The Sheik

The main feature of the room was a big black divan heaped

with huge cushions covered with dull black silk. Beside the divan,

spread over the Persian rugs, were two unusually large black bearskins,

the mounted heads converging. At one end of the tent was a small

doorway, a little portable writing-table. There were one or two Moorish

stools heaped with a motley collection of ivories and gold and silver

cigarette cases and knick-knacks, and against the partition that

separated the two rooms stood a quaintly carved old wooden chest.

Though the furniture was scanty and made the tent seem even more

spacious than it really was, the whole room had an air of barbaric

splendour. The somber hangings gleaming with thick silver threads

seemed to Diana like a studied theatrical effect, a setting against

which the Arab's own white robes should contrast more vividly; she

remembered the black and silver waistcloth she had seen swathed round

him, with curling scornful lip. There was a strain of vanity in all

natives, she generalised contemptuously. Doubtless it pleased this

native's conceit to carry out the colour scheme of his tent even in his

clothes, and pose among the sable cushions of the luxurious divan to

the admiration of his retainers. She made a little exclamation of

disgust, and turned from the soft seductiveness of the big couch with

disdain.

She crossed the tent to the little bookcase and knelt beside it

curiously. What did a Francophile-Arab read? Novels, probably, that

would harmonise with the atmosphere that she dimly sensed in her

surroundings. But it was not novels that filled the bookcase. They were

books of sport and travel with several volumes on veterinary surgery.

They were all in French, and had all been frequently handled, many of

them had pencilled notes in the margins written in Arabic. One shelf

was filled entirely with the works of one man, a certain Vicomte Raoul

de Saint Hubert. With the exception of one novel, which Diana only

glanced at hastily; they were all books of travel. From the few

scribbled words in the front of each Diana could see that they had all

been sent to the Arab by the author himself--one even was dedicated to

"My friend, Ahmed Ben Hassan, Sheik of the Desert." She put the books

back with a puzzled frown. She wished, with a feeling that she could

not fathom, that they had been rather what she had imagined. The

evidence of education and unlooked-for tastes in the man they belonged

to troubled her. It was an unexpected glimpse into the personality of

the Arab that had captured her was vaguely disquieting, for it

suggested possibilities that would not have existed in a raw native, or

one only superficially coated with a veneer of civilisation. He seemed

to become infinitely more sinister, infinitely more horrible. She

looked at her watch with sudden apprehension. The day was wearing away

quickly. Soon he would come. Her breath came quick and short and the

tears welled up in her eyes.