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.”
“Then it is useless to——”
“It is very useless. It is as useless as to try to count the grains of the sand.”
I said no more.
Mohammed El Aïd Ben Ali Tidjani smiled once more, and beckoned to a negro attendant, who ran with a musical box, one of the gifts of the faithful.
“This comes from Paris,” he said, with a spreading complacence.
Then there was within the box a sounding click, and there stole forth a tinkling of Auber’s music to Masaniello, “Come o’er the moonlit sea!”