Naomi was sick.Her head ached.The smell of rotten fish, the stench of the manure heap, the braying of the donkeys, the barking of the dogs, the grunt of the camels, and the tumult of human voices made her light-headed.She could neither eat nor sleep.Almost as soon as it was light she was up and out and on her way."I must lose no time,"she thought, trying not to realise that the blue sky was spinning round her, that noises were ringing in her head, and that her poor little heart, which had been so stout only yesterday, was sinking very low.
"He must be starving," she told herself again, and that helped her to forget her own troubles and to struggle on.But oh, if the world were only not so cruel, oh, if there were anyone to give her a word of cheer, nay, a glance of pity! But nobody had looked at her except the women who stole her bread and the men who shamed her with their wicked eyes.
That one day's experience did more than all her life before it to fill her with the bitter fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.Her illusions fell away from her, and her sweet childish faith was broken down.She saw herself as she was:
a simple girl, a child ignorant of the ways of the world, going alone on a long journey unknown to her, thinking to succour her father in prison, and carrying a handful of eggs and a few poor cakes of bread.When at length the scales fell from the eyes of her mind, and as she trudged along on her bony mule, afraid to ask her way, she saw herself, with all her fine purposes shrivelled up, do what she would to be brave, she could not help but cry.
It was all so vain, so foolish; she was such a weak little thing.
Her father knew this, and that was why he told her to stay where he left her.What if he came home while she was absent!
Should she go back?
She had almost resolved to return, struggle as she might to push forward, when going close under the town walls, near to the very gate, the Bab Toot whereat she had been cast out with her father remembering this scene of their abasement with a new sense of its cruelty and shame born of her own simple troubles, she lit upon a woman who was coming out.