But Halima came not through the open doorway holding the scarlet handkerchiefs above her head.
And presently, late in the night, they laid her body in a palanquin, and set the palanquin upon a running camel, and, while the dancers shrilled their lament amid the sands, they bore her away into the darkness of the dunes towards the south and the tents of her own people.
The jackals laughed as she went by.
But the hedgehog’s foot was left lying upon the floor of her chamber. Not one of the dancers would touch it.
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?”