One little figure, with a very protruding stomach, and a very large white metal disc on her dark chest for her only article of attire, suddenly appeared in front of them. Silently she had risen up out of the hot sand at their feet. Her big eyes stared at the two strange beings whom she had been brave enough to approach. When Millicent spoke to her she screamed and flew back to her mother's side. The woman looked like a man, clean-limbed and as tanned as leather. Her tent was supported by two sticks; to enter it she had to bend almost double.
The naked child had appeared so suddenly and it had run away so swiftly, that Millicent laughed like a child. It really was a delicious bit of nature. The metal disc shone like a small sun.
"What a 'tummy'!" she said. Her laughter was contagious. "Just like a baby blackbird's before it has got its feathers. And that big silver disc!—like the family plate on the family chest."
"It's protection from all evil, poor wee mite."
"What a filthy-looking hovel," Millicent said. "Worse than a gipsy-tent in England."
"And yet it's a home," Michael said. "And there are no more passionate lovers of home than these tent-women, or more hospitable people."
"Do these date-trees bear fruit?" Millicent asked the practical question irrelevantly. Her mind was charged with new interests, while her eyes looked at the soaring trees. The tent-dwellers interested her. She would like to have questioned them about all sorts of intimate subjects.
"Rather! These people pay taxes, too."
"Really? Isn't there any spot on the globe where people can just live as they like, where they can get away from income-tax and authorities?"
"I don't know if the Bedouins pay any tent-taxes, but I suppose that if they didn't aspire to owning date-palms, they could live in the arid desert without paying anybody anything. It's the old, old, unchanging subject—water."