She may have heard the sharp intake of breath, but she took no notice when the men turned, the one to the other, as Al-Asad knelt. His fingers trembled in the tumult of his love for the beautiful woman as he unfastened the knotted ribbons of her sandals, his heart leapt as he bent and kissed the little foot, leaving his manhood in the dust beneath it. He sprang to his feet, holding the golden sandal against his breast, shrinking back against the wall at the men’s laughter, in which the woman he loved joined.
“Neither does the gazelle fear the dead lion,” she mocked as he fled from the hall out into the night and up to his dwelling upon the mountainside, where he flung himself full length upon the ground with the golden sandal against his lips.
“I love thee, love thee, love thee!” he whispered, “and will serve thee to my last hour and with all my strength. If I cannot be thy king, thy master, I will be thy slave. One day perchance, thou too wilt waken to love and learn what suffering means.”
If he had but known, love had come to her, love for the white man, causing her to suffer through the chafe of the chains which bound her.
Zarah watched the great figure as he fled past blind Yussuf and through the doorway out into the night, then smiled, and stooping, lifted her cloak and spread it across the dead Sheikh.
“I will sleep in the bed of my fathers,” she said curtly. “Bring me meat and wine to my bedchamber. To-morrow I will commit my dead father to the sands and will then make choice, amongst the slaves, for those who will attend me both night and day. Obey me, and it will be well with all of you; resist me, and your lives will be even darker than this night of storm.”
The men, so long held upon the leash by the dead Sheikh, so long baffled in their fierce desires, shouted their praises as they made a way for her. She passed them without looking at them, glittering with jewels, superb in her strength.
She climbed the steps leading to the dwelling wherein her father had slept, and up to the roof, and, leaning on the balustrade, raised her face to the sky which showed sullen and starless.
Great sandstorms do not sweep the deserts of Arabia bringing devastation in their path, but the hot wind from the south will lift the topmost layer of sand hundreds of feet into the air, where it hangs like a pall across the heavens, causing men to hide their faces and cattle to flee for shelter from the terrific heat which descends from it, scorching the earth.
She walked to the corner of the roof from which, through the cleft in the rocks, the red sands of the desert could be seen stretching in great waves away to the south. She stared down and drew her hands across her eyes, and stared again; drew back with a half-uttered cry of fear, then moved forward, leaning far over the coping, looking down.