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.

As Domini and Androvsky rode into this whirlpool of humanity, above which the sky was red like a great wound, it flowed and eddied round them, making them its centre. The arrival of a stranger-woman was a rare, if not an unparalleled, event in Amara, and Batouch had been very busy in spreading the fame of his mistress.

“Madame should dismount,” said Batouch. “Ali will take the horses, and I will escort Madame and Monsieur up the hill to the place of the fountain. Shabah will be there to greet Madame.”

“What an uproar!” Domini exclaimed, half laughing, half confused. “Who on earth is Shabah?”

“Shabah is the Caid of Amara,” replied Batouch with dignity. “The greatest man of the city. He awaits Madame by the fountain.” Domini cast a glance at Androvsky.

“Well?” she said.

He shrugged his shoulders like a man who thinks strife useless and the moment come for giving in to Fate.

“The monster has opened his jaws for us,” he said, forcing a laugh. “We had better walk in, I suppose. But—O Domini!—the silence of the wastes!”

“We shall know it again. This is only for the moment. We shall have all its joy again.”

“Who knows?” he said, as he had said when they were riding up the sand slope. “Who knows?”

Then they got off their horses and were taken by the crowd.