They were rather foolish people, men at whom he had laughed and whom
he had rather pitied for having made him do so, and women he had
looked at distantly as of a kind he might understand when his work was
over and he wished to be amused. The young girls to whom he was in the
habit of pouring out his denunciations of evil, and from whom he was
accustomed to receive advice and moral support, he could not place in
this landscape. He felt uneasily that they would not allow him to
enjoy it his own way; they would consider the Moor historically as the
invader of Catholic Europe, and would be shocked at the lack of proper
sanitation, and would see the mud. As for himself, he had risen above
seeing the mud. He looked up now at the broken line of the roof-tops
against the blue sky, and when a hooded figure drew back from his
glance he found himself murmuring the words of an Eastern song he had
read in a book of Indian stories:
"Alone upon the house-tops, to the north
I turn and watch the lightning in the sky,--
The glamour of thy footsteps in the north.
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!
"Below my feet the still bazaar is laid.
Far, far below, the weary camels lie--"
Holcombe laughed and shrugged his shoulders. He had stopped half-way
down the hill on which stands the Bashaw's palace, and the whole of
Tangier lay below him like a great cemetery of white marble. The moon
was shining clearly over the town and the sea, and a soft wind from
the sandy farm-lands came to him and played about him like the
fragrance of a garden.
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