As she spoke the door opened and Lella Mabrouka came swiftly into the room, fierce-eyed as a tigress whose cub is threatened. She was tight-lipped and silent, but her eyes spoke, and all three knew that she had listened. Such words as she had missed her quick wit had caught and patched together. Ourïeda's wish to propitiate Zakia by not seeming to talk secrets before her had undone them both. But it was too late for regrets, and even for lies.
Lella Mabrouka clapped her hands, and Taous came, to be told in a tense voice that the Agha must be summoned. Then Mabrouka turned to the Roumia.
"Go, thou! This has nothing to do with thee," was all she said.
Sanda glanced at her friend, and an answering glance bade her obey. She rose and went out, along the balcony to the door of her own room. This she left open, thinking with a fast-beating heart that if there were any cry she would run back, no matter what they might do to her. But there was no cry, no sound of any kind, only the cooing of doves which had flown down into the fountain court, hoping Ourïeda might throw them corn.
The custom of the house was for the three ladies to take their meals together in a room where occasionally, as a great honour, the Agha dined with them. That evening a tray of food was brought to Sanda with polite regrets from Lella Mabrouka because she and her niece were too indisposed by the hot weather to forsake the shelter of their rooms. Politeness, always politeness, with these Arabs of high birth and manners! thought the Irish-French girl in a passionate revolt against the curtain of silk velvet softly let down between her and the secrets of Ben Râana's harem. This time it might be, she said to herself, that politeness covered tragedy. But the same night she received another message from Mabrouka. It was merely to say that, the air of Djazerta not being healthful at this time of year, the Agha had decided, for his daughter's sake, to finish the week of the wedding feast out in the desert, at the douar.
CHAPTER XXI
THE ELEVENTH HOUR
When Max, at the head of his small caravan, came in sight of the Agha's douar, it was almost noon, and the desert, shimmering with heat, was motionless, as if under enchantment. They had travelled through the night, after learning that Ben Râana and his family had gone from Djazerta, with intervals of rest no longer than those allowed to the Legion on march. What they saw was a giant tent as large as a circus tent in a village of America or Europe surrounded at a distance by an army of little tents, black and dirty brown, so flat and low that they were like huge bats with outstretched wings resting on the sand. The great tent of the chief with its high roof, its vast spread of white, red, and amber striped cloth of close-woven camel's hair, rose nobly above all the others, as a mosque rises above a crowd of prostrate worshippers at prayer. For background, there was a clump of trees; for here, in the far southern desert, just outside a waving welter of dunes, lay a region of dayas, where a wilderness of sand and tumbled stones was brightened by green hollows half full of gurgling water.
Never before had Max seen a douar of importance, the desert dwelling of a desert chief. But Manöel had been here before; and the camel-drivers, if they had not visited this douar, were familiar with others. Max alone wondered at the great tent, whose many different compartments sheltered the Agha, his whole family, and servants brought from Djazerta. As the caravan wound nearer to watching eyes, another tent, not so big, but new and brilliant of colour, separated itself from the vast bulk of the tente sultane.