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Read Ebook: Halima And The Scorpions 1905 by Hichens Robert
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Ebook has 95 lines and 6813 words, and 2 pages
"They shall speak well," said Ben-Abid. "Their voices cannot lie. Sleep to-night in thy room with these my brothers. Irena and Boria, the Golden Date and the Lotus Flower, shall watch beside thee. Guard in thy hand, or in thy breast, the hedgehog's foot that thou sayest can preserve from every ill. If, in the evening of to-morrow, thou dancest before the soldiers, I will give thee fifty golden coins. But, if thou dancest not, the city shall know whether Ben-Abid is a truth-teller, and whether the blessings of the great marabout can rest upon such a woman as thou art. If thou refusest thou art afraid, and thy fear proveth that thou hast no faith in the magic treasure that dangles at thy girdle."
There was a moment of deep silence. Then, from the crowd burst forth the cry of many voices:
"Put it to the proof! Ben-Abid speaks well. Put it to the proof, and may Allah judge between them."
Beneath the caked pigments on her face Halima had gone pale.
"I will not," she began.
But the cries rose up again, and with them the shrill, twittering laughter of her envious rivals.
"She has no faith in the marabout!" squawked one, who had a nose like an eagle's beak.
"She is a liar!" piped another, shaking out her silken petticoats as a bird shakes out its plumes.
And then the twitter of fierce laughter rose, shriek on shriek, and was echoed more deeply by the crowd of watching men.
"Give me the scorpions!" cried Halima passionately. "I am not afraid!"
Her desert blood was up. Her fatalism--even in the women of the Sahara it lurks--was awake. In that moment she was ready to die, to silence the bitter laughter of her rivals. It sank away as Sadok grasped the scorpions in his filthy claw, and leaped, gibbering in his beard, upon the terrace.
"Wait!" cried Halima, as he came upon her, holding forth his handful of writhing poison.
Her bosom heaved. Her lustrous eyes, heavy with kohl, shone like those of a beast at bay.
Sadok stood still, with his naked arm outstretched.
"How shall I know that the son of a scorpion will pay me the fifty golden coins? He is poor, though he speaks bravely. He is but a singer in the caf? of the smokers of the hashish, and cannot buy even a new garment for the close of the feast of Ramadan. How, then, shall I know that the gold will hang from my breasts when to-morrow, at the falling of the sun, I dance before the men of Toug--"
Ben-Abid put his hand beneath his burnous, and brought forth a bag tied at the mouth with cord.
"They are here!" he said.
"The Jews! He has been to the Jews!" cried the desert men.
"Bring a lamp!" said Ben-Abid.
And while Irena and Boria, the Golden Date and the Lotus Flower, held the lights, and the desert men crowded about him with the eyes of wolves that are near to starving, he counted forth the money on the terrace at Halima's feet. And she gazed down at the glittering pieces as one that gazes upon a black fate.
"And now set my brothers upon the maiden," Ben-Abid said to Sadok, gathering up the money, and casting it again into the bag, which he tied once more with the cord.
Halima did not move, but she looked upon the scorpion that was black, and her red lips trembled. Then she closed her hand upon the hedgehog's foot that hung from her golden girdle, and shut her eyes beneath her ebon eyebrows.
"Set my brothers upon her!" said Ben-Abid.
The plunger of the wells sprang upon Halima, opened her scarlet bodice roughly, plunged his claw into her swelling bosom, and withdrew it--empty.
"Kiss her close, my brothers!" whispered Ben-Abid.
A long murmur, like the growl of the tide upon a shingly beach, arose once more from the crowd. Halima turned about, and went slowly in at her lighted doorway, followed by Irena and Boria. The heavy door of palm was shut behind them. The light was hidden. There was a great silence. It was broken by Sadok's voice screaming in his beard to Ben-Abid, "My money! Give me my money!"
He snatched it with a howl, and went capering forth into the darkness.
When the next night fell upon the desert there was a great crowd assembled in the caf? of the dancers. The pipers blew into their pipes, and swayed upon their haunches, turning their glittering eyes to and fro to see what man had a mind to press a piece of money upon their well greased foreheads. The dancers came and went, promenading arm in arm upon the earthen floor, or leaping with hands outstretched and fingers fluttering. The Kabyle attendant slipped here and there with the coffee cups, and the wreaths of smoke curled lightly upward towards the wooden roof.
But Halima came not through the open doorway holding the scarlet handkerchiefs above her head.
And presently, late in the night, they laid her body in a palanquin, and set the palanquin upon a running camel, and, while the dancers shrilled their lament amid the sands, they bore her away into the darkness of the dunes towards the south and the tents of her own people.
The jackals laughed as she went by.
But the hedgehog's foot was left lying upon the floor of her chamber. Not one of the dancers would touch it.
That night I was in the caf?, and, hearing of all these things from Kou?dah, the boy, I went into the court, and gathered up the trinket which had brought a woman to the great silence. Next day I rode on horseback to Tamacine, asked to see the marabout and told him all the story.
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.
When I came to the end I said:
"O, holy marabout, tell me one thing."
"Allah is just. I listen."
"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."
I said no more.
Mohammed El A?d 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.
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