That night I was in the café, and, hearing of all these things from Kouïdah, the boy, I went into the court, and gathered up the trinket which had brought a woman to the great silence. Next day I rode on horseback to Tamacine, asked to see the marabout and told him all the story.
He listened, smiling like the rising sun in an oleograph, and twisting in his huge hands, that were tinted with the henna, the staff with the apple-green ribbons.
When I came to the end I said:
“O, holy marabout, tell me one thing.”
“Allah is just. I listen.”
“If the scorpions had slept with a veiled woman who held the hedgehog’s foot, how would it have been? Would the woman have died or lived?”
The marabout did not answer. He looked at me calmly, as at a child who asks questions about the mysteries of life which only the old can understand.
“These things,” he said at length, “are hidden from the unbeliever. You are a Roumi. How, then, should you learn such matters?”
“But even the Roumi——”
“In the desert there are mysteries,” continued the marabout, “which even the faithful must not seek to penetrate.”