He listened, smiling like the rising sun in an oleograph, and twisting in his huge hands, that were tinted with the henna, the staff with the apple-green ribbons.
“If the scorpions had slept with a veiled woman who held the hedgehog’s foot, how would it have been? Would the woman have died or lived?”
The marabout did not answer. He looked at me calmly, as at a child who asks questions about the mysteries of life which only the old can understand.
“These things,” he said at length, “are hidden from the unbeliever. You are a Roumi. How, then, should you learn such matters?”
“In the desert there are mysteries,” continued the marabout, “which even the faithful must not seek to penetrate.”
“It is very useless. It is as useless as to try to count the grains of the sand.”
Mohammed El Aïd Ben Ali Tidjani smiled once more, and beckoned to a negro attendant, who ran with a musical box, one of the gifts of the faithful.
“This comes from Paris,” he said, with a spreading complacence.
Then there was within the box a sounding click, and there stole forth a tinkling of Auber’s music to _Masaniello_, “Come o’er the moonlit sea!”
End of Project Gutenberg’s Halima And The Scorpions, by Robert Hichens