The Delicate Prey: And Other Stories

man was tending the fire. There was one guest sipping tea. The qaouaji tried to make him take a seat at the other table in the front room, but the Professor walked airily ahead into the back room and sat down. The moon was shining through the reed latticework and there was not a sound outside but the occasional distant bark of a dog. He changed tables so he could see the river. It was dry, but there was a pool here and there that reflected the bright night sky. The qaouaji came in and wiped off the table.

“Does this cafe still belong to Hassan Ramani?” he asked him in the Moghrebi he had taken four years to learn.

The man replied in bad French: “He is deceased.”

“Deceased?” repeated the Professor, without noticing the absurdity of the word. “Really? When?”

“I don’t know,” said the qaouaji. “One tea?”

“Yes. But I don’t understand . . .”

The man was already out of the room, fanning the fire. The Professor sat still, feeling lonely, and arguing with himself that to do so was ridiculous. Soon the qaouaji returned with the tea, He paid him and gave him an enormous tip, for which he received a grave bow.

“Tell me,” he said, as the other started away. “Can one still get those little boxes made from camel udders?”

The man looked angry. “Sometimes the Reguibat bring in those things. We do not buy them here.” Then insolently, in Arabic: “And why a camel-udder box?”

“Because I like them,” retorted the Professor. And then because he was feeling a little exalted, he added, “I like them so much I want to make a collection of them, and I will pay you ten francs for every one you can get me.”

“Khamstache,” said the qaouaji, opening his left hand rapidly three times in succession.

“Never. Ten.”

“Not possible. But wait until later and come with me. You can give me what you like. And you will get camel-udder boxes if there are any.”

He went out into the front room, leaving the Professor to drink his tea and listen to the growing chorus of dogs that barked and howled as the moon rose higher into the sky. A group of customers came into the front room and sat talking for an hour or so. When they had left, the qaouaji put out the fire and stood in the doorway putting on his burnous. “Come,” he said.

Outside in the street there was very little movement. The booths were all closed and the only light came from the moon. An occasional pedestrian passed, and grunted a brief greeting to the qaouaji.

“Everyone knows you,” said the Professor, to cut the silence between them.

“Yes.”

“I wish everyone knew me,” said the Professor, before he realized how infantile such a remark must sound.

“No one knows you,” said his companion gruffly.

They had come to the other side of the town, on the promontory above the desert, and through a great rift in the wall the Professor saw the white endlessness, broken in the foreground by dark spots of oasis. They walked through the opening and followed a winding road between rocks, downward toward the nearest small forest of palms. The Professor thought: “He may cut my throat. But his cafe—he would surely be found out.”

“Is it far?” he asked, casually.

“Are you tired?” countered the qaouaji.

“They are expecting me back at the Hotel Saharien,” he lied.

“You can’t be there and here,” said the qaouaji.

The Professor laughed. He wondered if it sounded uneasy to the other.

“Have you owned Ramani’s cafe long?”

“I work there for a friend.” The reply made the Professor more unhappy than he had imagined it would.

“Oh. Will you work tomorrow?”

“That is impossible to say.”

The Professor stumbled on a stone, and fell, scraping his hand. The qaouaji said: “Be careful.”

The sweet black odor of rotten meat hung in the air suddenly.

“Agh!” said the Professor, choking. “What is it?”

The qaouaji had covered his face with his burnous and did not answer. Soon the stench had been left behind. They were on flat ground. Ahead the path was bordered on each side by a high mud wall. There was no breeze and the palms were quite still, but behind the walls was the sound of running water. Also, the odor of human excrement was almost constant as they walked between the walls.

The Professor waited until he thought it seemed logical for him to ask with a certain degree of annoyance: “But where are we going?”

“Soon,” said the guide, pausing to gather some stones in the ditch.

“Pick up some stones,” he advised. “Here are bad dogs.”

“Where?” asked the Professor, but he stooped and got three large ones with pointed edges.

They continued very quietly. The walls came to an end and the bright desert lay ahead. Nearby was a ruined marabout, with its tiny dome only half standing, and the front wall entirely destroyed. Behind it were clumps of stunted, useless palms. A dog came running crazily toward them on three legs. Not until it got quite close did the Professor hear its steady low growl. The qaouaji let fly a large stone at it, striking it square in the muzzle. There was a strange snapping of jaws and the dog ran sideways in another direction, falling blindly against rocks and scrambling haphazardly about like an injured insect.

Turning off the road, they walked across the earth strewn with sharp stones, past the little rain, through the trees, until they came to a place where the ground dropped abruptly away in front of them.

“It looks like a quarry,” said the Professor, resorting to French for the word “quarry,” whose Arabic equivalent he could not call to mind at the moment. The qaouaji did not answer. Instead he stood still and turned his head, as if listening. And indeed, from somewhere down below, but very far below, came the faint sound of a low flute. The qaouaji nodded his head slowly several times. Then he said: “The path begins here. You can see it well all the way. The rock is white and the moon is strong. So you can see well. I am going back now and sleep. It is late. You can give me what you like.”

Standing there at the edge of the abyss which at each moment looked deeper, with the dark face of the qaouaji framed in its moonlit burnous close to his own face, the Professor asked himself exactly what he felt. Indignation, curiosity, fear, perhaps, but most of all relief and the hope that this was not a trick, the hope that the qaouaji would really leave him alone and turn back without him.

He stepped back a little from the edge, and fumbled in his pocket for a loose note, because he did not want to show his wallet. Fortunately there was a fifty-franc bill there, which he took out and handed to the man. He knew the qaouaji was pleased, and so he paid no attention when he heard him saying: “It is not enough. I have to walk a long way home and there are dogs. . . . “

“Thank you and good night,” said the Professor, sitting down with his legs drawn up under him, and lighting a cigarette. He felt almost happy.

“Give me only one cigarette,” pleaded the man.

“Of course,” he said, a bit curtly, and he held up the pack. The qaouaji squatted close beside him. His face was not pleasant to see. “What is it?” thought the Professor, terrified again, as he held out his lighted cigarette toward him.

The man’s eyes were almost closed. It was the most obvious registering of concentrated scheming the Professor had ever seen. When the second cigarette was burning, he ventured to say to the still-squatting Arab: “What are you thinking about?”

The other drew on his cigarette deliberately, and seemed about to speak. Then his expression changed to one of satisfaction, but he did not speak. A cool wind had risen in the air, and the Professor shivered. The sound of the flute came up from the depths below at intervals, sometimes mingled with the scraping of nearby palm fronds