"When thou settest thy horse against an enemy it is well to have two lances to thy hand—thine own and his. And it is written, Habib, son of Habib, that thou shalt be content…. Put off thy shoes now and come. It is time we were at prayer."
Summer died. Autumn grew. With the approach of winter an obscure nervousness spread over the land. In the dust of its eight months' drought, from one day to another, from one glass-dry night to another, the desert waited for the coming of the rains. The earth cracked. A cloud sailing lone and high from the coast of Sousse passed under the moon and everywhere men stirred in their sleep, woke, looked out—from their tents on the cactus steppes, from fondouks on the camel tracks of the west, from marble courts of Kairwan…. The cloud passed on and vanished in the sky. On the plain the earth cracks crept and ramified. Gaunt beasts tugged at their heel ropes and would not be still. The jackals came closer to the tents. The city slept again, but in its sleep it seemed to mutter and twitch….
In the serpent-spotted light under the vine on the housetop Habib muttered, too, and twitched a little. It was as if the arid months had got in under his skin and peeled off the coverings of his nerves. The girl's eyes widened with a gradual, phlegmatic wonder of pain under the pinch of his blue fingers on her arms. His face was the colour of the moon.
"Am I a child of three years, that my father should lead me here or lead me there by the hand? Am I that?"
"Nay, sidi, nay."
"Am I a sheep between two wells, that the herder's stick should tell me, 'Here, and not there, thou shalt drink'? Am I a sheep?"
"Thou art neither child nor sheep, sidi, but a lion!"
"Yes, a lion!" A sudden thin exaltation shook him like a fever chill. "I am more than a lion, Nedjma, I am a man—just as the Roumi" [Romans—i.e., Christians.] "are men—men who decide—men who undertake—agitate—accomplish … and now, for the last time, I have decided. A fate has given thy loveliness to me, and no man shall take it away from me to enjoy. I will take it away from them instead! From all the men of this Africa, conquered by the French. Hark! I will come and take thee away in the night, to the land beyond the sea, where thou mayest be always near me, and neither God nor man say yes or no!"
"And there, sidi, beyond the sea, I may talk unveiled with other men? As thou hast told me, in France ——"
"Yes, yes, as I have told thee, there thou mayest—thou ——"