Mrs. Austin smiled. "I didn't want to help Wolf, and if I have helped, it's because one gets nothing unless one pays. However, we'll let it go."
When Kit returned to Las Palmas he found a note from Wolf, and in the evening went to a house in an old quarter of the town. The street was narrow, quiet and dark, but the moon touched one side with misty light. Kit heard the throbbing rumble of the surf, and coming from the noisy steam tram and the lights of the main street, he got a hint of mystery in the quietness and gloom. The houses had flat tops and looked like forts. Their straight fronts were pierced by a few narrow slits and a low arch. The slits were high up and barred. Kit thought that part of the city looked as if it had not been built by Europeans; it rather belonged to Egypt or Algiers. There was something romantic but sinister about it.
He knocked at a door and an old man took him across a patio where a ray of moonlight fell. The man showed him into a room furnished like an office, and Kit waited and looked about. There was no window, but an arch opened on to a passage with dark wooden pillars supporting a balcony. A few maps occupied the wall, and Kit began to study one of the Rio de Oro belt. Maps drew him; they called one to countries one had not seen, and this map pictured a wild land white men did not know much about. For all that, Kit thought it good. Green rings marked the oases, blue threads the wadys where water sometimes runs, and the red lines were the tracks by which loaded camels came from the Soudan. The marks, however, were not numerous, and Kit mused about the blank spaces.
Then he turned with a start and saw Wolf. He had not heard the fellow come in, and noted that he wore slippers of soft red leather. His shirt and trousers were white, but he wore a red silk sash and a Fez cap.
"My map interests you?" he said. "Well, I doubt if the Spanish government owns one as good. I expect to have noted that for the most part it is not printed?"
Kit had noted that the caravan roads and wadys were drawn by a pen.
"I was studying the unmarked spaces," he replied.
Wolf smiled and indicated a chair. "The explorer's instinct; there's something about the unknown that pulls. All the same, more is known about the country than some people think, and in one sense, it is not a desert. Then the people are not savages, although their rules are the rules the Arabs brought a thousand years since. They spring from famous stocks; Carthaginian, Roman; Saracen adventurers who pushed across the Atlas range and vanished. The country's intriguing, but to know it one must be resolute."
"I suppose the tribes are Mohammedans?" Kit remarked.
Wolf gave him some scented wine and a cigarette with a curious taste, and while he smoked Kit heard the measured beat of the surf. Somebody on a neighbouring roof played a guitar and the music was strange and melancholy.