The Fayyūm is a great and superb oasis situated upon a plateau of the desert of Libya, wonderfully fertile, rich, and bland, with a splendid climate, and springs of sweet waters which, carefully directed into a network of channels, spreading like wrinkles over the face of the land, carry life and a smiling of joy through the crowding palms, the olive and fruit trees, the corn and the brakes of the sugar-cane. The Egyptians often call it "the country of the roses," and they say that everything grows there. The fellah thinks of it as of a Paradise where man can only be happy. Every Egyptian who has ever set the butt end of a gun against his shoulder sighs to be among its multitudinous game. The fisherman longs to let down his net into the depths of its sacred lake. The land-owner would rather have a few acres between Sennoures and Beni SuwÊf than many in the other parts of Egypt. The man who is amorous yearns after the legendary beauty of its unveiled women, with their delicately tattooed chins, their huge eyes, and their slim and sinuous bodies. And scarcely is there upon the Nile a brown boy whose face will not gleam and grow expressive with desire at the sound of the words "El-Fayyūm."

It is a land of Goshen, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land of the heart's desire, this green tract of sweet and gracious fertility to which the Bahr-YÛsuf is kind.

But to Mrs. Armine it was from the very first a hateful land.

Their camp was pitched on a piece of brown waste ground, close to a runlet of water, near a palm-grove that shut out from them the native houses of the great village or country town of Sennoures. The land which Nigel's fellahÎn were reclaiming and had reclaimed—for much of it was already green with luxuriant crops—was farther away, where the oasis runs flush with the pale yellow, or honey-coloured, or sometimes spectral grey sands of the desert of Libya. But Nigel, when he first came to the Fayyūm, had first gone into camp among the palms of Sennoures, and there had heard the Egyptian Pan in the night; and he wanted to renew certain impressions, to feel them decked out, as it were, with novel graces now that he was no longer lonely; so he had ordered the camp to be pitched by the little stream that he knew, in order to savour fully the great change in his life.

The railway from Cairo goes to Sennoures, so they came by train, and arrived rather late in the afternoon. Three days later the Sacred Carpet was to depart from Cairo on its journey to Mecca, and at Madinat-al-Fayyūm, and at other stations along the route, there were throngs of natives assembled to bid farewell to the pilgrims who were departing to accompany it and to worship at the Holy Places. Small and cheap flags of red edged with a crude yellow fluttered over the doors or beneath the hanging shutters of many dwellings, and the mild and limpid atmosphere was full of the chanting of the songs of pilgrimage in high and nasal voices. Once at a roadside station there was for some unexplained reason a long delay, during which Mrs. Armine sat at the window and looked out upon the crowd, while Nigel got down to stretch his legs and see the people at closer quarters. Loud and almost angry hymns rose up not only from some of the starting pilgrims, but also from many envious ones who would never be "hÂjjee." Presently, just before the carriage door, a strange little group was formed; a broad, sturdy man with a brutal, almost white-skinned face garnished with a bristling black beard but no moustache, who wore the green turban, an elderly man with staring, sightless eyes, carrying a long staff, and three heavily veiled women, in thin robes partially covered with black, loose-sleeved cloaks, whose eyelids were thickly adorned with kohl, whose hands were dyed a deep orange-colour with the henna, and who rattled and clinked as they moved and the barbaric ornaments of silver and gold which circled their arms and ankles shifted upon their small-boned limbs. The blind man was singing loudly. The women, staring vacantly, held the corners of their cloaks mechanically to their already covered faces. The man with the bristling beard talked violently with friends, and occasionally, interrupting himself abruptly, joined almost furiously in the blind man's hymn. On the platform lay a few bundles wrapped in gaudy cloths and handkerchiefs. From outside the station came the perpetual twittering of women.

As Mrs. Armine looked at these people Nigel came up.

"They are going to Mecca," he said. "You see those bundles? The poor things will be away for months, and that is all they are taking."

The blind man shouted his hymn. Fixing his small and vicious eyes upon Mrs. Armine, the man with the beard joined in. A horn sounded. Nigel got into the carriage, and the train moved slowly out of the station. Mrs. Armine stared at the man with the beard, who kept his eyes upon her, always roaring his hymn, until he was out of sight. His expression was actively wicked. Yet he was starting at great expense with infinite hardships before him, to visit and pray at the Holy Places. She remembered how Baroudi had stared at her while he sang.

"What strange people they are!" said Nigel.

"Yes, they are very strange."

"One can never really know them. There is an eternal barrier between us, the great stone wall of their faith. To-day all the world seems going on pilgrimage. We too, Ruby!"

Even at Sennoures, when they got down, the station was crowded, and the air was alive with hymns. Ibrahim met them, and Hamza was outside the fence with the donkey for Mrs. Armine. He was joining in the singing, and his long eyes held a flame. But when he saw Mrs. Armine, his voice ceased, and he looked at her in silence. As she greeted him, she felt an odd mingled sensation of fear and of relief. He was a link between her and Baroudi, yet he looked a fatal figure, and she could never rid herself of the idea that some harm, or threatening of great danger, would come to her through him.

As they left the station and rode towards the palm-trees, the noise of the hymns grew less, but even when they came in sight of the tents the voices of the pilgrims were still faintly audible, stealing among the wrinkled trunks, through the rich, rankly growing herbage, over the running waters, to make a faint music of religion about their nomad's home.

But after sunset the voices died away. The train had carried the pilgrims towards Cairo, and, trooping among the palm-trees, or along the alleys of Sennoures, the crowd dispersed to their homes.

And a silence fell over this opulent land, which already Mrs. Armine hated.

She hated it as a woman hates the place which in her life is substituted for the place where is the man who has grasped her and holds her fast, whatever the dividing distance between them.

That night, as she sat in the tent, she saw before her the orange garden that bordered the Nile, the wild geraniums making a hedge about the pavilion of bamboo, she heard the loud voice of the fellah by the shadÛf. Was it raised in protest or warning? Did she care? Could she care? Could any voice stop her from following the voice that called her on? And what was it in Baroudi that made his summons to her so intense, so arbitrary? What was it in him that governed her so completely? Now that he was far away she could ask herself a question that she could not ask when she was near him.

He was splendid in physique, but so were other men whom she had known and ruled, not been ruled by. He was bold, perhaps indifferent at bottom, though sometimes, in certain moments, on the surface far from indifferent. Others had been like that, and she had not loved them. He was intensely passionate. (But Nigel was passionate, though he kept a strong hand upon the straining life of his nature.) He was very strange.

He was very strange. She understood and could not understand him. He was very strange, and full of secret violence in which religion and vice went hand in hand. And his religion was not canting, nor was his vice ashamed. The one was as bold and as determined as the other. She seemed to grasp him, and did not grasp him. Such a failure piques a woman, and out of feminine pique often rises feminine passion. He was intent upon her. Yet part of him escaped her. Did he love her? She did not know. She knew he drove her perpetually on towards greater desire of him. Yet even that driving action might not be deliberate on his part. He seemed too careless to plot, and yet she knew that he plotted. Was he now at AswÂn with some dancing-girl of his own people? Not one word had she heard of him since the day which had preceded the night of the storm when the ginnee had come in the wind. Abruptly he had gone out of her life. At their last meeting he had said nothing about any further intercourse. Yet she knew that he meant to meet her again, that he meant—what? His deep silence did not tell her. She could only wonder and suspect, and govern herself to preserve the bloom of her beauty, and, looking at Ibrahim and Hamza, trust to his intriguing cleverness to "manage things somehow." Yet how could they be managed? She looked at the future and felt hopeless. What was to come? She knew that even if, driven by passion, she were ready to take some mad, decisive step, Baroudi would not permit her to take it. He had never told her so, but instinctively she knew it. If he meant anything, it was something quite different from that. He must mean something, he must mean much; or why was Hamza out here in the green depths of the FayyÛm?

Nigel had gone to Sennoures to order provisions, leaving her to rest after the journey from Cairo. She got up from the sofa in the sitting-room tent, which was comfortable in a very simple way but not at all luxurious, went to the opening, and looked out.

Night had fallen, the stars were out, and a small moon, round which was a luminous ring of vapour, lit up the sky, which was partially veiled by thin wreaths of cloud. The densely growing palms looked like dark wands tufted with enormous bunches of feathers. Among them she saw a light. It came from a tent pitched at some distance, and occupied by a middle-aged German lady who was travelling with a handsome young Arab. They had passed on the road close by the camp when the Armines were having tea, and Nigel had asked Ibrahim about them. Mrs. Armine remembered the look on his face when, having heard their history, he had said to her, "Those are the women who ruin the Europeans' prestige out here." She had answered, "That is a thing I could never understand!" and had begun to talk of other matters, but she had not forgotten his look. If—certain things—she might be afraid of Nigel.

Dogs barked in the distance. She heard a faint noise from the runlet of water in front of the camp. From the heavily-cumbered ground, smothered with growing things except just where the tents were pitched, rose a smell that seemed to her autumnal. Along the narrow road that led between the palms and the crops to the town, came two of their men leading in riding camels. A moment later a bitter snarling rose up, mingling with the barking of the dogs and the sound of the water. The camels were being picketed for the night's repose. The atmosphere was not actually cold, but there was no golden warmth in the air, and the wonderful and exquisitely clean dryness of Upper Egypt was replaced by a sort of rich humidity, now that the sun was gone. The vapour around the moon, the smell of the earth, the distant sound of the dogs and the near sound of the water, the feeling of dew which hung wetly about her, and the gleam of the light from that tent distant among the palm-trees, made Mrs. Armine feel almost unbearably depressed. She longed with all her soul to be back at Luxor. And it seemed to her incredible that any one could be happy here. Yet Nigel was perfectly happy and every Egyptian longed to be in the Fayyūm.

The sound of the name seemed to her desolate and sad.

But Baroudi meant something. Even now she saw Hamza, straight as a reed, coming down the shadowy track from the town. She must make Nigel happy—and wait. She must make Nigel very happy, lest she should fall below Baroudi's estimate of her, lest she should prove herself less clever, less subtle, than she felt him to be.

Hamza's shadowy figure crossed a little bridge of palm-wood that spanned the runlet of water, turned and came over the waste ground noiselessly into the camp. He was walking with naked feet. He came to the men's tent, where, in a row, with their faces towards the tent door, the camels were lying, eating barley that had been spread out for them on bits of sacking. When he reached it he stood still. He was shrouded in a black abÂyeh.

"Hamza!"

Mrs. Armine had called to him softly from the tent-door.

"Hamza!"

He flitted across the open space that divided the tents, and stood beside her.

She had never had any conversation with Hamza. She had never heard him say any English word yet but "yes." But to-night she had an uneasy longing to get upon terms with him. For he was Baroudi's emissary in the camp of the Fayyūm.

"Are you glad to be in my service, Hamza?" she said. "Are you glad to come with us to the Fayyūm?"

"Yes," he said.

She hesitated. There was always something in his appearance, in his manner, which seemed to fend her off from him. She always felt as if with his mind and soul he was pushing her away. At last she said:

"Do you like me, Hamza?"

"Yes," he replied.

"You have been to Mecca, haven't you, with Mahmoud Baroudi?"

"Yes."

He muttered the word this time. His hands had been hanging at his sides, concealed in his loose sleeves, but now they were moved, and one went quickly up to his breast, and stayed there.

"What are you doing?" Mrs. Armine said, with a sudden sharpness; and, moved by an impulse she could not have explained, she seized the hand at his heart, and pulled it towards her. By the light of the young moon she saw that it was grasping tightly a sort of tassel made of cowries which hung round his neck by a string. He covered the shells with his fingers, and showed his teeth. She let his hand go.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Yes," he answered.

She turned and went into the tent, and he flitted away like a shadow.

That night, when Nigel came in from Sennoures, she said to him:

"What is the meaning of those tassels made of shells that Egyptians sometimes wear round their necks?"

"What sort of shells?" he asked.

"Cowries."

"Cowries—oh, they're supposed to be a charm against the evil eye and bad spirits. Where have you seen one?"

"On a donkey-boy up the Nile, at Luxor."

She changed the conversation.

They were sitting at dinner on either side of a folding table that rested on iron legs. Beneath their feet was a gaudy carpet, very thick and of a woolly texture, and so large that it completely concealed the hard earth within the circle of the canvas, which had a lining of deep red, covered with an elaborate pattern in black, white, yellow, blue, and green. The tent was lit up by an oil-lamp, round which several night moths revolved, occasionally striking against the globe of glass. The tent-door was open, and just outside stood Ibrahim, with his head and face wrapped up in a shawl with flowing fringes, to see that the native waiter did his duty properly. Through the opening came the faint sound of running water and the distant noise of the persistent barking of dogs. The opulent smell of the rich and humid land penetrated into the tent and mingled with the smell from the dishes.

Nigel's face was radiant. They had got right away from modern civilization into the wilds, and, manlike, he felt perfectly happy. He looked at Ruby, seeking a reflection of his joy, yet a little doubtful, too, realizing that this was an experiment for her, while to him it was an old story to which she was supplying the beautiful interest of love. She answered his look with one that set his mind at rest, which thrilled him, yet which only drew from him the prosaic remark:

"The cook isn't so bad, is he, Ruby?"

"Excellent," she said. "I don't know when I've had such a capital dinner. How can he do it all in a tent?"

She moved her chair.

"This table's a little bit low," she said. "But I've no business to be so tall. In camp one ought to be the regulation size."

"Have you been uncomfortable?" he exclaimed, anxiously.

"No, no—not really. It doesn't matter."

"I'll have it altered, made higher somehow, to-morrow. We must have everything right, as we're going to live in camp for some time."

She got up.

"I won't take coffee to-night," she said. "It would be too horrid to sleep badly in a tent."

"You'll see, you'll sleep splendidly out here. Every one does in camp. One is always in the air, and one gets thoroughly done by the evening."

"Yes, but I shan't be working so hard as you do."

She went to the tent-door.

"How long shall we be in the Fayyūm?" she asked, carelessly. "How long were you in it last year?"

"Off and on for nearly six months."

She said nothing. He struck a match and lit a cigar.

"But of course now it's different," he said. "If you like it, we can stay on, and if you don't we can go back presently to the villa."

"And your work?"

"I ought to be here, so I hope you will like it, Ruby."

He joined her at the tent-door.

"But this winter I mean to live for you, and to try to make you happy. We'll just see how you like being here. Do you think you will like it? Do you feel, as I do, the joy of being in such perfect freedom?"

He put his arm inside hers.

"It's a tremendous change for you, but is it a happy change?" he asked.

"It's wonderful here," she answered; "but it's so strange that I shall have to get accustomed to it."

As she spoke, she was longing, till her soul seemed to ache, to take the early morning train to Cairo. Accustomed for years to have all her caprices obeyed, all her whims indulged by men, she did not know how she was going to endure this situation, which a passionate love alone could have made tolerable. And the man by her side had that passionate love which made the dreary FayyÛm his Heaven. She could almost have struck him because he was so happy.

"There's one thing I must say I should love to do before we go away from Egypt," she said, slowly.

She seemed to be led or even forced to say it.

"What's that?"

"I should love to go up the Nile on a dahabeeyah."

"Then you shall. When we leave here and pass through Cairo, I'll pick out a boat, and we'll send it up to Luxor, go on board there, and then sail for Assouan. But you mustn't think we shall get a Loulia."

He laughed.

"Millionaires like Baroudi don't hire out their boats," he added. "And if they did, I couldn't pay their price while Etchingham's so badly let."

Her forehead was wrinkled by a frown. She hated to hear a man who loved her speak of his poverty. It had become a habit of her mind to think that no man had a right to love her unless he could give her exactly what she wanted.

"Shall we go out, Ruby?"

"Very well."

They stepped out on to the waste ground. His hand was still on her arm, and he led her down to the stream. The young moon was already setting. The starry sky was flecked here and there with gossamer veils of cloud. A heavy dew was falling upon the dense growths of the oasis, and in the distance of the palm-grove, where gleamed the lamp from the tent of the German lady and the young Arab, a faint and pearly mist was rising. Nigel drew in his breath, then let it out. It went in vapour from his lips.

"We've left the dryness of Upper Egypt," he said. "This is the country of fertility, the country where things grow. The dews at night are splendid. But wait a moment. I'll get you a cloak. I'm your maid, remember."

He fetched a cloak and wrapped it round her.

"I suppose the Loulia is far up the river," he said. "Perhaps at Assouan. I wonder if we shall see Baroudi some day again. I think he's a good sort of fellow; but after all, one can never get really quite in touch with an Eastern. I used to think one could. I used to swear it, but—"

He shook his head and puffed at his cigar. Quite unconsciously he had taken the husband's tone. There was something in the very timbre of his voice which seemed to assume Ruby's agreement. She longed to startle him, to say she was far more in touch with an Eastern than she could ever be with him, but she thought of the dahabeeyah, the Nile, the getting away from here.

"To tell the truth," she said, "I have always felt that. There is an impassable barrier between East and West."

She looked at the distant light among the palm-trees. Then, with contempt, she added:

"Those who try to overleap it must be mad, or worse."

Nigel's face grew stern.

"Yes," he said. "I loathe condemnation. But there are some things which really are unforgivable."

He swung out his arm towards the light.

"And that is one of them. I hate to see that light so near us. It is the only blot on perfection."

"Don't look at it," she murmured.

His unusual expression of vigorous, sane disgust, and almost of indignation, partly fascinated and partly alarmed her.

"Don't think of it. It has nothing to do with us. Hark! What's that?"

A clear note, like the note of a little flute, sounded from the farther side of the stream, was reiterated many times. Nigel's face relaxed. The sternness vanished from it, and was replaced by an ardent expression that made it look almost like the face of a romantic boy.

"It's—it's the Egyptian Pan by the water," he whispered.

His arm stole round her waist.

"Come a little nearer—gently. That's it! Now listen!"

The little, clear, frail sound was repeated again and again.

The young moon went down behind the palm-trees. Its departure, making the night more dark, made the distant light in the grove seem more clear, more definite, more brilliant.

It drew the eyes, it held the eyes of Bella Donna as the Egyptian Pan piped on.