Next day my business of selling sheep took me to the Haras Fortress, away behind the hills of Ahmar, and the voices of the muddenin were already calling the faithful for the maghrib when I re-entered the Kasbah. Kasneh, my slave, was playing damma in the courtyard, but rose quietly, saluted, and told me that he had taken to my room a small package which had been left by the negro servant that had brought the letter on the previous day.
Could it, I wondered, be a present from Khadidja? Rushing in, I found on my table a small box, packed in white paper and secured with black seals. Eagerly I tore away the wrappings and opened it.
As I did so a shriek of horror escaped me. I fell back awe-stricken at the sight presented. Inside a satin-lined bracelet-case, bearing the name of a Paris jeweller, on a piece of pale-blue velvet, there was stretched a human finger that had been roughly hacked off at the joint! It lay stiff, white, and cold, with the blood coagulated where the blunt knife had jagged the flesh. The finger was a woman’s—slim, well-formed, with the nail stained by henna. It was loaded with costly rings, which scintillated in the golden ray of sunset that strayed into the room, and fell across them. As I looked, breathless in amazement, I saw among the ornaments my own ring!
A scrap of paper that fluttered to the ground bore the words, scrawled in Arabic character, “From the husband of Fathma Khadidja!”
That same night I strode furiously along the seashore, watching the glimmering lights in the distance. In fear and trepidation, I took the hideous souvenir of love, and, when far from the city, cast it away from me into the dark rolling waters.
Perhaps there, deep in its lonely hiding-place, it met the white, dead thing of which it had once formed part—the body of the matchless daughter of the sun whose wondrous hair enmeshed me, whose full, red lips held me like a magnet, shackling me to the inevitable. Who can tell?
Truly, in that brief hour when I lounged at her side, I was at the dreaded Bab-el-Hâwiyat.