Yet even when that life trembled in the balance she could not refrain from tormenting the man who had been her willing, humble slave from the moment his eyes had first met hers, and who alone raced to help her in her peril.
She held out her arms towards him and called his name and smiled, even though she could almost see the red gleam of hate in the greyhound’s eyes, so near was the revengeful beast.
“Al-Asad!” she called. “Al-Asad!”
Her voice sounded like a peal of bells in the desert stillness, her beauty flamed like the sky above, her courage was superb as she measured the distance between herself and the maddened greyhound.
Then she leant forward and screamed, screamed till the echo of the terrible sound carried to Yussuf’s ears, so that he turned and looked back in the direction of the girl he could not see.
Death was upon her; death with a crown of red above its snow-white face; the death Yussuf had prophesied when she had struck him blind.
She ran back so that the white cloak stretched between; she looked round and up, up to the sun which was her birthright, forward to the closing of her day. She flung out her arms, her hands, fingers widespread as though to clutch the last moments of the life she loved so well. Life was nigh spent; she stood within the shadows of Eternity; but, true to her father’s race, true to the relentless desert to which she belonged, she would die fighting.
She shouted the battle-cry as she raised her spear.
“Ista ’jil! Ista ’jil! Ista ’jil!”
The desperate, defiant words were carried across the sands as she flung the spear, flung it as Rādi the bitch, increasing her speed in a last desperate effort to revenge her pup, changed her course by a few inches, so that the spear barely grazed the shoulder as it flew past and buried itself in the sands.