Lilla emerged from her cabin, crossed the deck, and laid her hands upon the softly quivering rail. Close beside her the darkness gave up a ghost—Hamoud, who also stood silent, gazing toward the coast. His robes exhaled an odor of musk and aloes.
"Africa, madam," he uttered at last in a voice that lost itself in the clinging darkness and the smothering heat.
And soon a languid ecstasy stole over him.
His heart swelled as he drank in, at the same time, the exhalations of his native land and the faint fragrance of her hair. In the darkness he perceived with his mind's eye both her beauty and the well-remembered beauty of the spice isles. The palm-crowned hills encircled the lapis-lazuli harbor of Zanzibar, on whose waters he saw himself sailing, with this mortal treasure, in a handsome dhow, the tasseled prow shaped like the head of the she-camel sent from heaven to the Thamud tribesmen, the mast fluttering the pennants of ancient sultans. Then the dhow with the camel prow became a panoplied camel, on which he and she were being borne away to Omân, the land of his fathers, which he had never seen. There, in those rugged mountains, he would become, as his ancestors had been—vigorous of will, fierce and great, triumphant in war and love.
For a long while he stood there trembling gently in unison with the ship, thought linking itself to thought, and image to image, his fancies growing ever more bizarre yet ever more distinct, as though he were inhaling, instead of the faint perfume of her hair, the smoke of hasheesh.
But she had forgotten him.
CHAPTER LIV
In the thick sunshine, below the cloudlike mountains, sandbanks unrolled themselves between the mouths of the equatorial rivers flanked by mangrove forests. At last, in the depths of a bay of glittering, brownish water, the port town appeared, a mass of red-tiled roofs spread along the gray seawall that suggested a fortress.
Through sandy thoroughfares bordered with acacia trees rode hollow-eyed Europeans in little cars, which half-naked negroes pushed along a narrow-gauge railway. The languor of those recumbent figures was abruptly disturbed, at the apparition of a woman clad in snowy linen, who advanced between a tall, young Zanzibar Arab and a small, limping white man, with the step of a convalescent, but with eyes that were filled with an extraordinary resolution. That evening, at the club house, one brought word to the rest that she was Lawrence Teck's wife.