Achmed Abdullah

“ Some of the Askaris accompanied the magistrate to the garret. Others, led by the lieutenant, dispersed through the wide, curtainless Moorish arches that connected the room with a sweep of apartments, all dusty and grimy. Electric torches were switched on. Lights stabbed into dark corners.
For a moment the lieutenant reappeared on the threshold. “Go ahead,” he said to the three soldiers who had remained in the room with Atheba. “Remember: three thousand francs blood money to be split—and the lion's share to the one who gets the rebel—dead or alive!” ”

“ So she sank on her knees and prayed to the Lord Allah in whom she believed with all her hard, fervent soul:
“There is no God but He—the Living, the Eternal! He bringeth forth the dead from the living; He bringeth forth the living from the dead....” ”

“ The few surviving Benni Fuhara had scattered into the dun waste, spreading spreading afar the tale and pity of their doomed, stubborn race, while the sheik, outlawed by the French, his tribe wiped out, had bound Atheba on the saddle behind him and had ridden forth from that reeling wreck of strife, into the North, and had reached Algiers on their way to the mountains of The Scorpion. “Algiers is safest,” Mansur had argued. “Men of a hundred tribes crowd the streets. ”

“ For a fleeting second terror led her brain to the point where numbness succeeds upon excess of fear. But she regained her self-control with a shuddering effort. She tightened her quivering nerves against the coming ordeal She drew up her face veil. She was a woman of the Benni Fuhara; decent even at a moment of supreme agony. ”

“ Wah! What are three thousand or thirty times three thousand francs between children of the same soil?” she whispered.
When he drew nearer she touched the sergeant's chevrons on his sleeve as a Bedawin, running away from the toll of blood feud, touches another Bedawin's tent rope to claim protection. “Behold!” she continued. “I have alighted at your tent, O son of Adam!” ”