Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/152

 rawhide whip unmercifully, the animal trampling down flowers and shrubs and small trees in haste to reach the pavilion—where Aziza Nurmahal rose from her cushions and thrust the amber mouthpiece of her hubble-bubble which she was smoking into the hands of the nearest servant.

“Bismillah!” she exclaimed.

She was excited, expectant, her flaring, nervous nostrils quivering like those of a blooded mare.

To his dying day Hector Wade laughed at the memory of that scene.

For, when the visitor hove in sight, he saw that it was not a man, but a woman. Past the Biblical age she was, lean as a panther, haggard, berry brown. The cavernous mouth that shouted loud, guttural greetings of “''Salaam Aleikhoom! Salaam Aleikhoom! Yah Sidi! Yah Bibi! Yah Moslima!''” showed two lonely teeth crimson with betel juice; a few wisps of gray hair escaped from beneath the immense, mannish fur cap that tilted at a rakish angle over her left brow; her wizened body, clad in a robe of coquettish rose-madder silk sadly torn and mud blotched, was perched audaciously between the humps of the saturnine, Hebraic camel; on the hand that plied the raw-hide twinkled an immense off-color diamond in a hammered lead setting.

“Down! Down on thy knees, O lust-scabbed spawn of a hyena and a bloated she-devil!” she addressed her mount that gave a wicked, grunting snarl, turned its swanlike neck with the evident intention of biting its rider's scrawny hip, bent its forelegs suddenly double