I saw Abdul Ali, laughing cynically, make a gesture with his arm as if he consigned me to the dogs.

Then I caught Grim's eye--Suliman ben Saoud's.

He, too, was making capital of my predicament.
He had got the attention of the men around him, and was pointing at the Bible while he reeled off a string of an angry rhetoric that sounded like a cat-fight.

He shouted at me, and made angry gestures; but I knew that if he wanted me to understand his signals he would never make them openly, so I ignored them.
"The sheikh from Arabia demands to see the book," said Mahommed ben Hamza in my ear.
I passed it over the carpet with the pencil folded in it at the page I had begun to mark; and the men opposite handed it along, with remarks they considered appropriate.

Jim Suliman ben Saoud Grim seized the book angrily, glared at it, denounced it, and wrote something on the fly-leaf.