Page:Oriental Stories v01 n01 (1930-10).djvu/87

 "By prayer alone can she find peace," he repeated wistfully.

Out in the desert Mes'oodeh, kneeling in apparent prayer, smiled cynically, as she whispered tensely, "In time, I know that he will come to me."

later as Andrea Giovanni walked through the mellah of Wadi-el-Gibli, he overheard two old Jewish merchants speaking of the desert woman, Mes'oodeh.

"She has disappeared," said one, "and the city is well rid of her. She had no soul; her only God was Self. Now she has vanished and I am as glad at her going as I would be at the passing of a plague. But where she has gone is a mystery."

"She was last seen riding out alone into the desert," declared the other. "Her disappearance is but another mystery added to the multitudes which have shrouded the desert for ages. She has probably lost her way out there among those rolling sand dunes, and perished as she deserves. Truly it seems that God has purposely caused her to go away in order to purge our city."

"And yet," hazarded the first speaker, "it is a terrible death for a woman. Imagine how she must be suffering, plunging blindly, desperately about among those sand dunes; her lips cracked and broken, her tongue scorched and blackened, her eyes dried into glistening balls of heat, all sense of direction dead within her. Even a rabid dog of the streets deserves a better death than that."

"The people of Wadi-el-Gibli think differently. They say that by arriving at such an end, she does but get what she deserves. It is not their intention to go in search of her. Not a single person will enter the desert on such a quest. They say, 'It is the Will of Allah!'"

evening Andrea Giovanni rode off alone into the desert. The night was exquisitely silent, not a breath of sound shattered the wondrous web of solitude. The moon glowed down upon the desert, creating a glorious brilliance almost as light as day. Not till it had set did he dismount from his camel, utterly worn out, and throw himself at full length upon the burning sand-mat-tress of desolation. Sleep came almost instantly; a dreamless, profound sleep which comes only to a man who is utterly exhausted.

Dawn had painted the eastern skies with silver before he again opened his eyes, and probably he would not have awakened even then if it had not been for a dull, ominous, moaning sound which seemed to roll to his ears from far off over the desert. Curiously, he rose to his feet and surveyed the far horizon, and there, away off to the south, a great grim wall of dense smoke seemed to be rushing toward him over the desert. In less than fifteen minutes he was engulfed in a raging yellow sandstorm. He threw himself face downward upon the sand, drawing his baracan about his face. The desert seemed to have become alive. Waves of sand surged and roared about him, while the air became so crowded with fine particles of molten dust that the sky disappeared utterly, swallowed up in the dense pall of gloom. As the storm increased in violence, the sand grew as hot as a lava stream. Particles of burning dust even penetrated through the thick folds of his baracan, blinding his eyes, parching his throat and even seeming to burn deep into the flesh of his face. The heat intensified so frightfully that it seemed as though he were being scalded