"A month! Thirty-one days! Oh, God! Only thirty-one days. It seems a

lifetime. Only a month since I left Biskra. A month! A month!"

Diana flung herself on to her face, burying her head deeply into the

cushions of the divan, shutting out from her sight the barbaric luxury

of her surroundings, shuddering convulsively. She did not cry. The

complete breakdown of the first night had never been repeated. Tears of

shame and anger had risen in her eyes often, but she would not let them

fall. She would not give her captor the satisfaction of knowing that he

could make her weep. Her pride was dying hard. Her mind travelled back

slowly over the days and nights of anguished revolt, the perpetual

clash of will against will, the enforced obedience that had made up

this month of horror. A month of experience of such bitterness that she

wondered dully how she still had the courage to rebel. For the first

time in her life she had had to obey. For the first time in her life

she was of no account. For the first time she had been made conscious

of the inferiority of her sex. The training of years had broken down

under the experience.

The hypothetical status in which she had stood

with regard to Aubrey and his friends was not tolerated here, where

every moment she was made to feel acutely that she was a woman, forced

to submit to everything to which her womanhood exposed her, forced to

endure everything that he might put upon her--a chattel, a slave to do

his bidding, to bear his pleasure and his displeasure, shaken to the

very foundation of her being with the upheaval of her convictions and

the ruthless violence done to her cold, sexless temperament. The

humiliation of it seared her proud heart. He was pitiless in his

arrogance, pitiless in his Oriental disregard of the woman subjugated.

He was an Arab, to whom the feelings of a woman were non-existent. He

had taken her to please himself and he kept her to please himself, to

amuse him in his moments of relaxation.

To Diana before she had come to Africa the life of an Arab Sheik in his

native desert had been a very visionary affair. The term sheik itself

was elastic. She had been shown Sheiks in Biskra who drove hard

bargains to hire out mangy camels and sore-covered donkeys for trips

into the interior. Her own faithless caravan-leader had called himself

"Sheik." But she had heard also of other and different Sheiks who lived

far away across the shimmering sand, powerful chiefs with large

followings, who seemed more like the Arabs of her imaginings, and of

whose lives she had the haziest idea. When not engaged in killing their

neighbours she visualized them drowsing away whole days under the

influence of narcotics, lethargic with sensual indulgence. The pictures

she had seen had been mostly of fat old men sitting cross-legged in the

entrance of their tents, waited on by hordes of retainers, and looking

languidly, with an air of utter boredom, at some miserable slave being

beaten to death.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024