drinkers of
absinthe and the domino players were sleeping or wasting their time
in the darkness over the pastimes of the lewd, when the sybarites
were sweating under the smoky arches of the Moorish baths, and the
_marechale_ of the dancing-girls sat in her flat-roofed house guarding
the jewels and the amulets of her gay confederation. These verses were
written both in Arabic and in French, and the poet of Paris and his
friends had found them beautiful as the dawn, and as the palm trees of
Ourlana by the Artesian wells. All the girls of the Ouled Nails were
celebrated in these poems--Aishoush and Irena, Fatma and Baali. In them
also were enshrined legends of the venerable marabouts who slept in the
Paradise of Allah, and tales of the great warriors who had fought above
the rocky precipices of Constantine and far off among the sands of
the South. They told the stories of the Koulouglis, whose mothers were
Moorish slaves, and romances in which figured the dark-skinned Beni
M'Zab and the freed negroes who had fled away from the lands in the very
heart of the sun.

All this information, not wholly devoid of a naive egoism, Batouch
poured forth gently and melodiously as they walked through the twilight
in the tunnel. And Domini was quite content to listen. The strange names
the poet mentioned, his liquid pronunciation of them, his allusions
to wild events that had happened long ago in desert places, and to the
lives of priests of his old religion, of fanatics, and girls who rode
on camels caparisoned in red to the dancing-houses of Sahara cities--all