"Ah, my God! What is it now?"
Hamoud cast back at her through the curtain, in a tone of bitterness:
"Rebellion."
She wrapped herself in her robe and cowered on the bed.
Half an hour passed. Hamoud's voice was heard again:
"Madam, all is ready."
She emerged victorious once more, her face stony, her lips compressed, her eyes as cold as ice.
On each side of her tent a clump of askaris stood leaning on their rifles. Over against her chair the porters were aligned in a great semicircle, tribe by tribe. The intervening flames of a camp fire shone richly on the massed bronze bodies and the brutish faces that had turned, for once, inexpressive. As Lilla sat down in her chair, a low murmur passed through their ranks and lost itself in the gilded fronds of palm trees that hung stiffly, like the scenery of a theater, above this spectacle.
Amid the shrilling of crickets a Wasena, the leader of the machilla bearers, spoke first. He was a thin mulatto with filed teeth; the sores on his shoulders were smeared with an ointment made of charcoal and oil. His voice rose explosively, in a sort of childish defiance, persisted for a long while, then suddenly died away. One heard from the depths of the jungle the tittering of a hyena.
An askari spat to the left contemptuously.