The hush of a thousand empty miles lay over the city. For an hour nothing lived but the universe, the bright dust in the sky….
That hush was disrupted. The single long crash of a human throat!
Rolling down over the plain of the housetops!
"La illah il Allah, Mohammed rassoul'lah! Allah Akbar! God is great!"
One by one the dim towers took it up. The call to prayer rolled between the stars and the town. It searched the white runways. It penetrated the vine-bowered arbour. Little by little, tower by tower, it died. In a fondouk outside the gate a waking camel lifted a gargling wail. A jackal dog barked in the Oued Zaroud two miles away. And again the silence of the desert came up over the city walls.
Under the vine Habib whispered: "No, I don't care anything about thy name. A name is such a little thing. I'll call thee 'Nedjma,' because we are under the stars."
"Ai, Nedjmetek—'Thy Star'!" The girl's lips moved drowsily. In the dark her eyes shone with a dull, steady lustre, unblinking, unquestioning, always unquestioning.
That slumberous acquiescence, taken from all her Arab mothers, began to touch his nerves with the old uneasiness. He took her shoulders between his hands and shook her roughly, crying in a whisper:
"Why dost thou do nothing but repeat my words? Talk! Say things to me!
Thou art like the rest; thou wouldst try to make me seem like these
Arab men, who wish for nothing in a woman but the shadow of
themselves. And I am not like that!"
"No, sidi, no."
"But talk! Tell me things about thyself, thy life, thy world. Talk! In
Paris, now, a man and a woman can talk together—yes—as if they were
two friends met in a coffeehouse. And those women can talk! Ah! in
Paris I have known women—"