She looked at him as though he were a little boy and said: "And you, too, will go rioting?"
"Yes, I will," he spoke as calmly as before, but there was a light in his eyes that made her think once more of his father's having been killed in a riot.
"No, don't go, dear!" she begged with sudden anxiety.
He made no answer and began singing again in a low voice, lightly touching the strings.
"Death is now to me like sweetest myrrh,
Death is now to me like healing,
Death is now to me like refreshing rain,
Death is now to me like a home to an exile,"
"Aïe-aïe-aïe! What is it?" cried a little girl who was sleeping in the shelter.
A little tame monkey was sitting at the top of the tree eating yellow pods. It threw the skins into the shelter trying to hit the little girl or the tame gazelle asleep at her feet. It missed its aim every time. At last, hanging on to a branch with one paw, it threw with another a handful of skins, hitting the gazelle. The animal jumped up, and bleating ran to the girl and licked her face.
The girl jumped up, too, and shouted in a fright.
"Aïe-aïe-aïe! What is it?"
She was about thirteen years old. Her brown bronze-coloured body, slender and supple like a snake, showed through the transparent web of her dress 'the woven air.' She was a strange mixture of woman and child; the rosy-bronzed nipples of her breasts, firm and round like a grown girl's, lifted the linen as though they would pierce it, but there was something childishly mischievous in the eyes and childishly piteous in the thick, pouting lips. Her face—ugly, charming and dangerous like a serpent's head—seemed tiny under the mass of dull-black fluffy hair, powdered with blue.