To the left of them the solitary tower commanded this terrific vision of desolation, seemed to watch it steadily, yet furtively, with its tiny loophole eyes.

"We have come into winter," Domini murmured.

She looked at the white of the camels' bones, of the plains, at the grey white of the sky, at the yellow pallor of the dunes.

"How wonderful! How terrible!" she said.

She drew her horse to one side, a little nearer to Androvsky's.

"Does the Russian in you greet this land?" she asked him.

He did not reply. He seemed to be held in thrall by the sad immensity before them.

"I realise here what it must be to die in the desert, to be killed by it—by hunger, by thirst in it," she said presently, speaking, as if to herself, and looking out over the mirage sea, the mirage snow. "This is the first time I have really felt the terror of the desert."

Her horse drooped its head till its nose nearly touched the earth, and shook itself in a long shiver. She shivered too, as if constrained to echo an animal's distress.

"Things have died here," Androvsky said, speaking at last in a low voice and pointing with his long-lashed whip towards the camels' skeletons. "Come, Domini, the horses are tired."

He cast another glance at the tower, and they dismounted by their tent, which was pitched at the very edge of the steep slope that sank down to the beast-like shapes of the near dunes.

An hour later Domini said to Androvsky:

"You won't go after gazelle this evening surely?"

They had been having coffee in the tent and had just finished. Androvsky got up from his chair and went to the tent door. The grey of the sky was pierced by a gleaming shaft from the sun.

"Do you mind if I go?" he said, turning towards her after a glance to the desert.

"No, but aren't you tired?"

He shook his head.

"I couldn't ride, and now I can ride. I couldn't shoot, and I'm just beginning—"

"Go," she said quickly. "Besides, we want gazelle for dinner, Batouch says, though I don't suppose we should starve without it." She came to the tent door and stood beside him, and he put his arm around her.

"If I were alone here, Boris," she said, leaning against his shoulder, "I believe I should feel horribly sad to-day."

"Shall I stay?"

He pressed her against him.

"No. I shall know you are coming back. Oh, how extraordinary it is to think we lived so many years without knowing of each other's existence, that we lived alone. Were you ever happy?"

He hesitated before he replied.

"I sometimes thought I was."

"But do you think now you ever really were?"

"I don't know—perhaps in a lonely sort of way."

"You can never be happy in that way now?"

He said nothing, but, after a moment, he kissed her long and hard, and as if he wanted to draw her being into his through the door of his lips.

"Good-bye," he said, releasing her. "I shall be back directly after sundown."

"Yes. Don't wait for the dark down there. If you were lost in the dunes!"

She pointed to the distant sand hills rising and falling monotonously to the horizon.

"If you are not back in good time," she said, "I shall stand by the tower and wave a brand from the fire."

"Why by the tower?"

"The ground is highest by the tower."

She watched him ride away on a mule, with two Arabs carrying guns. They went towards the plains of saltpetre that looked like snow beside the sea that was only a mirage. Then she turned back into the tent, took up a volume of Fromentin's, and sat down in a folding-chair at the tent door. She read a little, but it was difficult to read with the mirage beneath her. Perpetually her eyes were attracted from the book to its mystery and plaintive sadness, that was like the sadness of something unearthly, of a spirit that did not move but that suffered. She did not put away the book, but presently she laid it down on her knees, open, and sat gazing. Androvsky had disappeared with the Arabs into some fold of the sands. The sun-ray had vanished with him. Without Androvsky and the sun—she still connected them together, and knew she would for ever.

The melancholy of this desert scene was increased for her till it became oppressive and lay upon her like a heavy weight. She was not a woman inclined to any morbid imaginings. Indeed, all that was morbid roused in her an instinctive disgust. But the sudden greyness of the weather, coming after weeks of ardent sunshine, and combined with the fantastic desolation of the landscape, which was half real and half unreal, turned her for the moment towards a dreariness of spirit that was rare in her.

She realised suddenly, as she looked and did not see Androvsky even as a black and moving speck upon the plain; what the desert would seem to her without him, even in sunshine, the awfulness of the desolation of it, the horror of its distances. And realising this she also realised the uncertainty of the human life in connection with any other human life. To be dependent on another is to double the sum of the terrors of uncertainty. She had done that.

If the immeasurable sands took Androvsky and never gave him back to her! What would she do?

She gazed at the mirage sea with its dim red islands, and at the sad white plains along its edge.

Winter—she would be plunged in eternal winter. And each human life hangs on a thread. All deep love, all consuming passion, holds a great fear within the circle of a great glory. To-day the fear within the circle of her glory seemed to grow. But she suddenly realised that she ought to dominate it, to confine it—as it were—to its original and permanent proportions.

She got up, came out upon the edge of the hill, and walked along it slowly towards the tower.

Outside, freed from the shadow of the tent, she felt less oppressed, though still melancholy, and even slightly apprehensive, as if some trouble were coming to her and were near at hand. Mentally she had made the tower the limit of her walk, and therefore when she reached it she stood still.

It was a squat, square tower, strongly constructed, with loopholes in the four sides, and now that she was by it she saw built out at the back of it a low house with small shuttered windows and a narrow courtyard for mules. No doubt Androvsky was right and French soldiers had once been here to work the optic telegraph. She thought of the recruits and of Marseilles, of Notre Dame de la Garde, the Mother of God, looking towards Africa. Such recruits came to live in such strange houses as this tower lost in the desert and now abandoned. She glanced at the shuttered windows and turned back towards the tent; but something in the situation of the tower—perhaps the fact that it was set on the highest point of the ground—attracted her, and she presently made Batouch bring her out some rugs and ensconced herself under its shadow, facing the mirage sea.

How long she sat there she did not know. Mirage hypnotises the imaginative and suggests to them dreams strange and ethereal, sad sometimes, as itself. How long she might have sat there dreaming, but for an interruption, she knew still less. It was towards evening, however, but before evening had fallen, that a weary and travel-stained party of three French soldiers, Zouaves, and an officer rode slowly up the sandy track from the dunes. They were mounted on mules, and carried their small baggage with them on two led mules. When they reached the top of the hill they turned to the right and came towards the tower. The officer was a little in advance of his men. He was a smart-looking, fair man of perhaps thirty-two, with blonde moustaches, blue eyes with blonde lashes, and hair very much the colour of the sand dunes. His face was bright red, burnt, as a fair delicate skin burns, by the sun. His eyes, although protected by large sun spectacles, were inflamed. The skin was peeling from his nose. His hair was full of sand, and he rode leaning forward over his animal's neck, holding the reins loosely in his hands, that seemed nerveless from fatigue. Yet he looked smart and well-bred despite his evident exhaustion, as if on parade he would be a dashing officer. It was evident that both he and his men were riding in from some tremendous journey. The latter looked dog-tired, scarcely human in their collapse. They kept on their mules with difficulty, shaking this way and that like sacks, with their unshaven chins wagging loosely up and down. But as they saw the tower they began to sing in chorus half under their breath, and leaning their broad hands on the necks of the beasts for support they looked with a sort of haggard eagerness in its direction.

Domini was roused from her contemplation of the mirage and the daydreams it suggested by the approach of this small cavalcade. The officer was almost upon her ere she heard the clatter of his mule among the stones. She looked up, startled, and he looked down, even more surprised, apparently, to see a lady ensconced at the foot of the tower. His astonishment and exhaustion did not, however, get the better of his instinctive good breeding, and sitting straight up in the saddle he took off his sun helmet and asked Domini's pardon for disturbing her.

"But this is my home for the night, Madame," he added, at the same time drawing a key from the pocket of his loose trousers. "And I'm thankful to reach it. Ma foi! there have been several moments in the last days when I never thought to see Mogar."

Slowly he swung himself off his mule and stood up, catching on to the saddle with one hand.

"F-f-f-f!" he said, pursing his lips. "I can hardly stand. Excuse me, Madame."

Domini had got up.

"You are tired out," she said, looking at him and his men, who had now come up, with interest.

"Pretty well indeed. We have been three days lost in the great dunes in a sand-storm, and hit the track here just as we were preparing for a—well, a great event."

"A great event?" said Domini.

"The last in a man's life, Madame."

He spoke simply, even with a light touch of humour that was almost cynical, but she felt beneath his words and manner a solemnity and a thankfulness that attracted and moved her.

"Those terrible dunes!" she said.

And, turning, she looked out over them.

There was no sunset, but the deepening of the grey into a dimness that seemed to have blackness behind it, the more ghastly hue of the white plains of saltpetre, and the fading of the mirage sea, whose islands now looked no longer red, but dull brown specks in a pale mist, hinted at the rapid falling of night.

"My husband is out in them," she added.

"Your husband, Madame!"

He looked at her rather narrowly, shifted from one leg to the other as if trying his strength, then added:

"Not far, though, I suppose. For I see you have a camp here."

"He has only gone after gazelle."

As she said the last word she saw one of the soldiers, a mere boy, lick his lips and give a sort of tragic wink at his companions. A sudden thought struck her.

"Don't think me impertinent, Monsieur, but—what about provisions in your tower?"

"Oh, as to that, Madame, we shall do well enough. Here, open the door, Marelle!"

And he gave the key to a soldier, who wearily dismounted and thrust it into the door of the tower.

"But after three days in the dunes! Your provisions must be exhausted unless you've been able to replenish them."

"You are too good, Madame. We shall manage a cous-cous."

"And wine? Have you any wine?"

She glanced again at the exhausted soldiers covered with sand and saw that their eyes were fixed upon her and were shining eagerly. All the "good fellow" in her nature rose up.

"You must let me send you some," she said. "We have plenty."

She thought of some bottles of champagne they had brought with them and never opened.

"In the desert we are all comrades," she added, as if speaking to the soldiers.

They looked at her with an open adoration which lit up their tired faces.

"Madame," said the officer, "you are much too good; but I accept your offer as frankly as you have made it. A little wine will be a godsend to us to-night. Thank you, Madame."

The soldiers looked as if they were going to cheer.

"I'll go to the camp—"

"Cannot one of the men go for you, Madame? You were sitting here. Pray, do not let us disturb you."

"But night is falling and I shall have to go back in a moment."

While they had been speaking the darkness had rapidly increased. She looked towards the distant dunes and no longer saw them. At once her mind went to Androvsky. Why had he not returned? She thought of the signal. From the camp, behind their sleeping-tent, rose the flames of a newly-made fire.

"If one of your men can go and tell Batouch—Batouch—to come to me here I shall be grateful," she answered. "And I want him to bring me a big brand from the fire over there."

She saw wonder dawning in the eyes fixed upon her, and smiled.

"I want to signal to my husband," she said, "and this is the highest point. He will see it best if I stand here."

"Go, Marelle, ask for Batouch, and be sure you bring the brand from the fire."

The man saluted and rode off with alacrity. The thought of wine had infused a gaiety into him and his companions.

"Now, Monsieur, don't stand on ceremony," Domini said to the officer. "Go in and make your toilet. You are longing to, I know."

"I am longing to look a little more decent—now, Madame," he said gallantly, and gazing at her with a sparkle of admiration in his inflamed eyes. "You will let me return in a moment to escort you to the camp."

"Thank you."

"Will you permit me—my name is De Trevignac."

"And mine is Madame Androvsky."

"Russian!" the officer said. "The alliance in the desert! Vive la Russie!"

She laughed.

"That is for my husband, for I am English."

"Vive l'Angleterre!" he said.

The two soldier echoed his words impulsively, lifting up in the gathering darkness hoarse voices.

"Vive l'Angleterre!"

"Thank you, thank you," she said. "Now, Monsieur, please don't let me keep you."

"I shall be back directly," the officer replied.

And he turned and went into the tower, while the soldiers rode round to the court, tugging at the cords of the led mules.

Domini waited for the return of Marelle. Her mood had changed. A glow of cordial humanity chased away her melancholy. The hostess that lurks in every woman—that housewife-hostess sense which goes hand-in-hand with the mother sense—was alive in her. She was keenly anxious to play the good fairy simply, unostentatiously, to these exhausted men who had come to Mogar out of the jaws of Death, to see their weary faces shine under the influence of repose and good cheer. But the tower looked desolate. The camp was gayer, cosier. Suddenly she resolved to invite them all to dine in the camp that night.

Marelle returned with Batouch. She saw them from a distance coming through the darkness with blazing torches in their hands. When they came to her she said:

"Batouch, I want you to order dinner in camp for the soldiers."

A broad and radiant smile irradiated the blunt Breton features of Marelle.

"And Monsieur the officer will dine with me and Monsieur. Give us all you can. Perhaps there will be some gazelle."

She saw him opening his lips to say that the dinner would be poor and stopped him.

"You are to open some of the champagne—the Pommery. We will drink to all safe returns. Now, give me the brand and go and tell the cook."

As he took his torch and disappeared into the darkness De Trevignac came out from the tower. He still looked exhausted and walked with some difficulty, but he had washed the sand from his face with water from the artesian well behind the tower, changed his uniform, brushed the sand from his yellow hair, and put on a smart gold-laced cap instead of his sun-helmet. The spectacles were gone from his eyes, and between his lips was a large Havana—his last, kept by him among the dunes as a possible solace in the dreadful hour of death.

"Monsieur de Trevignac, I want you to dine with us in camp to-night—only to dine. We won't keep you from your bed one moment after the coffee and the cognac. You must seal the triple alliance—France, Russia, England—in some champagne."

She had spoken gaily, cordially. She added more gravely:

"One doesn't escape from death among the dunes every day. Will you come?"

She held out her hand frankly, as a man might to another man. He pressed it as a man presses a woman's hand when he is feeling very soft and tender.

"Madame, what can I say, but that you are too good to us poor fellows and that you will find it very difficult to get rid of us, for we shall be so happy in your camp that we shall forget all about our tower."

"That's settled then."

With the brand in her hand she walked to the edge of the hill. De Trevignac followed her. He had taken the other brand from Marelle. They stood side by side, overlooking the immense desolation that was now almost hidden in the night.

"You are going to signal to your husband, Madame?"

"Yes."

"Let me do it for you. See, I have the other brand!"

"Thank you—but I will do it."

In the light of the flame that leaped up as if striving to touch her face he saw a light in her eyes that he understood, and he drooped his torch towards the earth while she lifted hers on high and waved it in the blackness.

He watched her. The tall, strong, but exquisitely supple figure, the uplifted arm with the torch sending forth a long tongue of golden flame, the ardent and unconscious pose, that set before him a warm passionate heart calling to another heart without shame, made him think of her as some Goddess of the Sahara. He had let his torch droop towards the earth, but, as she waved hers, he had an irresistible impulse to join her in the action she made heroic and superb. And presently he lifted his torch, too, and waved it beside hers in the night.

She smiled at him in the flames.

"He must see them surely," she said.

From below, in the distance of the desert, there rose a loud cry in a strong man's voice.

"Aha!" she exclaimed.

She called out in return in a warm, powerful voice. The man's voice answered, nearer. She dropped her brand to the earth.

"Monsieur, you will come then—in half an hour?"

"Madame, with the most heartfelt pleasure. But let me accompany—"

"No, I am quite safe. And bring your men with you. We'll make the best feast we can for them. And there's enough champagne for all."

Then she went away quickly, eagerly, into the darkness.

"To be her husband!" murmured De Trevignac. "Lucky—lucky fellow!" And he dropped his brand beside hers on the ground, and stood watching the two flames mingle.

"Lucky—lucky fellow!" he said again aloud. "I wonder what he's like."



CHAPTER XX

When Domini reached the camp she found it in a bustle. Batouch, resigned to the inevitable, had put the cook upon his mettle. Ouardi was already to be seen with a bottle of Pommery in each hand, and was only prevented from instantly uncorking them by the representations of his mistress and an elaborate exposition of the peculiar and evanescent virtues of champagne. Ali was humming a mysterious song about a lovesick camel-man, with which he intended to make glad the hearts of the assembly when the halting time was over. And the dining-table was already set for three.

When Androvsky rode in with the Arabs Domini met him at the edge of the hill.

"You saw my signal, Boris?"

"Yes—"

He was going to say more, when she interrupted him eagerly.

"Have you any gazelle? Ah——"

Across the mule of one of the Arabs she saw a body drooping, a delicate head with thin, pointed horns, tiny legs with exquisite little feet that moved as the mule moved.

"We shall want it to-night. Take it quickly to the cook's tent, Ahmed." Androvsky got off his mule.

"There's a light in the tower!" he said, looking at her and then dropping his eyes.

"Yes."

"And I saw two signals. There were two brands being waved together."

"To-night, we have comrades in the desert."

"Comrades!" he said.

His voice sounded startled.

"Men who have escaped from a horrible death in the dunes."

"Arabs?"

"French."

Quickly she told him her story. He listened in silence. When she had finished he said nothing. But she saw him look at the dining-table laid for three and his expression was dark and gloomy.

"Boris, you don't mind!" she said in surprise. "Surely you would not refuse hospitality to these poor fellows!"

She put her hand through his arm and pressed it.

"Have I done wrong? But I know I haven't!"

"Wrong! How could you do that?"

He seemed to make an effort, to conquer something within him.

"It's I who am wrong, Domini. The truth is, I can't bear our happiness to be intruded upon even for a night. I want to be alone with you. This life of ours in the desert has made me desperately selfish. I want to be alone, quite alone, with you."

"It's that! How glad I am!"

She laid her cheek against his arm.

"Then," he said, "that other signal?"

"Monsieur de Trevignac gave it."

Androvsky took his arm from hers abruptly.

"Monsieur de Trevignac!" he said. "Monsieur de Trevignac?"

He stood as if in deep and anxious thought.

"Yes, the officer. That's his name. What is it, Boris?"

"Nothing."

There was a sound of voices approaching the camp in the darkness. They were speaking French.

"I must," said Androvsky, "I must——"

He made an uncertain movement, as if to go towards the dunes, checked it, and went hurriedly into the dressing-tent. As he disappeared De Trevignac came into the camp with his men. Batouch conducted the latter with all ceremony towards the fire which burned before the tents of the attendants, and, for the moment, Domini was left alone with De Trevignac.

"My husband is coming directly," she said. "He was late in returning, but he brought gazelle. Now you must sit down at once."

She led the way to the dining-tent. De Trevignac glanced at the table laid for three with an eager anticipation which he was far too natural to try to conceal.

"Madame," he said, "if I disgrace myself to-night, if I eat like an ogre in a fairy tale, will you forgive me?"

"I will not forgive you if you don't."

She spoke gaily, made him sit down in a folding-chair, and insisted on putting a soft cushion at his back. Her manner was cheerful, almost eagerly kind and full of a camaraderie rare in a woman, yet he noticed a change in her since they stood together waving the brands by the tower. And he said to himself:

"The husband—perhaps he's not so pleased at my appearance. I wonder how long they've been married?"

And he felt his curiosity to see "Monsieur Androvsky" deepen.

While they waited for him Domini made De Trevignac tell her the story of his terrible adventure in the dunes. He did so simply, like a soldier, without exaggeration. When he had finished she said:

"You thought death was certain then?"

"Quite certain, Madame."

She looked at him earnestly.

"To have faced a death like that in utter desolation, utter loneliness, must make life seem very different afterwards."

"Yes, Madame. But I did not feel utterly alone."

"Your men!"

"No, Madame."

After a pause he added, simply:

"My mother is a devout Catholic, Madame. I am her only child, and—she taught me long ago that in any peril one is never quite alone."

Domini's heart warmed to him. She loved this trust in God so frankly shown by a soldier, member of an African regiment, in this wild land. She loved this brave reliance on the unseen in the midst of the terror of the seen. Before they spoke again Androvsky crossed the dark space between the tents and came slowly into the circle of the lamplight.

De Trevignac got up from his chair, and Domini introduced the two men. As they bowed each shot a swift glance at the other. Then Androvsky looked down, and two vertical lines appeared on his high forehead above his eyebrows. They gave to his face a sudden look of acute distress. De Trevignac thanked him for his proffered hospitality with the ease of a man of the world, assuming that the kind invitation to him and to his men came from the husband as well as from the wife. When he had finished speaking, Androvsky, without looking up, said, in a voice that sounded to Domini new, as if he had deliberately assumed it:

"I am glad, Monsieur. We found gazelle, and so I hope—I hope you will have a fairly good dinner."

The words could scarcely have been more ordinary, but the way in which they were uttered was so strange, sounded indeed so forced, and so unnatural, that both De Trevignac and Domini looked at the speaker in surprise. There was a pause. Then Batouch and Ouardi came in with the soup.

"Come!" Domini said. "Let us begin. Monsieur de Trevignac, will you sit here on my right?"

They sat down. The two men were opposite to each other at the ends of the small table, with a lamp between them. Domini faced the tent door, and could see in the distance the tents of the attendants lit up by the blaze of the fire, and the forms of the French soldiers sitting at their table close to it, with the Arabs clustering round them. Sounds of loud conversation and occasional roars of laughter, that was almost childish in its frank lack of all restraint, told her that one feast was a success. She looked at her companions and made a sudden resolve—almost fierce—that the other, over which she was presiding, should be a success, too. But why was Androvsky so strange with other men? Why did he seem to become almost a different human being directly he was brought into any close contact with his kind? Was it shyness? Had he a profound hatred of all society? She remembered Count Anteoni's luncheon and the distress Androvsky had caused her by his cold embarrassment, his unwillingness to join in conversation on that occasion. But then he was only her friend. Now he was her husband. She longed for him to show himself at his best. That he was not a man of the world she knew. Had he not told her of his simple upbringing in El Kreir, a remote village of Tunisia, by a mother who had been left in poverty after the death of his father, a Russian who had come to Africa to make a fortune by vine-growing, and who had had his hopes blasted by three years of drought and by the visitation of the dreaded phylloxera? Had he not told her of his own hard work on the rich uplands among the Spanish workmen, of how he had toiled early and late in all kinds of weather, not for himself, but for a company that drew a fortune from the land and gave him a bare livelihood? Till she met him he had never travelled—he had never seen almost anything of life. A legacy from a relative had at last enabled him to have some freedom and to gratify a man's natural taste for change. And, strangely, perhaps, he had come first to the desert. She could not—she did not—expect him to show the sort of easy cultivation that a man acquires only by long contact with all sorts and conditions of men and women. But she knew that he was not only full of fire and feeling—a man with a great temperament, but also that he was a man who had found time to study, whose mind was not empty. He was a man who had thought profoundly. She knew this, although even with her, even in the great intimacy that is born of a great mutual passion, she knew him for a man of naturally deep reserve, who could not perhaps speak all his thoughts to anyone, even to the woman he loved. And knowing this, she felt a fighting temper rise up in her. She resolved to use her will upon this man who loved her, to force him to show his best side to the guest who had come to them out of the terror of the dunes. She would be obstinate for him.

Her lips went down a little at the corners. De Trevignac glanced at her above his soup-plate, and then at Androvsky. He was a man who had seen much of society, and who divined at once the gulf that must have separated the kind of life led in the past by his hostess from the kind of life led by his host. Such gulfs, he knew, are bridged with difficulty. In this case a great love must have been the bridge. His interest in these two people, encountered by him in the desolation of the wastes, and when all his emotions had been roused by the nearness of peril, would have been deep in any case. But there was something that made it extraordinary, something connected with Androvsky. It seemed to him that he had seen, perhaps known Androvsky at some time in his life. Yet Androvsky's face was not familiar to him. He could not yet tell from what he drew this impression, but it was strong. He searched his memory.

Just at first fatigue was heavy upon him, but the hot soup, the first glass of wine revived him. When Domini, full of her secret obstinacy, began to talk gaily he was soon able easily to take his part, and to join her in her effort to include Androvsky in the conversation. The cheerful noise of the camp came to them from without.

"I'm afraid my men are lifting up their voices rather loudly," said De Trevignac.

"We like it," said Domini. "Don't we, Boris?"

There was a long peal of laughter from the distance. As it died away Batouch's peculiar guttural chuckle, which had something negroid in it, was audible, prolonging itself in a loneliness that spoke his pertinacious sense of humour.

"Certainly," said Androvsky, still in the same strained and unnatural voice which had surprised Domini when she introduced the two men. "We are accustomed to gaiety round the camp fire."

"You are making a long stay in the desert, Monsieur?" asked De Trevignac.

"I hope so, Monsieur. It depends on my—it depends on Madame Androvsky."

"Why didn't he say 'my wife'?" thought De Trevignac. And again he searched his memory. "Had he ever met this man? If so, where?"

"I should like to stay in the desert for ever," Domini said quickly, with a long look at her husband.

"I should not, Madame," De Trevignac said.

"I understand. The desert has shown you its terrors."

"Indeed it has."

"But to us it has only shown its enchantment. Hasn't it?" She spoke to Androvsky. After a pause he replied:

"Yes."

The word, when it came, sounded like a lie.

For the first time since her marriage Domini felt a cold, like a cold of ice about her heart. Was it possible that Androvsky had not shared her joy in the desert? Had she been alone in her happiness? For a moment she sat like one stunned by a blow. Then knowledge, reason, spoke in her. She knew of Androvsky's happiness with her, knew it absolutely. There are some things in which a woman cannot be deceived. When Androvsky was with her he wanted no other human being. Nothing could take that certainty from her.

"Of course," she said, recovered, "there are places in the desert in which melancholy seems to brood, in which one has a sense of the terrors of the wastes. Mogar, I think, is one of them, perhaps the only one we have been in yet. This evening, when I was sitting under the tower, even I"—and as she said "even I" she smiled happily at Androvsky—"knew some forebodings."

"Forebodings?" Androvsky said quickly. "Why should you—?" He broke off.

"Not of coming misfortune, I hope, Madame?" said De Trevignac in a voice that was now irresistibly cheerful.

He was helping himself to some gazelle, which sent forth an appetising odour, and Ouardi was proudly pouring out for him the first glass of blithely winking champagne.

"I hardly know, but everything looked sad and strange; I began to think about the uncertainties of life."

Domini and De Trevignac were sipping their champagne. Ouardi came behind Androvsky to fill his glass.

"Non! non!" he said, putting his hand over it and shaking his head.

De Trevignac started.

Ouardi looked at Domini and made a distressed grimace, pointing with a brown finger at the glass.

"Oh, Boris! you must drink champagne to-night!" she exclaimed.

"I would rather not," he answered. "I am not accustomed to it."

"But to drink our guest's health after his escape from death!"

Androvsky took his hand from the glass and Ouardi filled it with wine.

Then Domini raised her glass and drank to De Trevignac. Androvsky followed her example, but without geniality, and when he put his lips to the wine he scarcely tasted it. Then he put the glass down and told Ouardi to give him red wine. And during the rest of the evening he drank no more champagne. He also ate very little, much less than usual, for in the desert they both had the appetites of hunters.

After thanking them cordially for drinking his health, De Trevignac said:

"I was nearly experiencing the certainty of death. But was it Mogar that turned you to such thoughts, Madame?"

"I think so. There is something sad, even portentous about it."

She looked towards the tent door, imagining the immense desolation that was hidden in the darkness outside, the white plains, the mirage sea, the sand dunes like monsters, the bleached bones of the dead camels with the eagles hovering above them.

"Don't you think so, Boris? Don't you think it looks like a place in which—like a tragic place, a place in which tragedies ought to occur?"

"It is not places that make tragedies," he said, "or at least they make tragedies far more seldom than the people in them."

He stopped, seemed to make an effort to throw off his taciturnity, and suddenly to be able to throw it off, at least partially. For he continued speaking with greater naturalness and ease, even with a certain dominating force.

"If people would use their wills they need not be influenced by place, they need not be governed by a thousand things, by memories, by fears, by fancies—yes, even by fancies that are the merest shadows, but out of which they make phantoms. Half the terrors and miseries of life lie only in the minds of men. They even cause the very tragedies they would avoid by expecting them."

He said the last words with a sort of strong contempt—then, more quietly, he added:

"You, Domini, why should you feel the uncertainty of life, especially at Mogar? You need not. You can choose not to. Life is the same in its chances here as everywhere?"

"But you," she answered—"did you not feel a tragic influence when we arrived here? Do you remember how you looked at the tower?"

"The tower!" he said, with a quick glance at De Trevignac. "I—why should I look at the tower?"

"I don't know, but you did, almost as if you were afraid of it."

"My tower!" said De Trevignac.

Another roar of laughter reached them from the camp fire. It made Domini smile in sympathy, but De Trevignac and Androvsky looked at each other for a moment, the one with a sort of earnest inquiry, the other with hostility, or what seemed hostility, across the circle of lamplight that lay between them.

"A tower rising in the desert emphasises the desolation. I suppose that was it," Androvsky said, as the laugh died down into Batouch's throaty chuckle. "It suggests lonely people watching."

"For something that never comes, or something terrible that comes," De Trevignac said.

As he spoke the last words Androvsky moved uneasily in his chair, and looked out towards the camp, as if he longed to get up and go into the open air, as if the tent roof above his head oppressed him.

Trevignac turned to Domini.

"In this case, Madame, you were the lonely watcher, and I was the something terrible that came."

She laughed. While she laughed De Trevignac noticed that Androvsky looked at her with a sort of sad intentness, not reproachful or wondering, as an older person might look at a child playing at the edge of some great gulf into which a false step would precipitate it. He strove to interpret this strange look, so obviously born in the face of his host in connection with himself. It seemed to him that he must have met Androvsky, and that Androvsky knew it, knew—what he did not yet know—where it was and when. It seemed to him, too, that Androvsky thought of him as the "something terrible" that had come to this woman who sat between them out of the desert.

But how could it be?

A profound curiosity was roused in him and he mentally cursed his treacherous memory—if it were treacherous. For possibly he might be mistaken. He had perhaps never met his host before, and this strange manner of his might be due to some inexplicable cause, or perhaps to some cause explicable and even commonplace. This Monsieur Androvsky might be a very jealous man, who had taken this woman away into the desert to monopolise her, and who resented even the chance intrusion of a stranger. De Trevignac knew life and the strange passions of men, knew that there are Europeans with the Arab temperament, who secretly long that their women should wear the veil and live secluded in the harem. Androvsky might be one of these.

When she had laughed Domini said:

"On the contrary, Monsieur, you have turned my thoughts into a happier current by your coming."

"How so?"

"You made me think of what are called the little things of life that are more to us women than to you men, I suppose."

"Ah," he said. "This food, this wine, this chair with a cushion, this gay light—Madame, they are not little things I have to be grateful for. When I think of the dunes they seem to me—they seem—"

Suddenly he stopped. His gay voice was choked. She saw that there were tears in his blue eyes, which were fixed on her with an expression of ardent gratitude. He cleared his throat.

"Monsieur," he said to Androvsky, "you will not think me presuming on an acquaintance formed in the desert if I say that till the end of my life I—and my men—can only think of Madame as of the good Goddess of the desolate Sahara!"

He did not know how Androvsky would take this remark, he did not care. For the moment in his impulsive nature there was room only for admiration of the woman and, gratitude for her frank kindness. Androvsky said:

"Thank you, Monsieur."

He spoke with an intensity, even a fervour, that were startling. For the first time since they had been together his voice was absolutely natural, his manner was absolutely unconstrained, he showed himself as he was, a man on fire with love for the woman who had given herself to him, and who received a warm word of praise of her as a gift made to himself. De Trevignac no longer wondered that Domini was his wife. Those three words, and the way they were spoken, gave him the man and what he might be in a woman's life. Domini looked at her husband silently. It seemed to her as if her heart were flooded with light, as if desolate Mogar were the Garden of Eden before the angel came. When they spoke again it was on some indifferent topic. But from that moment the meal went more merrily. Androvsky seemed to lose his strange uneasiness. De Trevignac met him more than half-way. Something of the gaiety round the camp fire had entered into the tent. A chain of sympathy had been forged between these three people. Possibly, a touch might break it, but for the moment it seemed strong.

At the end of the dinner Domini got up.

"We have no formalities in the desert," she said. "But I'm going to leave you together for a moment. Give Monsieur de Trevignac a cigar, Boris. Coffee is coming directly."

She went out towards the camp fire. She wanted to leave the men together to seal their good fellowship. Her husband's change from taciturnity to cordiality had enchanted her. Happiness was dancing within her. She felt gay as a child. Between the fire and the tent she met Ouardi carrying a tray. On it were a coffee-pot, cups, little glasses and a tall bottle of a peculiar shape with a very thin neck and bulging sides.

"What's that, Ouardi?" she asked, touching it with her finger.

"That is an African liqueur, Madame, that you have never tasted. Batouch told me to bring it in honour of Monsieur the officer. They call it—"

"Another surprise of Batouch's!" she interrupted gaily. "Take it in! Monsieur the officer will think we have quite a cellar in the desert."

He went on, and she stood for a few minutes looking at the blaze of the fire, and at the faces lit up by it, French and Arab. The happy soldiers were singing a French song with a chorus for the delectation of the Arabs, who swayed to and fro, wagging their heads and smiling in an effort to show appreciation of the barbarous music of the Roumis. Dreary, terrible Mogar and its influences were being defied by the wanderers halting in it. She thought of Androvsky's words about the human will overcoming the influence of place, and a sudden desire came to her to go as far as the tower where she had felt sad and apprehensive, to stand in its shadow for an instant and to revel in her happiness.

She yielded to the impulse, walked to the tower, and stood there facing the darkness which hid the dunes, the white plains, the phantom sea, seeing them in her mind, and radiantly defying them. Then she began to return to the camp, walking lightly, as happy people walk. When she had gone a very short way she heard someone coming towards her. It was too dark to see who it was. She could only hear the steps among the stones. They were hasty. They passed her and stopped behind her at the tower. She wondered who it was, and supposed it must be one of the soldiers come to fetch something, or perhaps tired and hastening to bed.

As she drew near to the camp she saw the lamplight shining in the tent, where doubtless De Trevignac and Androvsky were smoking and talking in frank good fellowship. It was like a bright star, she thought, that gleam of light that shone out of her home, the brightest of all the stars of Africa. She went towards it. As she drew near she expected to hear the voices of the two men, but she heard nothing. Nor did she see the blackness of their forms in the circle of the light. Perhaps they had gone out to join the soldiers and the Arabs round the fire. She hastened on, came to the tent, entered it, and was confronted by her husband, who was standing back in an angle formed by the canvas, in the shadow, alone. On the floor near him lay a quantity of fragments of glass.

"Boris!" she said. "Where is Monsieur de Trevignac?"

"Gone," replied Androvsky in a loud, firm voice.

She looked up at him. His face was grim and powerful, hard like the face of a fighting man.

"Gone already? Why?"

"He's tired out. He told me to make his excuses to you."

"But——"

She saw in the table the coffee cups. Two of them were full of coffee. The third, hers, was clean.

"But he hasn't drunk his coffee!" she said.

She was astonished and showed it. She could not understand a man who had displayed such warm, even touching, appreciation of her kindness leaving her without a word, taking the opportunity of her momentary absence to disappear, to shirk away—for she put it like that to herself.

"No—he did not want coffee."

"But was anything the matter?"

She looked down at the broken glass, and saw stains upon the ground among the fragments.

"What's this?" she said. "Oh, the African liqueur!"

Suddenly Androvsky put his arm round her with an iron grip, and led her away out of the tent. They crossed the space to the sleeping-tent in silence. She felt governed, and as if she must yield to his will, but she also felt confused, even almost alarmed mentally. The sleeping-tent was dark. When they reached it Androvsky took his arm from her, and she heard him searching for the matches. She was in the tent door and could see that there was a light in the tower. De Trevignac must be there already. No doubt it was he who had passed her in the night when she was returning to the camp. Androvsky struck a match and lit a candle. Then he came to the tent door and saw her looking at the light in the tower.

"Come in, Domini," he said, taking her by the hand, and speaking gently, but still with a firmness that hinted at command.

She obeyed, and he quickly let down the flap of canvas, and shut out the night.

"What is it, Boris?" she asked.

She was standing by one of the beds.

"What has happened?"

"Why—happened?"

"I don't understand. Why did Monsieur de Trevignac go away so suddenly?"

"Domini, do you care whether he is here or gone? Do you care?" He sat on the edge of the bed and drew her down beside him.

"Do you want anyone to be with us, to break in upon our lives? Aren't we happier alone?"

"Boris!" she said, "you—did you let him see that you wanted him to go?"

It occurred to her suddenly that Androvsky, in his lack of worldly knowledge, might perhaps have shown their guest that he secretly resented the intrusion of a stranger upon them even for one evening, and that De Trevignac, being a sensitive man, had been hurt and had abruptly gone away. Her social sense revolted at this idea.

"You didn't let him see that, Boris!" she exclaimed. "After his escape from death! It would have been inhuman."

"Perhaps my love for you might even make me that, Domini. And if it did—if you knew why I was inhuman—would you blame me for it? Would you hate me for it?"

There was a strong excitement dawning in him. It recalled to her the first night in the desert when they sat together on the ground and watched the waning of the fire.

"Could you—could you hate me for anything, Domini?" he said. "Tell me—could you?"

His face was close to hers. She looked at him with her long, steady eyes, that had truth written in their dark fire.

"No," she answered. "I could never hate you—now."

"Not if—not if I had done you harm? Not if I had done you a wrong?"

"Could you ever do me a wrong?" she asked.

She sat, looking at him as if in deep thought, for a moment.

"I could almost as easily believe that God could," she said at last simply.

"Then you—you have perfect trust in me?"

"But—have you ever thought I had not?" she asked. There was wonder in her voice.

"But I have given my life to you," she added still with wonder. "I am here in the desert with you. What more can I give? What more can I do?"

He put his arms about her and drew her head down on his shoulder.

"Nothing, nothing. You have given, you have done everything—too much, too much. I feel myself below you, I know myself below you—far, far down."

"How can you say that? I couldn't have loved you if it were so." She spoke with complete conviction.

"Perhaps," he said, in a low voice, "perhaps women never realise what their love can do. It might—it might—"

"What, Boris?"

"It might do what Christ did—go down into hell to preach to the—to the spirits in prison."

His voice had dropped almost to a murmur. With one hand on her cheek he kept her face pressed down upon his shoulder so that she could not see his face.

"It might do that, Domini."

"Boris," she said, almost whispering too, for his words and manner filled her with a sort of awe, "I want you to tell me something."

"What is it?"

"Are you quite happy with me here in the desert? If you are I want you to tell me that you are. Remember—I shall believe you."

"No other human being could ever give me the happiness you give me."

"But—"

He interrupted her.

"No other human being ever has. Till I met you I had no conception of the happiness there is in the world for man and woman who love each other."

"Then you are happy?"

"Don't I seem so?"

She did not reply. She was searching her heart for the answer—searching it with an almost terrible sincerity. He waited for her answer, sitting quite still. His hand was always against her face. After what seemed to him an eternity she said:

"Boris!"

"Yes."

"Why did you say that about a woman's love being able even to go down into hell to preach to the spirits in prison?"

He did not answer. His hand seemed to her to lie more heavily on her cheek.

"I—I am not sure that you are quite happy with me," she said.

She spoke like one who reverenced truth, even though it slew her. There was a note of agony in her voice.

"Hush!" he said. "Hush, Domini!"

They were both silent. Beyond the canvas of the tent that shut out from them the camp they heard a sound of music. Drums were being beaten. The African pipe was wailing. Then the voice of Ali rose in the song of the "Freed Negroes":

"No one but God and I Knows what is in my heart."

At that moment Domini felt that the words were true—horribly true.

"Boris," she said. "Do you hear?"

"Hush, Domini."

"I think there is something in your heart that sometimes makes you sad even with me. I think perhaps I partly guess what it is."

He took his hand away from her face, his arm from her shoulder, but she caught hold of him, and her arm was strong like a man's.

"Boris, you are with me, you are close to me, but do you sometimes feel far away from God?"

He did not answer.

"I don't know; I oughtn't to ask, perhaps. I don't ask—no, I don't. But, if it's that, don't be too sad. It may all come right—here in the desert. For the desert is the Garden of Allah. And, Boris—put out the light."

He extinguished the candle with his hand.

"You feel, perhaps, that you can't pray honestly now, but some day you may be able to. You will be able to. I know it. Before I knew I loved you I saw you—praying in the desert."

"I!" he whispered. "You saw me praying in the desert!"

It seemed to her that he was afraid. She pressed him more closely with her arms.

"It was that night in the dancing-house. I seemed to see a crowd of people to whom the desert had given gifts, and to you it had given the gift of prayer. I saw you far out in the desert praying."

She heard his hard breathing, felt it against her cheek.

"If—if it is that, Boris, don't despair. It may come. Keep the crucifix. I am sure you have it. And I always pray for you."

They sat for a long while in the dark, but they did not speak again that night.

Domini did not sleep, and very early in the morning, just as dawn was beginning, she stole out of the tent, shutting down the canvas flap behind her.

It was cold outside—cold almost as in a northern winter. The wind of the morning, that blew to her across the wavelike dunes and the white plains, seemed impregnated with ice. The sky was a pallid grey. The camp was sleeping. What had been a fire, all red and gold and leaping beauty, was now a circle of ashes, grey as the sky. She stood on the edge of the hill and looked towards the tower.

As she did so, from the house behind it came a string of mules, picking their way among the stones over the hard earth. De Trevignac and his men were already departing from Mogar.

They came towards her slowly. They had to pass her to reach the track by which they were going on to the north and civilisation. She stood to see them pass.

When they were quite near De Trevignac, who was riding, with his head bent down on his chest, muffled in a heavy cloak, looked up and saw her. She nodded to him. He sat up and saluted. For a moment she thought that he was going on without stopping to speak to her. She saw that he hesitated what to do. Then he pulled up his mule and prepared to get off.

"No, don't, Monsieur," she said.

She held out her hand.

"Good-bye," she added.

He took her hand, then signed to his men to ride on. When they had passed, saluting her, he let her hand go. He had not spoken a word. His face, burned scarlet by the sun, had a look of exhaustion on it, but also another look—of horror, she thought, as if in his soul he was recoiling from her. His inflamed blue eyes watched her, as if in a search that was intense. She stood beside the mule in amazement. She could hardly believe that this was the man who had thanked her, with tears in his eyes, for her hospitality the night before. "Good-bye," he said, speaking at last, coldly. She saw him glance at the tent from which she had come. The horror in his face surely deepened. "Goodbye, Madame," he repeated. "Thank you for your hospitality." He pulled up the rein to ride on. The mule moved a step or two. Then suddenly he checked it and turned in the saddle. "Madame!" he said. "Madame!"

She came up to him. It seemed to her that he was going to say something of tremendous importance to her. His lips, blistered by the sun, opened to speak. But he only looked again towards the tent in which Androvsky was still sleeping, then at her.

A long moment passed.

Then De Trevignac, as if moved by an irresistable impulse, leaned from the saddle and made over Domini the sign of the cross. His hand dropped down against the mule's side, and without another word, or look, he rode away to the north, following his men.



CHAPTER XXI

That same day, to the surprise of Batouch, they left Mogar. To both Domini and Androvsky it seemed a tragic place, a place where the desert showed them a countenance that was menacing.

They moved on towards the south, wandering aimlessly through the warm regions of the sun. Then, as the spring drew into summer, and the heat became daily more intense, they turned again northwards, and on an evening in May pitched their camp on the outskirts of the Sahara city of Amara.

This city, although situated in the northern part of the desert, was called by the Arabs "The belly of the Sahara," and also "The City of Scorpions." It lay in the midst of a vast region of soft and shifting sand that suggested a white sea, in which the oasis of date palms, at the edge of which the city stood, was a green island. From the south, whence the wanderers came, the desert sloped gently upwards for a long distance, perhaps half a day's march, and many kilometres before the city was reached, the minarets of its mosques were visible, pointing to the brilliant blue sky that arched the whiteness of the sands. Round about the city, on every side, great sand-hills rose like ramparts erected by Nature to guard it from the assaults of enemies. These hills were black with the tents of desert tribes, which, from far off, looked like multitudes of flies that had settled on the sands. The palms of the oasis, which stretched northwards from the city, could not be seen from the south till the city was reached, and in late spring this region was a strange and barbarous pageant of blue and white and gold; crude in its intensity, fierce in its crudity, almost terrible in its blazing splendour that was like the Splendour about the portals of the sun.

Domini and Androvsky rode towards Amara at a foot's pace, looking towards its distant towers. A quivering silence lay around them, yet already they seemed to hear the cries of the voices of a great multitude, to be aware of the movement of thronging crowds of men. This was the first Sahara city they had drawn near to, and their minds were full of memories of the stories of Batouch, told to them by the camp fire at night in the uninhabited places which, till now, had been their home: stories of the wealthy date merchants who trafficked here and dwelt in Oriental palaces, poor in aspect as seen from the dark and narrow streets, or zgags, in which they were situated, but within full of the splendours of Eastern luxury; of the Jew moneylenders who lived apart in their own quarter, rapacious as wolves, hoarding their gains, and practising the rites of their ancient and—according to the Arabs—detestable religion; of the marabouts, or sacred men, revered by the Mohammedans, who rode on white horses through the public ways, followed by adoring fanatics who sought to touch their garments and amulets, and demanded importunately miraculous blessings at their hands—the hedgehog's foot to protect their women in the peril of childbirth; the scroll, covered with verses of the Koran and enclosed in a sheaf of leather, that banishes ill dreams at night and stays the uncertain feet of the sleep-walker; the camel's skull that brings fruit to the palm trees; the red coral that stops the flow of blood from a knife-wound—of the dancing-girls glittering in an armour of golden pieces, their heads tied with purple and red and yellow handkerchiefs of silk, crowned with great bars of solid gold and tufted with ostrich feathers; of the dwarfs and jugglers who by night perform in the marketplace, contending for custom with the sorceresses who tell the fates from shells gathered by mirage seas; with the snake-charmers—who are immune from the poison of serpents and the acrobats who come from far-off Persia and Arabia to spread their carpets in the shadow of the Agha's dwelling and delight the eyes of negro and Kabyle, of Soudanese and Touareg with their feats of strength; of the haschish smokers who, assembled by night in an underground house whose ceiling and walls were black as ebony, gave themselves up to day-dreams of shifting glory, in which the things of earth and the joys and passions of men reappeared, but transformed by the magic influence of the drug, made monstrous or fairylike, intensified or turned to voluptuous languors, through which the Ouled Nail floated like a syren, promising ecstasies unknown even in Baghdad, where the pale Circassian lifts her lustrous eyes, in which the palms were heavy with dates of solid gold, and the streams were gliding silver.

Often they had smiled over Batouch's opulent descriptions of the marvels of Ain-Amara, which they suspected to be very far away from the reality, and yet, nevertheless, when they saw the minarets soaring above the sands to the brassy heaven, it seemed to them both as if, perhaps, they might be true. The place looked intensely barbaric. The approach to it was grandiose.

Wide as the sands had been, they seemed to widen out into a greater immensity of arid pallor before the city gates as yet unseen. The stretch of blue above looked vaster here, the horizons more remote, the radiance of the sun more vivid, more inexorable. Nature surely expanded as if in an effort to hold her arm against some tremendous spectacle set in its bosom by the activity of men, who were strong and ardent as the giants of old, who had powers and a passion for employing them persistently not known in any other region of the earth. The immensity of Mogar brought sadness to the mind. The immensity of Ain-Amara brought excitement. Even at this distance from it, when its minarets were still like shadowy fingers of an unlifted hand, Androvsky and Domini were conscious of influences streaming forth from its battlements over the sloping sands like a procession that welcomed them to a new phase of desert life.

"And people talk of the monotony of the Sahara!" Domini said speaking out of their mutual thought. "Everything is here, Boris; you've never drawn near to London. Long before you reach the first suburbs you feel London like a great influence brooding over the fields and the woods. Here you feel Amara in the same way brooding over the sands. It's as if the sands were full of voices. Doesn't it excite you?"

"Yes," he said. "But"—and he turned in his saddle and looked back—"I feel as if the solitudes were safer."

"We can return to them."

"Yes."

"We are splendidly free. There's nothing to prevent us leaving Amara tomorrow."

"Isn't there?" he answered, fixing his eyes upon the minarets.

"What can there be?"

"Who knows?"

"What do you mean, Boris? Are you superstitious? But you reject the influence of place. Don't you remember—at Mogar?"

At the mention of the name his face clouded and she was sorry she had spoken it. Since they had left the hill above the mirage sea they had scarcely ever alluded to their night there. They had never once talked of the dinner in camp with De Trevignac and his men, or renewed their conversation in the tent on the subject of religion. But since that day, since her words about Androvsky's lack of perfect happiness even with her far out in the freedom of the desert, Domini had been conscious that, despite their great love for each other, their mutual passion for the solitude in which it grew each day more deep and more engrossing, wrapping their lives in fire and leading them on to the inner abodes of sacred understanding, there was at moments a barrier between them.

At first she had striven not to recognise its existence. She had striven to be blind. But she was essentially a brave woman and an almost fanatical lover of truth for its own sake, thinking that what is called an ugly truth is less ugly than the loveliest lie. To deny truth is to play the coward. She could not long do that. And so she quickly learned to face this truth with steady eyes and an unflinching heart.

At moments Androvsky retreated from her, his mind became remote—more, his heart was far from her, and, in its distant place, was suffering. Of that she was assured.

But she was assured, too, that she stood to him for perfection in human companionship. A woman's love is, perhaps, the only true divining rod. Domini knew instinctively where lay the troubled waters, what troubled them in their subterranean dwelling. She was certain that Androvsky was at peace with her but not with himself. She had said to him in the tent that she thought he sometimes felt far away from God. The conviction grew in her that even the satisfaction of his great human love was not enough for his nature. He demanded, sometimes imperiously, not only the peace that can be understood gloriously, but also that other peace which passeth understanding. And because he had it not he suffered.

In the Garden of Allah he felt a loneliness even though she was with him, and he could not speak with her of this loneliness. That was the barrier between them, she thought.

She prayed for him: in the tent by night, in the desert under the burning sky by day. When the muezzin cried from the minaret of some tiny village lost in the desolation of the wastes, turning to the north, south, east and west, and the Mussulmans bowed their shaved heads, facing towards Mecca, she prayed to the Catholics' God, whom she felt to be the God, too, of all the devout, of all the religions of the world, and to the Mother of God, looking towards Africa. She prayed that this man whom she loved, and who she believed was seeking, might find. And she felt that there was a strength, a passion in her prayers, which could not be rejected. She felt that some day Allah would show himself in his garden to the wanderer there. She dared to feel that because she dared to believe in the endless mercy of God. And when that moment came she felt, too, that their love—hers and his—for each other would be crowned. Beautiful and intense as it was it still lacked something. It needed to be encircled by the protecting love of a God in whom they both believed in the same way, and to whom they both were equally near. While she felt close to this love and he far from it they were not quite together.

There were moments in which she was troubled, even sad, but they passed. For she had a great courage, a great confidence. The hope that dwells like a flame in the purity of prayer comforted her.

"I love the solitudes," he said. "I love to have you to myself."

"If we lived always in the greatest city of the world it would make no difference," she said quietly. "You know that, Boris."

He bent over from his saddle and clasped her hand in his, and they rode thus up the great slope of the sands, with their horses close together.

The minarets of the city grew more distinct. They dominated the waste as the thought of Allah dominates the Mohammedan world. Presently, far away on the left, Domini and Androvsky saw hills of sand, clearly defined like small mountains delicately shaped. On the summits of these hills were Arab villages of the hue of bronze gleaming in the sun. No trees stood near them. But beyond them, much farther off, was the long green line of the palms of a large oasis. Between them and the riders moved slowly towards the minarets dark things that looked like serpents writhing through the sands. These were caravans coming into the city from long journeys. Here and there, dotted about in the immensity, were solitary horsemen, camels in twos and threes, small troops of donkeys. And all the things that moved went towards the minarets as if irresistibly drawn onwards by some strong influence that sucked them in from the solitudes of the whirlpool of human life.

Again Domini thought of the approach to London, and of the dominion of great cities, those octopus monsters created by men, whose tentacles are strong to seize and stronger still to keep. She was infected by Androvsky's dread of a changed life, and through her excitement, that pulsed with interest and curiosity, she felt a faint thrill of something that was like fear.

"Boris," she said, "I feel as if your thoughts were being conveyed to me by your touch. Perhaps the solitudes are best."

By a simultaneous impulse they pulled in their horses and listened. Sounds came to them over the sands, thin and remote. They could not tell what they were, but they knew that they heard something which suggested the distant presence of life.

"What is it?" said Domini.

"I don't know, but I hear something. It travels to us from the minarets."

They both leaned forward on their horses' necks, holding each other's hand.

"I feel the tumult of men," Androvsky said presently.

"And I. But it seems as if no men could have elected to build a city here."

"Here in the 'Belly of the desert,'" he said, quoting the Arabs' name for Amara.

"Boris"—she spoke in a more eager voice, clasping his hand strongly—"you remember the fumoir in Count Anteoni's garden. The place where it stood was the very heart of the garden."

"Yes."

"We understood each other there."

He pressed her hand without speaking.

"Amara seems to me the heart of the Garden of Allah. Perhaps—perhaps we shall——"

She paused. Her eyes were fixed upon his face.

"What, Domini?" he asked.

He looked expectant, but anxious, and watched her, but with eyes that seemed ready to look away from her at a word.

"Perhaps we shall understand each other even better there."

He looked down at the white sand.

"Better!" he repeated. "Could we do that?"

She did not answer. The far-off villages gleamed mysteriously on their little mountains, like unreal things that might fade away as castles fade in the fire. The sky above the minarets was changing in colour slowly. Its blue was being invaded by a green that was a sister colour. A curious light, that seemed to rise from below rather than to descend from above, was transmuting the whiteness of the sands. A lemon yellow crept through them, but they still looked cold and strange, and immeasurably vast. Domini fancied that the silence of the desert deepened so that, in it, they might hear the voices of Amara more distinctly.

"You know," she said, "when one looks out over the desert from a height, as we did from the tower of Beni-Mora, it seems to call one. There's a voice in the blue distance that seems to say, 'Come to me! I am here—hidden in my retreat, beyond the blue, and beyond the mirage, and beyond the farthest verge!'"

"Yes, I know."

"I have always felt, when we travelled in the desert, that the calling thing, the soul of the desert, retreated as I advanced, and still summoned me onward but always from an infinite distance."

"And I too, Domini."

"Now I don't feel that. I feel as if now we were coming near to the voice, as if we should reach it at Amara, as if there it would tell us its secret."

"Imagination!" he said.

But he spoke seriously, almost mystically. His voice was at odds with the word it said. She noticed that and was sure that he was secretly sharing her sensation. She even suspected that he had perhaps felt it first.

"Let us ride on," he said. "Do you see the change in the light? Do you see the green in the sky? It is cooler, too. This is the wind of evening."

Their hands fell apart and they rode slowly on, up the long slope of the sands.

Presently they saw that they had come out of the trackless waste and that though still a long way from the city they were riding on a desert road which had been trodden by multitudes of feet. There were many footprints here. On either side were low banks of sand, beaten into a rough symmetry by implements of men, and shallow trenches through which no water ran. In front of them they saw the numerous caravans, now more distinct, converging from left and right slowly to this great isle of the desert which stretched in a straight line to the minarets.

"We are on a highway," Domini said.

Androvsky sighed.

"I feel already as if we were in the midst of a crowd," he answered.

"Our love for peace oughtn't to make us hate our fellowmen!" she said. "Come, Boris, let us chase away our selfish mood!"

She spoke in a more cheerful voice and drew her rein a little tighter. Her horse quickened its pace.

"And think how our stay at Amara will make us love the solitudes when we return to them again. Contrast is the salt of life."

"You speak as if you didn't believe what you are saying."

She laughed.

"If I were ever inclined to tell you a lie," she said, "I should not dare to. Your mind penetrates mine too deeply."

"You could not tell me a lie."

"Do you hear the dogs barking?" she said, after a moment. "They are among those tents that are like flies on the sands around the city. That is the tribe of the Ouled Nails I suppose. Batouch says they camp here. What multitudes of tents! Those are the suburbs of Amara. I would rather live in them than in the suburbs of London. Oh, how far away we are, as if we were at the end of the world!"

Either her last words, or her previous change of manner to a lighter cheerfulness, almost a briskness, seemed to rouse Androvsky to a greater confidence, even to anticipation of possible pleasure.

"Yes. After all it is only the desert men who are here. Amara is their Metropolis, and in it we shall only see their life."

His horse plunged. He had touched it sharply with his heel.

"I believe you hate the thought of civilisation," she exclaimed.

"And you?"

"I never think of it. I feel almost as if I had never known it, and could never know it."

"Why should you? You love the wilds."

"They make my whole nature leap. Even when I was a child it was so. I remember once reading Maud. In it I came upon a passage—I can't remember it well, but it was about the red man—"

She thought for a moment, looking towards the city.

"I don't know how it is quite," she murmured. "'When the red man laughs by his cedar tree, and the red man's babe leaps beyond the sea'—something like that. But I know that it made my heart beat, and that I felt as if I had wings and were spreading them to fly away to the most remote places of the earth. And now I have spread my wings, and—it's glorious. Come, Boris!"

They put their horses to a canter, and soon drew near to the caravans. They had sent Batouch and Ali, who generally accompanied them, on with the rest of the camp. Both had many friends in Amara, and were eager to be there. It was obvious that they and all the attendants, servants and camel-men, thought of it as the provincial Frenchman thinks of Paris, as a place of all worldly wonders and delights. Batouch was to meet them at the entrance to the city, and when they had seen the marvels of its market-place was to conduct them to the tents which would be pitched on the sand-hills outside.

Their horses pulled as if they, too, longed for a spell of city life after the life of the wastes, and Domini's excitement grew. She felt vivid animal spirits boiling up within her, the sane and healthy sense that welcomes a big manifestation of the ceaseless enterprise and keen activity of a brotherhood of men. The loaded camels, the half-naked running drivers, the dogs sensitively sniffing, as if enticing smells from the city already reached their nostrils, the chattering desert merchants discussing coming gains, the wealthy and richly-dressed Arabs, mounted on fine horses, and staring with eyes that glittered up the broad track in search of welcoming friends, were sympathetic to her mood. Amara was sucking them all in together from the solitary places as quiet waters are sucked into the turmoils of a mill-race. Although still out in the sands they were already in the midst of a noise of life flowing to meet the roar of life that rose up at the feet of the minarets, which now looked tall and majestic in the growing beauty of the sunset.

They passed the caravans one by one, and came on to the crest of the long sand slope just as the sky above the city was flushing with a bright geranium red. The track from here was level to the city wall, and was no longer soft with sand. A broad, hard road rang beneath their horses' hoofs, startling them with a music that was like a voice of civilised life. Before them, under the red sky, they saw a dark blue of distant houses, towers, and great round cupolas glittering like gold. Forests of palm trees lay behind, the giant date palms for which Amara was famous. To the left stretched the sands dotted with gleaming Arab villages, to the right again the sands covered with hundreds of tents among which quantities of figures moved lively like ants, black on the yellow, arched by the sky that was alive with lurid colour, red fading into gold, gold into primrose, primrose into green, green into the blue that still told of the fading day. And to this multi-coloured sky, from the barbaric city and the immense sands in which it was set, rose a great chorus of life; voices of men and beasts, cries of naked children playing Cora on the sand-hills, of mothers to straying infants, shrill laughter of unveiled girls wantonly gay, the calls of men, the barking of multitudes of dogs,—the guard dogs of the nomads that are never silent night or day,—the roaring of hundreds of camels now being unloaded for the night, the gibbering of the mad beggars who roam perpetually on the outskirts of the encampments like wolves seeking what they may devour, the braying of donkeys, the whinnying of horses. And beneath these voices of living things, foundation of their uprising vitality, pulsed barbarous music, the throbbing tomtoms that are for ever heard in the lands of the sun, fetish music that suggests fatalism, and the grand monotony of the enormous spaces, and the crude passion that repeats itself, and the untiring, sultry loves and the untired, sultry languors of the children of the sun.

The silence of the sands, which Domini and Androvsky had known and loved, was merged in the tumult of the sands. The one had been mystical, laying the soul to rest. The other was provocative, calling the soul to wake. At this moment the sands themselves seemed to stir with life and to cry aloud with voices.

"The very sky is barbarous to-night!" Domini exclaimed. "Did you ever see such colour, Boris?"

"Over the minarets it is like a great wound," he answered.

"No wonder men are careless of human life in such a land as this. All the wildness of the world seems to be concentrated here. Amara is like the desert city of some tremendous dream. It looks wicked and unearthly, but how superb!"

"Look at those cupolas!" he said. "Are there really Oriental palaces here? Has Batouch told us the truth for once?"

"Or less than the truth? I could believe anything of Amara at this moment. What hundreds of camels! They remind me of Arba, our first halting-place." She looked at him and he at her.

"How long ago that seems!" she said.

"A thousand years ago."

They both had a memory of a great silence, in the midst of this growing tumult in which the sky seemed now to take its part, calling with the voices of its fierce colours, with the voices of the fires that burdened it in the west.

"Silence joined us, Domini," Androvsky said.

"Yes. Perhaps silence is the most beautiful voice in the world."

Far off, along the great white road, they saw two horsemen galloping to meet them from the city, one dressed in brilliant saffron yellow, the other in the palest blue, both crowned with large and snowy turbans.

"Who can they be?" said Domini, as they drew near. "They look like two princes of the Sahara."

Then she broke into a merry laugh.

"Batouch! and Ali!" she exclaimed.

The servants galloped up then, without slackening speed deftly wheeled their horses in a narrow circle, and were beside them, going with them, one on the right hand, the other on the left.

"Bravo!" Domini cried, delighted at this feat of horsemanship. "But what have you been doing? You are transformed!"

"Madame, we have been to the Bain Maure," replied Batouch, calmly, swelling out his broad chest under his yellow jacket laced with gold. "We have had our heads shaved till they are smooth and beautiful as polished ivory. We have been to the perfumer"—he leaned confidentially towards her, exhaling a pungent odour of amber—"to the tailor, to the baboosh bazaar!"—he kicked out a foot cased in a slipper that was bright almost as a gold piece—"to him who sells the cherchia." He shook his head till the spangled muslin that flowed about it trembled. "Is it not right that your servants should do you honour in the city?"

"Perfectly right," she answered with a careful seriousness. "I am proud of you both."

"And Monsieur?" asked Ali, speaking in his turn.

Androvsky withdrew his eyes from the city, which was now near at hand.

"Splendid!" he said, but as if attending to the Arabs with difficulty. "You are splendid."

As they came towards the old wall which partially surrounds Amara, and which rises from a deep natural moat of sand, they saw that the ground immediately before the city which, from a distance, had looked almost fiat, was in reality broken up into a series of wavelike dunes, some small with depressions like deep crevices between them, others large with summits like plateaux. These dunes were of a sharp lemon yellow in the evening light, a yellow that was cold in its clearness, almost setting the teeth on edge. They went away into great rolling slopes of sand on which the camps of the nomads and the Ouled Nails were pitched, some near to, some distant from, the city, but they themselves were solitary. No tents were pitched close to the city, under the shadow of its wall. As Androvsky spoke, Domini exclaimed:

"Boris—-look! That is the most extraordinary thing I have ever seen!"

She put her hand on his arm. He obeyed her eyes and looked to his right, to the small lemon-yellow dunes that were close to them. At perhaps a hundred yards from the road was a dune that ran parallel with it. The fire of the sinking sun caught its smooth crest, and above this crest, moving languidly towards the city, were visible the heads and busts of three women, the lower halves of whose bodies were concealed by the sand of the farther side of the dune. They were dancing-girls. On their heads, piled high with gorgeous handkerchiefs, were golden crowns which glittered in the sun-rays, and tufts of scarlet feathers. Their oval faces, covered with paint, were partially concealed by long strings of gold coins, which flowed from their crowns down over their large breasts and disappeared towards their waists, which were hidden by the sand. Their dresses were of scarlet, apple-green and purple silks, partially covered by floating shawls of spangled muslin. Beneath their crowns and handkerchiefs burgeoned forth plaits of false hair decorated with coral and silver ornaments. Their hands, which they held high, gesticulating above the crest of the dune, were painted blood red.

These busts and heads glided slowly along in the setting sun, and presently sank down and vanished into some depression of the dunes. For an instant one blood-red hand was visible alone, waving a signal above the sand to someone unseen. Its fingers fluttered like the wings of a startled bird. Then it, too, vanished, and the sharply-cold lemon yellow of the dunes stretched in vivid loneliness beneath the evening sky.

To both of them this brief vision of women in the sand brought home the solitude of the desert and the barbarity of the life it held, the ascetism of this supreme manifestation of Nature and the animal passion which fructifies in its heart.

"Do you know what that made me think of, Boris?" Domini said, as the red hand with its swiftly-moving fingers disappeared. "You'll smile, perhaps, and I scarcely know why. It made me think of the Devil in a monastery."

Androvsky did not smile. Nor did he answer. She felt sure that he, too, had been strongly affected by that glimpse of Sahara life. His silence gave Batouch an opportunity of pouring forth upon them a flood of poetical description of the dancing-girls of Amara, all of whom he seemed to know as intimate friends. Before he ceased they came into the city.

The road was still majestically broad. They looked with interest at the first houses, one on each side of the way. And here again they were met by the sharp contrast which was evidently to be the keynote of Amara. The house on the left was European, built of white stone, clean, attractive, but uninteresting, with stout white pillars of plaster supporting an arcade that afforded shade from the sun, windows with green blinds, and an open doorway showing a little hall, on the floor of which lay a smart rug glowing with gay colours; that on the right, before which the sand lay deep as if drifted there by some recent wind of the waste, was African and barbarous, an immense and rambling building of brown earth, brushwood and palm, windowless, with a flat-terraced roof, upon which were piled many strange-looking objects like things collapsed, red and dark green, with fringes and rosettes, and tall sticks of palm pointing vaguely to the sky.

"Why, these are like our palanquin!" Domini said.

"They are the palanquins of the dancing-girls, Madame," said Batouch. "That is the cafe of the dancers, and that"—he pointed to the neat house opposite—"is the house of Monsieur the Aumonier of Amara."

"Aumonier," said Androvsky, sharply. "Here!"

He paused, then added more quietly:

"What should he do here?"

"But, Monsieur, he is for the French officers."

"There are French officers?"

"Yes, Monsieur, four or five, and the commandant. They live in the palace with the cupolas."

"I forgot," Androvsky said to Domini. "We are not out of the sphere of French influence. This place looks so remote and so barbarous that I imagined it given over entirely to the desert men."

"We need not see the French," she said. "We shall be encamped outside in the sand."

"And we need not stay here long," he said quickly.

"Boris," she asked him, half in jest, half in earnest, "shall we buy a desert island to live in?"

"Let us buy an oasis," he said. "That would be the perf—the safest life for us."

"The safest?"

"The safest for our happiness. Domini, I have a horror of the world!" He said the last words with a strong, almost fierce, emphasis.

"Had you it always, or only since we have been married?"

"I—perhaps it was born in me, perhaps it is part of me. Who knows?"

He had relapsed into a gravity that was heavy with gloom, and looked about him with eyes that seemed to wish to reject all that offered itself to their sight.

"I want the desert and you in it," he said. "The lonely desert, with you."

"And nothing else?"

"I want that. I cannot have that taken from me."

He looked about him quickly from side to side as they rode up the street, as if he were a scout sent in advance of an army and suspected ambushes. His manner reminded her of the way he had looked towards the tower as they rode into Mogar. And he had connected that tower with the French. She remembered his saying to her that it must have been built for French soldiers. As they rode into Mogar he had dreaded something in Mogar. The strange incident with De Trevignac had followed. She had put it from her mind as a matter of small, or no, importance, had resolutely forgotten it, had been able to forget it in their dream of desert life and desert passion. But the entry into a city for the moment destroyed the dreamlike atmosphere woven by the desert, recalled her town sense, that quick-wittedness, that sharpness of apprehension and swiftness of observation which are bred in those who have long been accustomed to a life in the midst of crowds and movement, and changing scenes and passing fashions. Suddenly she seemed to herself to be reading Androvsky with an almost merciless penetration, which yet she could not check. He had dreaded something in Mogar. He dreaded something here in Amara. An unusual incident—for the coming of a stranger into their lives out of their desolation of the sand was unusual—had followed close upon the first dread. Would another such incident follow upon this second dread? And of what was this dread born?

Batouch drew her attention to the fact that they were coming to the marketplace, and to the curious crowds of people who were swarming out of the tortuous, narrow streets into the main thoroughfare to watch them pass, or to accompany them, running beside their horses. She divined at once, by the passionate curiosity their entry aroused, that he had misspent his leisure in spreading through the city lying reports of their immense importance and fabulous riches.

"Batouch," she said, "you have been talking about us."

"No, Madame, I merely said that Madame is a great lady in her own land, and that Monsieur—"

"I forbid you ever to speak about me, Batouch," said Androvsky, brusquely.

He seemed worried by the clamour of the increasing mob that surrounded them. Children in long robes like night-gowns skipped before them, calling out in shrill voices. Old beggars, with diseased eyes and deformed limbs, laid filthy hands upon their bridles and demanded alms. Impudent boys, like bronze statuettes suddenly endowed with a fury of life, progressed backwards to keep them full in view, shouting information at them and proclaiming their own transcendent virtues as guides. Lithe desert men, almost naked, but with carefully-covered heads, strode beside them, keeping pace with the horses, saying nothing, but watching them with a bright intentness that seemed to hint at unutterable designs. And towards them, through the air that seemed heavy and almost suffocating now that they were among buildings, and through clouds of buzzing flies, came the noise of the larger tumult of the market-place.

Looking over the heads of the throng Domini saw the wide road opening out into a great space, with the first palms of the oasis thronging on the left, and a cluster of buildings, many with small cupolas, like down-turned white cups, on the right. On the farther side of this space, which was black with people clad for the most in dingy garments, was an arcade jutting out from a number of hovel-like houses, and to the right of them, where the market-place, making a wide sweep, continued up hill and was hidden from her view, was the end of the great building whose gilded cupolas they had seen as they rode in from the desert, rising above the city with the minarets of its mosques.

The flies buzzed furiously about the horses' heads and flanks, and the people buzzed more furiously, like larger flies, about the riders. It seemed to Domini as if the whole city was intent upon her and Androvsky, was observing them, considering them, wondering about them, was full of a thousand intentions all connected with them.

When they gained the market-place the noise and the watchful curiosity made a violent crescendo. It happened to be market day and, although the sun was setting, buying and selling were not yet over. On the hot earth over which, whenever there is any wind from the desert, the white sand grains sift and settle, were laid innumerable rugs of gaudy colours on which were disposed all sorts of goods for sale; heavy ornaments for women, piles of burnouses, haiks, gandouras, gaiters of bright red leather, slippers, weapons—many jewelled and gilt, or rich with patterns in silver—pyramids of the cords of camels' hair that bind the turbans of the desert men, handkerchiefs and cottons of all the colours of the rainbow, cheap perfumes in azure flasks powdered with golden and silver flowers and leaves, incense twigs, panniers of henna to dye the finger-nails of the faithful, innumerable comestibles, vegetables, corn, red butcher's meat thickly covered with moving insects, pale yellow cakes crisp and shining, morsels of liver spitted on skewers—which, cooked with dust of keef, produce a dreamy drunkenness more overwhelming even than that produced by haschish—musical instruments, derboukas, guitars, long pipes, and strange fiddles with two strings, tomtoms, skins of animals with heads and claws, live birds, tortoise backs, and plaits of false hair.

The sellers squatted on the ground, their brown and hairy legs crossed, calmly gazing before them, or, with frenzied voices and gestures, driving bargains with the buyers, who moved to and fro, treading carelessly among the merchandise. The tellers of fates glided through the press, fingering the amulets that hung upon their hearts. Conjurors proclaimed the merits of their miracles, bawling in the faces of the curious. Dwarfs went to and fro, dressed in bright colours with green and yellow turbans on their enormous heads, tapping with long staves, and relating their deformities. Water-sellers sounded their gongs. Before pyramids of oranges and dates, neatly arranged in patterns, sat boys crying in shrill voices the luscious virtues of their fruits. Idiots, with blear eyes and protending under-lips, gibbered and whined. Dogs barked. Bakers hurried along with trays of loaves upon their heads. From the low and smoky arcades to right and left came the reiterated grunt of negroes pounding coffee. A fanatic was roaring out his prayers. Arabs in scarlet and blue cloaks passed by to the Bain Maure, under whose white and blue archway lounged the Kabyle masseurs with folded, muscular arms. A marabout, black as a coal, rode on a white horse towards the great mosque, followed by his servant on foot.

Native soldiers went by to the Kasba on the height, or strolled down towards the Cafes Maures smoking cigarettes. Circles of grave men bent over card games, dominoes and draughts—called by the Arabs the Ladies' Game. Khodjas made their way with dignity towards the Bureau Arabe. Veiled women, fat and lethargic, jingling with ornaments, waddled through the arches of the arcades, carrying in their painted and perspiring hands blocks of sweetmeats which drew the flies. Children played in the dust by little heaps of refuse, which they stirred up into clouds with their dancing, naked feet. In front, as if from the first palms of the oasis, rose the roar of beaten drums from the negroes' quarter, and from the hill-top at the feet of the minarets came the fierce and piteous noise that is the leit-motif of the desert, the multitudinous complaining of camels dominating all other sounds.