As Waldo sat viewing the outlook a woman came round the corner of the tomb. All the village women Waldo had seen had worn yashmaks or some other form of face covering or veil. This woman was bareheaded and unveiled. She wore some sort of yellowish-brown garment which enveloped her from neck to ankles, showing no waist line. Her feet, in defiance of the blistering sands, were bare.
At sight of Waldo she stopped and stared at him as he at her. He remarked the un-European posture of her feet, not at all turned out, but with the inner lines parallel. She wore no anklets, he observed, no bracelets, no necklace or earrings. Her bare arms he thought the most muscular he had ever seen on a human being. Her nails were pointed and long, both on her hands and feet. Her hair was black, short, and tousled, yet she did not look wild or uncomely. Her eyes smiled and her lips had the effect of smiling, though they did not part ever so little, not showing at all the teeth behind them.
“What a pity,” said Waldo aloud, “that she does not speak English.”
“I do speak English,” said the woman, and Waldo noticed that as she spoke, her lips did not perceptibly open. “What does the gentleman want?”
“You speak English!” Waldo exclaimed, jumping to his feet. “What luck! Where did you learn it?”
“At the mission school,” she replied, an amused smile playing about the corners of her rather wide, unopening mouth. “What can be done for you?” She spoke with scarcely any foreign accent, but very slowly and with a sort of growl running along from syllable to syllable.
“I am thirsty,” said Waldo, “and I have lost my way.
“Is the gentleman living in a brown tent, shaped like half a melon?” she inquired, the queer, rumbling note drawling from one word to the next, her lips barely separated.
“Yes, that is our camp,” said Waldo.
“I could guide the gentleman that way,” she droned; “but it is far, and there is no water on that side.”
“I want water first,” said Waldo, “or milk.”
“If you mean cow's milk, we have none. But we have goat's milk. There is to drink where I dwell,” she said, sing-songing the words. “It is not far. It is the other way.”
“Show me,” said he.
She began to walk, Waldo, his gun under his arm, beside her. She trod noiselessly and fast. Waldo could scarcely keep up with her. As they walked he often fell behind and noted how her swathing garments clung to a lithe, shapely back, neat waist, and firm hips. Each time he hurried and caught up with her, he scanned her with intermittent glances, puzzled that her waist, so well- marked at the spine, showed no particular definition in front; that the outline of her from neck to knees, perfectly shapeless under her wrappings, was without any waistline or suggestion of firmness or undulation. Likewise he remarked the amused flicker in her eyes and the compressed line of her red, her too-red lips.
“How long were you in the mission school?” he inquired. “Four years,” she replied.
“Are you a Christian?” he asked.
“The Free-folk do not submit to baptism,” she stated simply, but with rather more of the droning growl between her words.
He felt a queer shiver as he watched the scarcely moved lips through which the syllables edged their way.
“But you are not veiled,” he could not resist saying. “The Free-folk,” she rejoined, “are never veiled.”
“Then you are not a Mohammedan?” he ventured.
“The Free-folk are not Moslems.”
“Who are the Free-folk?” he blurted out incautiously. She shot one baleful glance at him. Waldo remembered that he had to do with an Asiatic. He recalled the three permitted questions.
“What is your name?” he inquired. “Amina,” she told him.
That is a name from the 'Arabian Nights',” he hazarded.
“From the foolish tales of the believers,” she sneered. “The Free-folk know nothing of such follies.” The unvarying shutness of her speaking lips, the drawly burr between the syllables, struck him all the more as her lips curled but did not open.
“You utter your words in a strange way,” he said. “Your language is not mine,” she replied.
“How is it that you learned my language at the mission school and are not a Christian?”
“They teach all at the mission school,” she said, “and the maidens of the Free-folk are like the other maidens they teach, though the Free-folk when grown are not as town-dwellers are. Therefore they taught me as any town-bred girl, not knowing me for what I am.”
“They taught you well,” he commented.
“I have the gift of tongues,” she uttered enigmatically, with an odd note of triumph burring the words through her unmoving lips.
Waldo felt a horrid shudder all over him, not only at her uncanny words, but also from mere faintness.
“Is it far to your home?” he breathed.
“It is there,” she said, pointing to the doorway of a large tomb just before them. The wholly open arch admitted them into a fairly spacious interior, cool with the abiding temperature of thick masonry. There was no rubbish on the floor. Waldo, relieved to escape the blistering glare outside, seated himself on a block of stone midway between the door and the inner partition wall, resting his gun butt on the floor. For the moment he was blinded by the change from the insistent brilliance of the desert morning to the blurred gray light of the interior.
When his sight cleared he looked about and remarked, opposite the door, the ragged hole which laid open the desecrated mausoleum. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness he was so startled that he stood up. It seemed to him that from its four corners the room swarmed with naked children. To his inexperienced conjecture they seemed about two years old, but they moved with the assurance of boys of eight or ten.
“Whose are these children?” he exclaimed. “Mine,” she said.
“All yours?” he protested.
“All mine,” she replied, a curious suppressed boisterousness in her demeanor. “But there are twenty of them,” he cried.
“You count badly in the dark,” she told him. “There are fewer.”
“There certainly are a dozen,” he maintained, spinning round as they danced and scampered about.
“The Free-people have large families,” she said.
“But they are all of one age,” Waldo exclaimed, his tongue dry against the roof of his mouth. She laughed, an unpleasant, mocking laugh, clapping her hands. She was between him and the doorway, and as most of the light came from it he could not see her lips.
“Is not that like a man! No woman would have made that mistake.” Waldo was confuted and sat down again. The children circulated around him, chattering, laughing, giggling, snickering, making noises indicative of glee.
“Please get me something cool to drink,” said Waldo, and his tongue was not only dry but big in his mouth.
“We shall have to drink shortly,” she said, “but it will be warm.” Waldo began to feel uneasy. The children pranced around him, jabbering strange, guttural noises, licking their lips, pointing at him, their eyes fixed on him, with now and then a glance at their mother.
“Where is the water?”
The woman stood silent, her arms hanging at her sides, and it seemed to Waldo she was shorter than she had been.
“Where is the water?” he repeated. “Patience, patience,” she growled, and came a step near to him. The sunlight struck upon her back and made a sort of halo about her hips. She seemed still shorter than before. There was a something furtive in her bearing, and the little ones sniggered evilly.