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The Garden of Allah

by Robert Hichens · English · Gutenberg #3637 · 1,106,790 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Garden of Allah

Author: Robert Hichens


        
Release date: April 13, 2006 [eBook #3637]
                Most recently updated: January 24, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3637

Credits: Dagny, John Bickers and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GARDEN OF ALLAH ***




THE GARDEN OF ALLAH

BY

ROBERT HICHENS


GROSSET & DUNLAP
Publishers — New York.
1904


     CONTENTS

     BOOK I.   PRELUDE
     BOOK II.  THE VOICE OF PRAYER
     BOOK III. THE GARDEN
     BOOK IV.  THE JOURNEY
     BOOK V.   THE REVELATION
     BOOK VI.  THE JOURNEY BACK




THE GARDEN OF ALLAH




BOOK I. PRELUDE



CHAPTER I

The fatigue caused by a rough sea journey, and, perhaps, the
consciousness that she would have to be dressed before dawn to catch the
train for Beni-Mora, prevented Domini Enfilden from sleeping. There was
deep silence in the Hotel de la Mer at Robertville. The French officers
who took their pension there had long since ascended the hill of Addouna
to the barracks. The cafés had closed their doors to the drinkers and
domino players. The lounging Arab boys had deserted the sandy Place de
la Marine. In their small and dusky bazaars the Israelites had reckoned
up the takings of the day, and curled themselves up in gaudy quilts
on their low divans to rest. Only two or three _gendarmes_ were still
about, and a few French and Spaniards at the Port, where, moored against
the wharf, lay the steamer _Le Général Bertrand_, in which Domini had
arrived that evening from Marseilles.

In the hotel the fair and plump Italian waiter, who had drifted to North
Africa from Pisa, had swept up the crumbs from the two long tables
in the _salle-à-manger_, smoked a thin, dark cigar over a copy of the
_Dépêche Algérienne_, put the paper down, scratched his blonde head, on
which the hair stood up in bristles, stared for a while at nothing in
the firm manner of weary men who are at the same time thoughtless and
depressed, and thrown himself on his narrow bed in the dusty corner of
the little room on the stairs near the front door. Madame, the landlady,
had laid aside her front and said her prayer to the Virgin. Monsieur,
the landlord, had muttered his last curse against the Jews and drunk
his last glass of rum. They snored like honest people recruiting their
strength for the morrow. In number two Suzanne Charpot, Domini’s maid,
was dreaming of the Rue de Rivoli.

But Domini with wide-open eyes, was staring from her big, square pillow
at the red brick floor of her bedroom, on which stood various trunks
marked by the officials of the Douane. There were two windows in the
room looking out towards the Place de la Marine, below which lay the
station. Closed _persiennes_ of brownish-green, blistered wood protected
them. One of these windows was open. Yet the candle at Domini’s bedside
burnt steadily. The night was warm and quiet, without wind.

As she lay there, Domini still felt the movement of the sea. The passage
had been a bad one. The ship, crammed with French recruits for the
African regiments, had pitched and rolled almost incessantly for
thirty-one hours, and Domini and most of the recruits had been ill.
Domini had had an inner cabin, with a skylight opening on to the lower
deck, and heard above the sound of the waves and winds their groans and
exclamations, rough laughter, and half-timid, half-defiant conversations
as she shook in her berth. At Marseilles she had seen them come on
board, one by one, dressed in every variety of poor costume, each one
looking anxiously around to see what the others were like, each one
carrying a mean yellow or black bag or a carefully-tied bundle. On the
wharf stood a Zouave, in tremendous red trousers and a fez, among great
heaps of dull brown woollen rugs. And as the recruits came hesitatingly
along he stopped them with a sharp word, examined the tickets they held
out, gave each one a rug, and pointed to the gangway that led from the
wharf to the vessel. Domini, then leaning over the rail of the upper
deck, had noticed the different expressions with which the recruits
looked at the Zouave. To all of them he was a phenomenon, a mystery of
Africa and of the new life for which they were embarking. He stood there
impudently and indifferently among the woollen rugs, his red fez pushed
well back on his short, black hair cut _en brosse_, his bronzed face
twisted into a grimace of fiery contempt, throwing, with his big and
muscular arms, rug after rug to the anxious young peasants who filed
before him. They all gazed at his legs in the billowing red trousers;
some like children regarding a Jack-in-the-box which had just sprung
up into view, others like ignorant, but superstitious, people who
had unexpectedly come upon a shrine by the wayside. One or two seemed
disposed to laugh nervously, as the very stupid laugh at anything
they see for the first time. But fear seized them. They refrained
convulsively and shambled on to the gangway, looking sideways, like
fowls, and holding their rugs awkwardly to their breasts with their
dirty, red hands.

To Domini there was something pitiful in the sight of all these lads,
uprooted from their homes in France, stumbling helplessly on board this
ship that was to convey them to Africa. They crowded together. Their
poor bundles and bags jostled one against the other. With their clumsy
boots they trod on each other’s feet. And yet all were lonely strangers.
No two in the mob seemed to be acquaintances. And every lad, each in
his different way, was furtively on the defensive, uneasily wondering
whether some misfortune might not presently come to him from one of
these unknown neighbours.

A few of the recruits, as they came on board, looked up at Domini as she
leant over the rail; and in all the different coloured and shaped eyes
she thought she read a similar dread and nervous hope that things might
turn out pretty well for them in the new existence that had to be faced.
The Zouave, wholly careless or unconscious of the fact that he was
an incarnation of Africa to these raw peasants, who had never before
stirred beyond the provinces where they were born, went on taking
the tickets, and tossing the woollen rugs to the passing figures, and
pointing ferociously to the gangway. He got very tired of his task
towards the end, and showed his fatigue to the latest comers, shoving
their rugs into their arms with brusque violence. And when at length the
wharf was bare he spat on it, rubbed his short-fingered, sunburnt hands
down the sides of his blue jacket, and swaggered on board with the air
of a dutiful but injured man who longed to do harm in the world. By this
time the ship was about to cast off, and the recruits, ranged in line
along the bulwarks of the lower deck, were looking in silence towards
Marseilles, which, with its tangle of tall houses, its forest of masts,
its long, ugly factories and workshops, now represented to them the
whole of France. The bronchial hoot of the siren rose up menacingly.
Suddenly two Arabs, in dirty white burnouses and turbans bound with
cords of camel’s hair, came running along the wharf. The siren hooted
again. The Arabs bounded over the gangway with grave faces. All the
recruits turned to examine them with a mixture of superiority and
deference, such as a schoolboy might display when observing the
agilities of a tiger. The ropes fell heavily from the posts of the
quay into the water, and were drawn up dripping by the sailors, and _Le
General Bertrand_ began to move out slowly among the motionless ships.

Domini, looking towards the land with the vague and yet inquiring glance
of those who are going out to sea, noticed the church of Notre dame de
la Garde, perched on its high hill, and dominating the noisy city,
the harbour, the cold, grey squadrons of the rocks and Monte Cristo’s
dungeon. At the time she hardly knew it, but now, as she lay in bed in
the silent inn, she remembered that, keeping her eyes upon the church,
she had murmured a confused prayer to the Blessed Virgin for the
recruits. What was the prayer? She could scarcely recall it. A woman’s
petition, perhaps, against the temptations that beset men shifting for
themselves in far-off and dangerous countries; a woman’s cry to a woman
to watch over all those who wander.

When the land faded, and the white sea rose, less romantic
considerations took possession of her. She wished to sleep, and drank a
dose of a drug. It did not act completely, but only numbed her senses.
Through the long hours she lay in the dark cabin, looking at the faint
radiance that penetrated through the glass shutters of the skylight.
The recruits, humanised and drawn together by misery, were becoming
acquainted. The incessant murmur of their voices dropped down to her,
with the sound of the waves, and of the mysterious cries and creaking
shudders that go through labouring ships. And all these noises seemed to
her hoarse and pathetic, suggestive, too, of danger.

When they reached the African shore, and saw the lights of houses
twinkling upon the hills, the pale recruits were marshalled on the white
road by Zouaves, who met them from the barracks of Robertville. Already
they looked older than they had looked when they embarked. Domini saw
them march away up the hill. They still clung to their bags and bundles.
Some of them, lifting shaky voices, tried to sing in chorus. One of
the Zouaves angrily shouted to them to be quiet. They obeyed, and
disappeared heavily into the shadows, staring about them anxiously at
the feathery palms that clustered in this new and dark country, and at
the shrouded figures of Arabs who met them on the way.

The red brick floor was heaving gently, Domini thought. She found
herself wondering how the cane chair by the small wardrobe kept its
footing, and why the cracked china basin in the iron washstand, painted
bright yellow, did not stir and rattle. Her dressing-bag was open. She
could see the silver backs and tops of the brushes and bottles in it
gleaming. They made her think suddenly of England. She had no idea why.
But it was too warm for England. There, in the autumn time, an open
window would let in a cold air, probably a biting blast. The wooden
shutter would be shaking. There would be, perhaps, a sound of rain. And
Domini found herself vaguely pitying England and the people mewed up in
it for the winter. Yet how many winters she had spent there, dreaming of
liberty and doing dreary things--things without savour, without meaning,
without salvation for brain or soul. Her mind was still dulled to a
certain extent by the narcotic she had taken. She was a strong and
active woman, with long limbs and well-knit muscles, a clever fencer,
a tireless swimmer, a fine horsewoman. But to-night she felt almost
neurotic, like one of the weak or dissipated sisterhood for whom “rest
cures” are invented, and by whom bland doctors live. That heaving red
floor continually emphasised for her her present feebleness. She hated
feebleness. So she blew out the candle and, with misplaced energy,
strove resolutely to sleep. Possibly her resolution defeated its object.
She continued in a condition of dull and heavy wakefulness till the
darkness became intolerable to her. In it she saw perpetually the long
procession of the pale recruits winding up the hill of Addouna with
their bags and bundles, like spectres on a way of dreams. Finally she
resolved to accept a sleepless night. She lit her candle again and saw
that the brick floor was no longer heaving. Two of the books that
she called her “bed-books” lay within easy reach of her hand. One was
Newman’s _Dream of Gerontius_, the other a volume of the Badminton
Library. She chose the former and began to read.

Towards two o’clock she heard a long-continued rustling. At first she
supposed that her tired brain was still playing her tricks. But the
rustling continued and grew louder. It sounded like a noise coming from
something very wide, and spread out as a veil over an immense surface.
She got up, walked across the floor to the open window and unfastened
the _persiennes_. Heavy rain was falling. The night was very black,
and smelt rich and damp, as if it held in its arms strange offerings--a
merchandise altogether foreign, tropical and alluring. As she stood
there, face to face with a wonder that she could not see, Domini forgot
Newman. She felt the brave companionship of mystery. In it she divined
the beating pulses, the hot, surging blood of freedom.

She wanted freedom, a wide horizon, the great winds, the great sun, the
terrible spaces, the glowing, shimmering radiance, the hot, entrancing
moons and bloomy, purple nights of Africa. She wanted the nomad’s fires
and the acid voices of the Kabyle dogs. She wanted the roar of the
tom-toms, the dash of the cymbals, the rattle of the negroes’ castanets,
the fluttering, painted figures of the dancers. She wanted--more than
she could express, more than she knew. It was there, want, aching in
her heart, as she drew into her nostrils this strange and wealthy
atmosphere.

When Domini returned to her bed she found it impossible to read any more
Newman. The rain and the scents coming up out of the hidden earth of
Africa had carried her mind away, as if on a magic carpet. She was
content now to lie awake in the dark.

Domini was thirty-two, unmarried, and in a singularly independent--some
might have thought a singularly lonely--situation. Her father, Lord
Rens, had recently died, leaving Domini, who was his only child, a
large fortune. His life had been a curious and a tragic one. Lady Rens,
Domini’s mother, had been a great beauty of the gipsy type, the daughter
of a Hungarian mother and of Sir Henry Arlworth, one of the most
prominent and ardent English Catholics of his day. A son of his became a
priest, and a famous preacher and writer on religious subjects. Another
child, a daughter, took the veil. Lady Rens, who was not clever,
although she was at one time almost universally considered to have the
face of a muse, shared in the family ardour for the Church, but was far
too fond of the world to leave it. While she was very young she met Lord
Rens, a Lifeguardsman of twenty-six, who called himself a Protestant,
but who was really quite happy without any faith. He fell madly in love
with her and, in order to marry her, became a Catholic, and even a very
devout one, aiding his wife’s Church by every means in his power, giving
large sums to Catholic charities, and working, with almost fiery zeal,
for the spread of Catholicism in England.

Unfortunately, his new faith was founded only on love for a human being,
and when Lady Rens, who was intensely passionate and impulsive, suddenly
threw all her principles to the winds, and ran away with a Hungarian
musician, who had made a furor one season in London by his magnificent
violin-playing, her husband, stricken in his soul, and also wounded
almost to the death in his pride, abandoned abruptly the religion of the
woman who had converted and betrayed him.

Domini was nineteen, and had recently been presented at Court when the
scandal of her mother’s escapade shook the town, and changed her father
in a day from one of the happiest to one of the most cynical, embittered
and despairing of men. She, who had been brought up by both her parents
as a Catholic, who had from her earliest years been earnestly educated
in the beauties of religion, was now exposed to the almost frantic
persuasions of a father who, hating all that he had formerly loved,
abandoning all that, influenced by his faithless wife, he had formerly
clung to, wished to carry his daughter with him into his new and most
miserable way of life. But Domini, who, with much of her mother’s dark
beauty, had inherited much of her quick vehemence and passion, was also
gifted with brains, and with a certain largeness of temperament and
clearness of insight which Lady Rens lacked. Even when she was still
quivering under the shock and shame of her mother’s guilt and her own
solitude, Domini was unable to share her father’s intensely egoistic
view of the religion of the culprit. She could not be persuaded that the
faith in which she had been brought up was proved to be a sham because
one of its professors, whom she had above all others loved and trusted,
had broken away from its teachings and defied her own belief. She would
not secede with her father; but remained in the Church of the mother she
was never to see again, and this in spite of extraordinary and dogged
efforts on the part of Lord Rens to pervert her to his own Atheism. His
mind had been so warped by the agony of his heart that he had come to
feel as if by tearing his only child from the religion he had been led
to by the greatest sinner he had known, he would be, in some degree at
least, purifying his life tarnished by his wife’s conduct, raising again
a little way the pride she had trampled in the dust.

Her uncle, Father Arlworth, helped Domini by his support and counsel in
this critical period of her life, and Lord Rens in time ceased from the
endeavour to carry his child with him as companion in his tragic journey
from love and belief to hatred and denial. He turned to the violent
occupations of despair, and the last years of his life were hideous
enough, as the world knew and Domini sometimes suspected. But though
Domini had resisted him she was not unmoved or wholly uninfluenced by
her mother’s desertion and its effect upon her father. She remained a
Catholic, but she gradually ceased from being a devout one. Although
she had seemed to stand firm she had in truth been shaken, if not in
her belief, in a more precious thing--her love. She complied with the
ordinances, but felt little of the inner beauty of her faith. The effort
she had made in withstanding her father’s assault upon it had exhausted
her. Though she had had the strength to triumph, at the moment, a
partial and secret collapse was the price she had afterwards to pay.
Father Arlworth, who had a subtle understanding of human nature, noticed
that Domini was changed and slightly hardened by the tragedy she had
known, and was not surprised or shocked. Nor did he attempt to force
her character back into its former way of beauty. He knew that to do
so would be dangerous, that Domini’s nature required peace in which to
become absolutely normal once again after the shock it had sustained.

When Domini was twenty-one he died, and her safest guide, the one who
understood her best, went from her. The years passed. She lived with her
embittered father; and drifted into the unthinking worldliness of the
life of her order. Her home was far from ideal. Yet she would not marry.
The wreck of her parents’ domestic life had rendered her mistrustful of
human relations. She had seen something of the terror of love, and could
not, like other women, regard it as safety and as sweetness. So she put
it from her, and strove to fill her life with all those lesser things
which men and women grasp, as the Chinese grasp the opium pipe, those
things which lull our comprehension of realities to sleep.

When Lord Rens died, still blaspheming, and without any of the
consolations of religion, Domini felt the imperious need of change. She
did not grieve actively for the dead man. In his last years they had
been very far apart, and his death relieved her from the perpetual
contemplation of a tragedy. Lord Rens had grown to regard his daughter
almost with enmity in his enmity against her mother’s religion, which
was hers. She had come to think of him rather with pity than with love.
Yet his death was a shock to her. When he could speak no more, but only
lie still, she remembered suddenly just what he had been before her
mother’s flight. The succeeding period, long though it had been and
ugly, was blotted out. She wept for the poor, broken life now ended,
and was afraid for his future in the other world. His departure into the
unknown roused her abruptly to a clear conception of how his action and
her mother’s had affected her own character. As she stood by his bed
she wondered what she might have been if her mother had been true, her
father happy, to the end. Then she felt afraid of herself, recognising
partially, and for the first time, how all these years had seen her long
indifference. She felt self-conscious too, ignorant of the real meaning
of life, and as if she had always been, and still remained, rather a
complicated piece of mechanism than a woman. A desolate enervation of
spirit descended upon her, a sort of bitter, and yet dull, perplexity.
She began to wonder what she was, capable of what, of how much good or
evil, and to feel sure that she did not know, had never known or tried
to find out. Once, in this state of mind, she went to confession. She
came away feeling that she had just joined with the priest in a farce.
How can a woman who knows nothing about herself make anything but a
worthless confession? she thought. To say what you have done is not
always to say what you are. And only what you are matters eternally.

Presently, still in this perplexity of spirit, she left England with
only her maid as companion. After a short tour in the south of Europe,
with which she was too familiar, she crossed the sea to Africa, which
she had never seen. Her destination was Beni-Mora. She had chosen it
because she liked its name, because she saw on the map that it was an
oasis in the Sahara Desert, because she knew it was small, quiet, yet
face to face with an immensity of which she had often dreamed. Idly she
fancied that perhaps in the sunny solitude of Beni-Mora, far from
all the friends and reminiscences of her old life, she might learn to
understand herself. How? She did not know. She did not seek to know.
Here was a vague pilgrimage, as many pilgrimages are in this world--the
journey of the searcher who knew not what she sought. And so now she lay
in the dark, and heard the rustle of the warm African rain, and smelt
the perfumes rising from the ground, and felt that the unknown was very
near her--the unknown with all its blessed possibilities of change.



CHAPTER II

Long before dawn the Italian waiter rolled off his little bed, put a cap
on his head, and knocked at Domini’s and at Suzanne Charpot’s doors.

It was still dark, and still raining, when the two women came out to get
into the carriage that was to take them to the station. The place de la
Marine was a sea of mud, brown and sticky as nougat. Wet palms dripped
by the railing near a desolate kiosk painted green and blue. The sky was
grey and low. Curtains of tarpaulin were let down on each side of the
carriage, and the coachman, who looked like a Maltese, and wore a round
cap edged with pale yellow fur, was muffled up to the ears. Suzanne’s
round, white face was puffy with fatigue, and her dark eyes, generally
good-natured and hopeful, were dreary, and squinted slightly, as she
tipped the Italian waiter, and handed her mistress’s dressing-bag and
rug into the carriage. The waiter stood an the discoloured step, yawning
from ear to ear. Even the tip could not excite him. Before the carriage
started he had gone into the hotel and banged the door. The horses
trotted quickly through the mud, descending the hill. One of the
tarpaulin curtains had been left unbuttoned by the coachman. It flapped
to and fro, and when its movement was outward Domini could catch
short glimpses of mud, of glistening palm-leaves with yellow stems, of
gas-lamps, and of something that was like an extended grey nothingness.
This was the sea. Twice she saw Arabs trudging along, holding their
skirts up in a bunch sideways, and showing legs bare beyond the knees.
Hoods hid their faces. They appeared to be agitated by the weather,
and to be continually trying to plant their naked feet in dry places.
Suzanne, who sat opposite to Domini, had her eyes shut. If she had not
from time to time passed her tongue quickly over her full, pale lips she
would have looked like a dead thing. The coquettish angle at which her
little black hat was set on her head seemed absurdly inappropriate
to the occasion and her mood. It suggested a hat being worn at some
festival. Her black, gloved hands were tightly twisted together in her
lap, and she allowed her plump body to wag quite loosely with the motion
of the carriage, making no attempt at resistance. She had really the
appearance of a corpse sitting up. The tarpaulin flapped monotonously.
The coachman cried out in the dimness to his horses like a bird,
prolonging his call drearily, and then violently cracking his whip.
Domini kept her eyes fixed on the loose tarpaulin, so that she might not
miss one of the wet visions it discovered by its reiterated movement.
She had not slept at all, and felt as if there was a gritty dryness
close behind her eyes. She also felt very alert and enduring, but not
in the least natural. Had some extraordinary event occurred; had the
carriage, for instance, rolled over the edge of the road into the sea,
she was convinced that she could not have managed to be either surprised
or alarmed, If anyone had asked her whether she was tired she would
certainly have answered “No.”

Like her mother, Domini was of a gipsy type. She stood five feet ten,
had thick, almost coarse and wavy black hair that was parted in the
middle of her small head, dark, almond-shaped, heavy-lidded eyes, and a
clear, warmly-white skin, unflecked with colour. She never flushed under
the influence of excitement or emotion. Her forehead was broad and low.
Her eyebrows were long and level, thicker than most women’s. The shape
of her face was oval, with a straight, short nose, a short, but rather
prominent and round chin, and a very expressive mouth, not very small,
slightly depressed at the corners, with perfect teeth, and red lips
that were unusually flexible. Her figure was remarkably athletic, with
shoulders that were broad in a woman, and a naturally small waist. Her
hands and feet were also small. She walked splendidly, like a Syrian,
but without his defiant insolence. In her face, when it was in repose,
there was usually an expression of still indifference, some thought of
opposition. She looked her age, and had never used a powderpuff in her
life. She could smile easily and easily become animated, and in her
animation there was often fire, as in her calmness there was sometimes
cloud. Timid people were generally disconcerted by her appearance, and
her manner did not always reassure them. Her obvious physical strength
had something surprising in it, and woke wonder as to how it had been,
or might be, used. Even when her eyes were shut she looked singularly
wakeful.

Domini and Suzanne got to the station of Robertville much too early.
The large hall in which they had to wait was miserably lit, blank and
decidedly cold. The ticket-office was on the left, and the room was
divided into two parts by a broad, low counter, on which the heavy
luggage was placed before being weighed by two unshaven and hulking men
in blue smocks. Three or four Arab touts, in excessively shabby European
clothes and turbans, surrounded Domini with offers of assistance. One,
the dirtiest of the group, with a gaping eye-socket, in which there
was no eye, succeeded by his passionate volubility and impudence in
attaching himself to her in a sort of official capacity. He spoke
fluent, but faulty, French, which attracted Suzanne, and, being
abnormally muscular and active, in an amazingly short time got hold
of all their boxes and bags and ranged them on the counter. He then
indulged in a dramatic performance, which he apparently considered
likely to rouse into life and attention the two unshaven men in smocks,
who were smoking cigarettes, and staring vaguely at the metal sheet on
which the luggage was placed to be weighed. Suzanne remained expectantly
in attendance, and Domini, having nothing to do, and seeing no bench to
rest on, walked slowly up and down the hall near the entrance.

It was now half-past four in the morning, and in the air Domini fancied
that she felt the cold breath of the coming dawn. Beyond the opening of
the station, as she passed and repassed in her slow and aimless walk,
she saw the soaking tarpaulin curtains of the carriage she had just left
glistening in the faint lamp-light. After a few minutes the Arabs she
had noticed on the road entered. Their brown, slipperless feet were
caked with sticky mud, and directly they found themselves under shelter
in a dry place they dropped the robes they had been holding up, and,
bending down, began to flick it off on to the floor with their delicate
fingers. They did this with extraordinary care and precision, rubbed the
soles of their feet repeatedly against the boards, and then put on their
yellow slippers and threw back the hoods which had been drawn over their
heads.

A few French passengers straggled in, yawning and looking irritable.
The touts surrounded them, with noisy offers of assistance. The men in
smocks still continued to smoke and to stare at the metal sheet on the
floor. Although the luggage now extended in quite a long line upon the
counter they paid no attention to it, or to the violent and reiterated
cries of the Arabs who stood behind it, anxious to earn a tip by getting
it weighed and registered quickly. Apparently they were wrapped in
savage dreams. At length a light shone through the small opening of the
ticket-office, the men in smocks stirred and threw down their cigarette
stumps, and the few travellers pressed forward against the counter,
and pointed to their boxes with their sticks and hands. Suzanne Charpot
assumed an expression of attentive suspicion, and Domini ceased
from walking up and down. Several of the recruits came in hastily,
accompanied by two Zouaves. They were wet, and looked dazed and tired
out. Grasping their bags and bundles they went towards the platform. A
train glided slowly in, gleaming faintly with lights. Domini’s trunks
were slammed down on the weighing machine, and Suzanne, drawing out her
purse, took her stand before the shining hole of the ticket-office.

In the wet darkness there rose up a sound like a child calling out an
insulting remark. This was followed immediately by the piping of a horn.
With a jerk the train started, passed one by one the station lamps, and,
with a steady jangling and rattling, drew out into the shrouded country.
Domini was in a wretchedly-lit carriage with three Frenchmen, facing
the door which opened on to the platform. The man opposite to her was
enormously fat, with a coal-black beard growing up to his eyes. He wore
black gloves and trousers, a huge black cloth hat, and a thick black
cloak with a black buckle near the throat. His eyes were shut, and his
large, heavy head drooped forward. Domini wondered if he was travelling
to the funeral of some relative. The two other men, one of whom looked
like a commercial traveller, kept shifting their feet upon the hot-water
tins that lay on the floor, clearing their throats and sighing loudly.
One of them coughed, let down the window, spat, drew the window up, sat
sideways, put his legs suddenly up on the seat and groaned. The train
rattled more harshly, and shook from side to side as it got up speed.
Rain streamed down the window-panes, through which it was impossible to
see anything.

Domini still felt alert, but an overpowering sensation of dreariness had
come to her. She did not attribute this sensation to fatigue. She did
not try to analyse it. She only felt as if she had never seen or heard
anything that was not cheerless, as if she had never known anything that
was not either sad, or odd, or inexplicable. What did she remember? A
train of trifles that seemed to have been enough to fill all her life;
the arrival of the nervous and badly-dressed recruits at the wharf,
their embarkation, their last staring and pathetic look at France,
the stormy voyage, the sordid illness of almost everyone on board, the
approach long after sundown to the small and unknown town, of which it
was impossible to see anything clearly, the marshalling of the recruits
pale with sickness, their pitiful attempt at cheerful singing, angrily
checked by the Zouaves in charge of them, their departure up the hill
carrying their poor belongings, the sleepless night, the sound of the
rain falling, the scents rising from the unseen earth. The tap of the
Italian waiter at the door, the damp drive to the station, the long wait
there, the sneering signal, followed by the piping horn, the jerking and
rattling of the carriage, the dim light within it falling upon the stout
Frenchman in his mourning, the streaming water upon the window-panes.
These few sights, sounds, sensations were like the story of a life to
Domini just then, were more, were like the whole of life; always
dull noise, strange, flitting, pale faces, and an unknown region
that remained perpeturally invisible, and that must surely be ugly or
terrible.

The train stopped frequently at lonely little stations. Domini looked
out, letting down the window for a moment. At each station she saw a
tiny house with a peaked roof, a wooden railing dividing the platform
from the country road, mud, grass bending beneath the weight of
water-drops, and tall, dripping, shaggy eucalyptus trees. Sometimes the
station-master’s children peered at the train with curious eyes, and
depressed-looking Arabs, carefully wrapped up, their mouths and chins
covered by folds of linen, got in and out slowly.

Once Domini saw two women, in thin, floating white dresses and spangled
veils, hurrying by like ghosts in the dark. Heavy silver ornaments
jangled on their ankles, above their black slippers splashed with mud.
Their sombre eyes stared out from circles of Kohl, and, with stained,
claret-coloured hands, whose nails were bright red, they clasped their
light and bridal raiment to their prominent breasts. They were escorted
by a gigantic man, almost black, with a zigzag scar across the left
side of his face, who wore a shining brown burnous over a grey woollen
jacket. He pushed the two women into the train as if he were pushing
bales, and got in after them, showing enormous bare legs, with calves
that stuck out like lumps of iron.

The darkness began to fade, and presently, as the grey light grew slowly
stronger, the rain ceased, and it was possible to see through the glass
of the carriage window.

The country began to discover itself, as if timidly, to Domini’s eyes.
She had recently noticed that the train was going very slowly, and she
could now see why. They were mounting a steep incline. The rich, damp
earth of the plains beyond Robertville, with its rank grass, its moist
ploughland and groves of eucalyptus, was already left behind. The train
was crawling in a cup of the hills, grey, sterile and abandoned,
without roads or houses, without a single tree. Small, grey-green bushes
flourished here and there on tiny humps of earth, but they seemed rather
to emphasise than to diminish the aspect of poverty presented by the
soil, over which the dawn, rising from the wet arms of night, shed a
cold and reticent illumination. By a gash in the rounded hills, where
the earth was brownish yellow, a flock of goats with flapping ears
tripped slowly, followed by two Arab boys in rags. One of the boys was
playing upon a pipe coverd with red arabesques. Domini heard two or
three bars of the melody. They were ineffably wild and bird-like,
very clear and sweet. They seemed to her to match exactly the pure and
ascetic light cast by the dawn over these bare, grey hills, and they
stirred her abruptly from the depressed lassitude in which the dreary
chances of recent travel had drowned her. She began, with a certain
faint excitement, to realise that these low, round-backed hills were
Africa, that she was leaving behind the sea, so many of whose waves
swept along European shores, that somewhere, beyond the broken and near
horizon line toward which the train was creeping, lay the great desert,
her destination, with its pale sands and desolate cities, its sunburnt
tribes of workers, its robbers, warriors and priests, its ethereal
mysteries of mirage, its tragic splendours of colour, of tempest and
of heat. A sense of a wider world than the compressed world into which
physical fatigue had decoyed her woke in her brain and heart. The little
Arab, playing carelessly upon his pipe with the red arabesques, was soon
invisible among his goats beside the dry water-course that was probably
the limit of his journeying, but Domini felt that like a musician at the
head of a procession he had played her bravely forward into the dawn and
Africa.

At Ah-Souf Domini changed into another train and had the carriage to
herself. The recruits had reached their destination. Hers was a longer
pilgramage and still towards the sun. She could not afterwards remember
what she thought about during this part of her journey. Subsequent
events so coloured all her memories of Africa that every fold of its
sun-dried soil was endowed in her mind with the significance of a living
thing. Every palm beside a well, every stunted vine and clambering
flower upon an _auberge_ wall, every form of hill and silhouette of
shadow, became in her heart intense with the beauty and the pathos she
used, as a child, to think must lie beyond the sunset.

And so she forgot.

A strange sense of leaving all things behind had stolen over her. She
was really fatigued by travel and by want of sleep, but she did not
know it. Lying back in her seat, with her head against the dirty white
covering of the shaking carriage, she watched the great change that was
coming over the land.

It seemed as if God were putting forth His hand to withdraw gradually
all things of His creation, all the furniture He had put into the great
Palace of the world; as if He meant to leave it empty and utterly naked.

So Domini thought.

First He took the rich and shaggy grass, and all the little flowers
that bloomed modestly in it. Then He drew away the orange groves, the
oleander and the apricot trees, the faithful eucalyptus with its pale
stems and tressy foliage, the sweet waters that fertilised the soil,
making it soft and brown where the plough seamed it into furrows, the
tufted plants and giant reeds that crowd where water is. And still,
as the train ran on, His gifts were fewer. At last even the palms
were gone, and the Barbary fig displayed no longer among the crumbling
boulders its tortured strength, and the pale and fantastic evolutions
of its unnatural foliage. Stones lay everywhere upon the pale yellow or
grey-brown earth. Crystals glittered in the sun like shallow jewels, and
far away, under clouds that were dark and feathery, appeared hard and
relentless mountains, which looked as if they were made of iron carved
into horrible and jagged shapes. Where they fell into ravines they
became black. Their swelling bosses and flanks, sharp sometimes as
the spines of animals, were steel coloured. Their summits were purple,
deepening where the clouds came down to ebony.

Journeying towards these terrible fastnesses were caravans on which
Domini looked with a heavy and lethargic interest. Many Kabyles, fairer
than she was, moved slowly on foot towards their rock villages.

Over the withered earth they went towards the distant mountains and the
clouds. The sun was hidden. The wind continued to rise. Sand found its
way in through the carriage windows. The mountains, as Domini saw them
more clearly, looked more gloomy, more unearthly. There was something
unnatural in their hard outlines, in the rigid mystery of their
innumerable clefts. That all these people should be journeying towards
them was pathetic, and grieved the imagination.

The wind seemed so cold, now the sun was hidden, that she had drawn both
the windows up and thrown a rug over her. She put her feet up on the
opposite seat, and half closed her eyes. But she still turned them
towards the glass on her left, and watched. It seemed to her
quite impossible that this shaking and slowly moving train had any
destination. The desolation of the country had become so absolute that
she could not conceive of anything but still greater desolation lying
beyond. She had no feeling that she was merely traversing a tract of
sterility. Her sensation was that she had passed the boundary of the
world God had created, and come into some other place, upon which He had
never looked and of which He had no knowledge.

Abruptly she felt as if her father had entered into some such region
when he forced his way out of his religion. And in this region he had
died. She had stood on the verge of it by his deathbed. Now she was in
it.

There were no Arabs journeying now. No tents huddled among the low
bushes. The last sign of vegetation was obliterated. The earth rose and
fell in a series of humps and depressions, interspersed with piles of
rock. Every shade of yellow and of brown mingled and flowed away towards
the foot of the mountains. Here and there dry water-courses showed their
teeth. Their crumbling banks were like the rind of an orange. Little
birds, the hue of the earth, with tufted crests, tripped jauntily among
the stones, fluttered for a few yards and alighted, with an air of
strained alertness, as if their minute bodies were full of trembling
wires. They were the only living things Domini could see.

She thought again of her father. In some such region as this his soul
must surely be wandering, far away from God.

She let down the glass.

The wind was really cold and blowing gustily. She drank it in as if
she were tasting a new wine, and she was conscious at once that she
had never before breathed such air. There was a wonderful, a startling
flavour in it, the flavour of gigantic spaces and of rolling leagues of
emptiness. Neither among mountains nor upon the sea had she ever found
an atmosphere so fiercely pure, clean and lively with unutterable
freedom. She leaned out to it, shutting her eyes. And now that she saw
nothing her palate savoured it more intensely. The thought of her father
fled from her. All detailed thoughts, all the minutia of the mind were
swept away. She was bracing herself to an encounter with something
gigantic, something unshackled, the being from whose lips this wonderful
breath flowed.

When two lovers kiss their breath mingles, and, if they really love,
each is conscious that in the breath of the loved one is the loved one’s
soul, coming forth from the temple of the body through the temple door.
As Domini leaned out, seeing nothing, she was conscious that in this
breath she drank there was a soul, and it seemed to her that it was the
soul which flames in the centre of things, and beyond. She could not
think any longer of her father as an outcast because he had abandoned a
religion. For all religions were surely here, marching side by side, and
behind them, background to them, there was something far greater than
any religion. Was it snow or fire? Was it the lawlessness of that which
has made laws, or the calm of that which has brought passion into being?
Greater love than is in any creed, or greater freedom than is in any
human liberty? Domini only felt that if she had ever been a slave at
this moment she would have died of joy, realising the boundless freedom
that circles this little earth.

“Thank God for it!” she murmured aloud.

Her own words woke her to a consciousness of ordinary things--or made
her sleep to the eternal.

She closed the window and sat down.

A little later the sun came out again, and the various shades of yellow
and of orange that played over the wrinkled earth deepened and glowed.
Domini had sunk into a lethargy so complete that, though not asleep, she
was scarcely aware of the sun. She was dreaming of liberty.

Presently the train slackened and stopped. She heard a loud chattering
of many voices and looked out. The sun was now shining brilliantly,
and she saw a station crowded with Arabs in white burnouses, who were
vociferously greeting friends in the train, were offering enormous
oranges for sale to the passengers, or were walking up and down gazing
curiously into the carriages, with the unblinking determination and
indifference to a return of scrutiny which she had already noticed and
thought animal. A guard came up, told her the place was El-Akbara, and
that the train would stay there ten minutes to wait for the train from
Beni-Mora. She decided to get out and stretch her cramped limbs. On
the platform she found Suzanne, looking like a person who had just been
slapped. One side of the maid’s face was flushed and covered with a
faint tracery of tiny lines. The other was greyish white. Sleep hung
in her eyes, over which the lids drooped as if they were partially
paralysed. Her fingers were yellow from peeling an orange, and her smart
little hat was cocked on one side. There were grains of sand on her
black gown, and when she saw her mistress she at once began to
compress her lips, and to assume the expression of obstinate patience
characteristic of properly-brought-up servants who find themselves
travelling far from home in outlandish places.

“Have you been asleep, Suzanne?”

“No, Mam’zelle.”

“You’ve had an orange?”

“I couldn’t get it down, Mam’zelle.”

“Would you like to see if you can get a cup of coffee here?”

“No, thank you, Mam’zelle. I couldn’t touch this Arab stuff.”

“We shall soon be there now.”

Suzanne made all her naturally small features look much smaller, glanced
down at her skirt, and suddenly began to shake the grains of sand from
it in an outraged manner, at the same time extending her left foot. Two
or three young Arabs came up and stood, staring, round her. Their eyes
were magnificent, and gravely observant. Suzanne went on shaking and
patting her skirt, and Domini walked away down the platform, wondering
what a French maid’s mind was like. Suzanne’s certainly had its
limitations. It was evident that she was horrified by the sight of bare
legs. Why?

As Domini walked along the platform among the fruit-sellers, the guides,
the turbaned porters with their badges, the staring children and the
ragged wanderers who thronged about the train, she thought of the desert
to which she was now so near. It lay, she knew, beyond the terrific
wall of rock that faced her. But she could see no opening. The towering
summits of the cliffs, jagged as the teeth of a wolf, broke crudely upon
the serene purity of the sky. Somewhere, concealed in the darkness of
the gorge at their feet, was the mouth from which had poured forth that
wonderful breath, quivering with freedom and with unearthly things. The
sun was already declining, and the light it cast becoming softened and
romantic. Soon there would be evening in the desert. Then there would
be night. And she would be there in the night with all things that the
desert holds.

A train of camels was passing on the white road that descended into the
shadow of the gorge. Some savage-looking men accompanied them, crying
continually, “Oosh! Oosh!” They disappeared, desert-men with their
desert-beasts, bound no doubt on some tremendous journey through the
regions of the sun. Where would they at last unlade the groaning camels?
Domini saw them in the midst of dunes red with the dying fires of the
west. And their shadows lay along the sands like weary things reposing.

She started when a low voice spoke to her in French, and, turning round,
saw a tall Arab boy, magnificently dressed in pale blue cloth trousers,
a Zouave jacket braided with gold, and a fez, standing near her. She was
struck by the colour of his skin, which was faint as the colour of _café
au lait_, and by the contrast between his huge bulk and his languid,
almost effeminate, demeanour. As she turned he smiled at her calmly, and
lifted one hand toward the wall of rock.

“Madame has seen the desert?” he asked.

“Never,” answered Domini.

“It is the garden of oblivion,” he said, still in a low voice, and
speaking with a delicate refinement that was almost mincing. “In the
desert one forgets everything; even the little heart one loves, and the
desire of one’s own soul.”

“How can that be?” asked Domini.

“Shal-lah. It is the will of God. One remembers nothing any more.”

His eyes were fixed upon the gigantic pinnacles of the rocks. There was
something fanatical and highly imaginative in their gaze.

“What is your name?” Domini asked.

“Batouch, Madame. You are going to Beni-Mora?”

“Yes, Batouch.”

“I too. To-night, under the mimosa trees, I shall compose a poem. It
will be addressed to Irena, the dancing-girl. She is like the little
moon when it first comes up above the palm trees.”

Just then the train from Beni-Mora ran into the station, and Domini
turned to seek her carriage. As she was coming to it she noticed, with
the pang of the selfish traveller who wishes to be undisturbed, that
a tall man, attended by an Arab porter holding a green bag, was at the
door of it and was evidently about to get in. He glanced round as Domini
came up, half drew back rather awkwardly as if to allow her to precede
him, then suddenly sprang in before her. The Arab lifted in the bag,
and the man, endeavouring hastily to thrust some money into his hand,
dropped the coin, which fell down between the step of the carriage
and the platform. The Arab immediately made a greedy dive after it,
interposing his body between Domini and the train; and she was obliged
to stand waiting while he looked for it, grubbing frantically in
the earth with his brown fingers, and uttering muffled exclamations,
apparently of rage. Meanwhile, the tall man had put the green bag up
on the rack, gone quickly to the far side of the carriage, and sat down
looking out of the window.

Domini was struck by the mixture of indecision and blundering haste
which he had shown, and by his impoliteness. Evidently he was not a
gentleman, she thought, or he would surely have obeyed his first impulse
and allowed her to get into the train before him. It seemed, too, as
if he were determined to be discourteous, for he sat with his shoulder
deliberately turned towards the door, and made no attempt to get his
Arab out of the way, although the train was just about to start. Domini
was very tired, and she began to feel angry with him, contemptuous too.
The Arab could not find the money, and the little horn now piped its
warning of departure. It was absolutely necessary for her to get in at
once if she did not mean to stay at El-Akbara. She tried to pass the
grovelling Arab, but as she did so he suddenly sprang up, jumped on
to the step of the carriage, and, thrusting his body half through the
doorway, began to address a torrent of Arabic to the passenger within.
The horn sounded again, and the carriage jerked backwards preparatory to
starting on its way to Beni-Mora.

Domini caught hold of the short European jacket the Arab was wearing,
and said in French:

“You must let me get in at once. The train is going.”

The man, however, intent on replacing the coin he had lost, took no
notice of her, but went on vociferating and gesticulating. The traveller
said something in Arabic. Domini was now very angry. She gripped the
jacket, exerted all her force, and pulled the Arab violently from the
door. He alighted on the platform beside her and nearly fell. Before he
had recovered himself she sprang up into the train, which began to
move at that very moment. As she got in, the man who had caused all the
bother was leaning forward with a bit of silver in his hand, looking as
if he were about to leave his seat. Domini cast a glance of contempt at
him, and he turned quickly to the window again and stared out, at the
same time putting the coin back into his pocket. A dull flush rose on
his cheek, but he attempted no apology, and did not even offer to fasten
the lower handle of the door.

“What a boor!” Domini thought as she bent out of the window to do it.

When she turned from the door, after securing the handle, she found the
carriage full of a pale twilight. The train was stealing into the gorge,
following the caravan of camels which she had seen disappearing. She
paid no more attention to her companion, and her feeling of acute
irritation against him died away for the moment. The towering cliffs
cast mighty shadows, the darkness deepened, the train, quickening its
speed, seemed straining forward into the arms of night. There was a
chill in the air. Domini drank it into her lungs again, and again
was startled, stirred, by the life and the mentality of it. She was
conscious of receiving it with passion, as if, indeed, she held her lips
to a mouth and drank some being’s very nature into hers. She forgot her
recent vexation and the man who had caused it. She forgot everything in
mere sensation. She had no time to ask, “Whither am I going?” She felt
like one borne upon a wave, seaward, to the wonder, to the danger,
perhaps, of a murmuring unknown. The rocks leaned forward; their teeth
were fastened in the sky; they enclosed the train, banishing the sun and
the world from all the lives within it. She caught a fleeting glimpse of
rushing waters far beneath her; of crumbling banks, covered with debris
like the banks of a disused quarry; of shattered boulders, grouped in a
wild disorder, as if they had been vomited forth from some underworld
or cast headlong from the sky; of the flying shapes of fruit trees,
mulberries and apricot trees, oleanders and palms; of dull yellow walls
guarding pools the colour of absinthe, imperturbable and still. A strong
impression of increasing cold and darkness grew in her, and the noises
of the train became hollow, and seemed to be expanding, as if they were
striving to press through the impending rocks and find an outlet
into space; failing, they rose angrily, violently, in Domini’s ears,
protesting, wrangling, shouting, declaiming. The darkness became like
the darkness of a nightmare. All the trees vanished, as if they fled in
fear. The rocks closed in as if to crush the train. There was a moment
in which Domini shut her eyes, like one expectant of a tremendous blow
that cannot be avoided.

She opened them to a flood of gold, out of which the face of a man
looked, like a face looking out of the heart of the sun.



CHAPTER III

It flashed upon her with the desert, with the burning heaps of carnation
and orange-coloured rocks, with the first sand wilderness, the first
brown villages glowing in the late radiance of the afternoon like carven
things of bronze, the first oasis of palms, deep green as a wave of the
sea and moving like a wave, the first wonder of Sahara warmth and Sahara
distance. She passed through the golden door into the blue country, and
saw this face, and, for a moment, moved by the exalted sensation of a
magical change in all her world, she looked at it simply as a new sight
presented, with the sun, the mighty rocks, the hard, blind villages, and
the dense trees, to her eyes, and connected it with nothing. It was part
of this strange and glorious desert region to her. That was all, for a
moment.

In the play of untempered golden light the face seemed pale. It was
narrow, rather long, with marked and prominent features, a nose with a
high bridge, a mouth with straight, red lips, and a powerful chin. The
eyes were hazel, almost yellow, with curious markings of a darker shade
in the yellow, dark centres that looked black, and dark outer circles.
The eyelashes were very long, the eyebrows thick and strongly curved.
The forehead was high, and swelled out slightly above the temples. There
was no hair on the face, which was closely shaved. Near the mouth were
two faint lines that made Domini think of physical suffering, and also
of mediaeval knights. Despite the glory of the sunshine there seemed to
be a shadow falling across the face.

This was all that Domini noticed before the spell of change and the
abrupt glory was broken, and she knew that she was staring into the face
of the man who had behaved so rudely at the station of El-Akbara. The
knowledge gave her a definite shock, and she thought that her expression
must have changed abruptly, for a dull flush rose on the stranger’s thin
cheeks and mounted to his rugged forehead. He glanced out of the window
and moved his hands uneasily. Domini noticed that they scarcely tallied
with his face. Though scrupulously clean, they looked like the hands of
a labourer, hard, broad, and brown. Even his wrists, and a small section
of his left forearm, which showed as he lifted his left hand from one
knee to the other, were heavily tinted by the sun. The spaces between
the fingers were wide, as they usually are in hands accustomed to
grasping implements, but the fingers themselves were rather delicate and
artistic.

Domini observed this swiftly. Then she saw that her neighbour was
unpleasantly conscious of her observation. This vexed her vaguely,
perhaps because even so trifling a circumstance was like a thin link
between them. She snapped it by ceasing to look at or think of him. The
window was down. A delicate and warm breeze drifted in, coming from
the thickets of the palms. In flashing out of the darkness of the gorge
Domini had had the sensation of passing into a new world and a new
atmosphere. The sensation stayed with her now that she was no longer
dreaming or giving the reins to her imagination, but was calmly herself.
Against the terrible rampart of rock the winds beat across the land of
the Tell. But they die there frustrated. And the rains journey thither
and fail, sinking into the absinthe-coloured pools of the gorge. And the
snows and even the clouds stop, exhausted in their pilgrimage. The gorge
is not their goal, but it is their grave, and the desert never sees
their burial. So Domini’s first sense of casting away the known
remained, and even grew, but now strongly and quietly. It was well
founded, she thought. For she looked out of the carriage window towards
the barrier she was leaving, and saw that on this side, guarding the
desert from the world that is not desert, it was pink in the evening
light, deepening here and there to rose colour, whereas on the far side
it had a rainy hue as of rocks in England. And there was a lustre of
gold in the hills, tints of glowing bronze slashed with a red line as
the heart of a wound, but recalling the heart of a flower. The folds of
the earth glistened. There was flame down there in the river bed. The
wreckage of the land, the broken fragments, gleamed as if braided with
precious things. Everywhere the salt crystals sparkled with the violence
of diamonds. Everywhere there was a strength of colour that hurled
itself to the gaze, unabashed and almost savage, the colour of summer
that never ceases, of heat that seldom dies, in a land where there is no
autumn and seldom a flitting cold.

Down on the road near the village there were people; old men playing
the “lady’s game” with stones set in squares of sand, women peeping from
flat roofs and doorways, children driving goats. A man, like a fair and
beautiful Christ, with long hair and a curling beard, beat on the ground
with a staff and howled some tuneless notes. He was dressed in red and
green. No one heeded him. A distant sound of the beating of drums rose
in the air, mingled with piercing cries uttered by a nasal voice. And
as if below it, like the orchestral accompaniment of a dramatic
solo, hummed many blending noises; faint calls of labourers in the
palm-gardens and of women at the wells; chatter of children in dusky
courts sheltered with reeds and pale-stemmed grasses; dim pipings of
homeward-coming shepherds drowned, with their pattering charges, in the
golden vapours of the west; soft twitterings of birds beyond brown walls
in green seclusions; dull barking of guard dogs; mutter of camel drivers
to their velvet-footed beasts.

The caravan which Domini had seen descending into the gorge reappeared,
moving deliberately along the desert road towards the south. A
watch-tower peeped above the palms. Doves were circling round it. Many
of them were white. They flew like ivory things above this tower of
glowing bronze, which slept at the foot of the pink rocks. On the left
rose a mass of blood-red earth and stone. Slanting rays of the sun
struck it, and it glowed mysteriously like a mighty jewel.

As Domini leaned out of the window, and the salt crystals sparkled to
her eyes, and the palms swayed languidly above the waters, and the rose
and mauve of the hills, the red and orange of the earth, streamed by
in the flames of the sun before the passing train like a barbaric
procession, to the sound of the hidden drums, the cry of the hidden
priest, and all the whispering melodies of these strange and unknown
lives, tears started into her eyes. The entrance into this land of flame
and colour, through its narrow and terrific portal, stirred her almost
beyond her present strength. The glory of this world mounted to her
heart, oppressing it. The embrace of Nature was so violent that it
crushed her. She felt like a little fly that had sought to wing its
way to the sun and, at a million miles’ distance from it, was being
shrivelled by its heat. When all the voices of the village fainted
away she was glad, although she strained her ears to hear their fading
echoes. Suddenly she knew that she was very tired, so tired that
emotions acted upon her as physical exertion acts upon an exhausted man.
She sat down and shut her eyes. For a long time she stayed with her eyes
shut, but she knew that on the windows strange lights were glittering,
that the carriage was slowly filling with the ineffable splendours of
the west. Long afterwards she often wondered whether she endowed the
sunset of that day with supernatural glories because she was so tired.
Perhaps the salt mountain of El-Alia did not really sparkle like the
celestial mountains in the visions of the saints. Perhaps the long chain
of the Aures did not really look as if all its narrow clefts had been
powdered with the soft and bloomy leaves of unearthly violets, and
the desert was not cloudy in the distance towards the Zibans with the
magical blue she thought she saw there, a blue neither of sky nor sea,
but like the hue at the edge of a flame in the heart of a wood fire. She
often wondered, but she never knew.

The sound of a movement made her look up. Her companion was changing his
place and going to the other side of the compartment. He walked softly,
no doubt with the desire not to disturb Domini. His back was towards her
for an instant, and she noticed that he was a powerful man, though
very thin, and that his gait was heavy. It made her think again of his
labourer’s hands, and she began to wonder idly what was his rank and
what he did. He sat down in the far corner on the same side as herself
and stared out of his window, crossing his legs. He wore large boots
with square toes, clumsy and unfashionable, but comfortable and good for
walking in. His clothes had obviously been made by a French tailor.
The stuff of them was grey and woolly, and they were cut tighter to
the figure than English clothes generally are. He had on a black silk
necktie, and a soft brown travelling hat dented in the middle. By the
way in which he looked out of the window, Domini judged that he, too,
was seeing the desert for the first time. There was something almost
passionately attentive in his attitude, something of strained eagerness
in that part of his face which she could see from where she was
sitting. His cheek was not pale, as she had thought at first, but brown,
obviously burnt by the sun of Africa. But she felt that underneath the
sunburn there was pallor. She fancied he might be a painter, and was
noting all the extraordinary colour effects with the definiteness of a
man who meant, perhaps, to reproduce them on canvas.

The light, which had now the peculiar, almost supernatural softness
and limpidity of light falling at evening from a declining sun in a hot
country, came full upon him, and brightened his hair. Domini saw that it
was brown with some chestnut in it, thick, and cut extremely short, as
if his head had recently been shaved. She felt convinced that he was not
French. He might be an Austrian, perhaps, or a Russian from the south of
Russia. He remained motionless in that attitude of profound observation.
It suggested great force not merely of body, but also of mind, an almost
abnormal concentration upon the thing observed. This was a man who
could surely shut out the whole world to look at a grain of sand, if he
thought it beautiful or interesting.

They were near Beni-Mora now. Its palms appeared far off, and in the
midst of them a snow-white tower. The Sahara lay beyond and around it,
rolling away from the foot of low, brown hills, that looked as if
they had been covered with a soft powder of bronze. A long spur of
rose-coloured mountains stretched away towards the south. The sun was
very near his setting. Small, red clouds floated in the western quarter
of the sky, and the far desert was becoming mysteriously dim and blue,
like a remote sea. Here and there thin wreaths of smoke ascended from
it, and lights glittered in it, like earth-bound stars.

Domini had never before understood how strangely, how strenuously,
colour can at moments appeal to the imagination. In this pageant of the
East she saw arise the naked soul of Africa; no faded, gentle thing,
fearful of being seen, fearful of being known and understood; but a
phenomenon vital, bold and gorgeous, like the sound of a trumpet pealing
a great _reveille_. As she looked on this flaming land laid fearlessly
bare before her, disdaining the clothing of grass, plant and flower, of
stream and tree, displaying itself with an almost brazen _insouciance_,
confident in its spacious power, and in its golden pride, her heart
leaped up as if in answer to a deliberate appeal. The fatigue in her
died. She responded to this _reveille_ like a young warrior who, so
soon as he is wakened, stretches out his hand for his sword. The sunset
flamed on her clear, white cheeks, giving them its hue of life. And
her nature flamed to meet it. In the huge spaces of the Sahara her soul
seemed to hear the footsteps of Freedom treading towards the south.
And all her dull perplexities, all her bitterness of _ennui_, all her
questionings and doubts, were swept away on the keen desert wind
into the endless plains. She had come from her last confession asking
herself, “What am I?” She had felt infinitely small confronted with the
pettiness of modern, civilised life in a narrow, crowded world. Now she
did not torture herself with any questions, for she knew that something
large, something capable, something perhaps even noble, rose up within
her to greet all this nobility, all this mighty frankness and fierce,
undressed sincerity of nature. This desert and this sun would be her
comrades, and she was not afraid of them.

Without being aware of it she breathed out a great sigh, feeling the
necessity of liberating her joy of spirit, of letting the body, however
inadequately and absurdly, make some demonstration in response to the
secret stirring of the soul. The man in the far corner of the carriage
turned and looked at her. When she heard this movement Domini remembered
her irritation against him at El-Akbara. In this splendid moment the
feeling seemed to her so paltry and contemptible that she had a lively
impulse to make amends for the angry look she had cast at him. Possibly,
had she been quite normal, she would have checked such an impulse. The
voice of conventionality would have made itself heard. But Domini could
act vigorously, and quite carelessly, when she was moved. And she was
deeply moved now, and longed to lavish the humanity, the sympathy and
ardour that were quick in her. In answer to the stranger’s movement she
turned towards him, opening her lips to speak to him. Afterwards she
never knew what she meant to say, whether, if she had spoken, the words
would have been French or English. For she did not speak.

The man’s face was illuminated by the setting sun as he sat half round
on his seat, leaning with his right hand palm downwards on the cushions.
The light glittered on his short hair. He had pushed back his soft hat,
and exposed his high, rugged forehead to the air, and his brown left
hand gripped the top of the carriage door. The large, knotted veins
on it, the stretched sinews, were very perceptible. The hand looked
violent. Domini’s eyes fell on it as she turned. The impulse to speak
began to fail, and when she glanced up at the man’s face she no longer
felt it at all. For, despite the glory of the sunset on him, there
seemed to be a cold shadow in his eyes. The faint lines near his
mouth looked deeper than before, and now suggested most powerfully the
dreariness, the harshness of long-continued suffering. The mouth itself
was compressed and grim, and the man’s whole expression was fierce and
startling as the expression of a criminal bracing himself to endure
inevitable detection. So crude and piercing indeed was this mask
confronting her that Domini started and was inclined to shudder. For
a minute the man’s eyes held hers, and she thought she saw in them
unfathomable depths of misery or of wickedness. She hardly knew which.
Sorrow was like crime, and crime like the sheer desolation of grief to
her just then. And she thought of the outer darkness spoken of in the
Bible. It came before her in the sunset. Her father was in it, and this
stranger stood by him. The thing was as vital, and fled as swiftly as a
hallucination in a madman’s brain.

Domini looked down. All the triumph died out in her, all the exquisite
consciousness of the freedom, the colour, the bigness of life. For there
was a black spot on the sun--humanity, God’s mistake in the great plan
of Creation. And the shadow cast by humanity tempered, even surely
conquered, the light. She wondered whether she would always feel the
cold of the sunless places in the golden dominion of the sun.

The man had dropped his eyes too. His hand fell from the door to his
knee. He did not move till the train ran into Beni-Mora, and the eager
faces of countless Arabs stared in upon them from the scorched field of
manoeuvres where Spahis were exercising in the gathering twilight.



CHAPTER IV

Having given her luggage ticket to a porter, Domini passed out of the
station followed by Suzanne, who looked and walked like an exhausted
marionette. Batouch, who had emerged from a third-class compartment
before the train stopped, followed them closely, and as they reached the
jostling crowd of Arabs which swarmed on the roadway he joined them with
the air of a proprietor.

“Which is Madame’s hotel?”

Domini looked round.

“Ah, Batouch!”

Suzanne jumped as if her string had been sharply pulled, and cast a
glance of dreary suspicion upon the poet. She looked at his legs, then
upwards.

He wore white socks which almost met his pantaloons. Scarcely more than
an inch of pale brown skin was visible. The gold buttons of his jacket
glittered brightly. His blue robe floated majestically from his broad
shoulders, and the large tassel of his fez fell coquettishly towards
his left ear, above which was set a pale blue flower with a woolly green
leaf.

Suzanne was slightly reassured by the flower and the bright buttons.
She felt that they needed a protector in this mob of shouting brown and
black men, who clamoured about them like savages, exposing bare legs and
arms, even bare chests, in a most barbarous manner.

“We are going to the Hotel du Desert,” Domini continued. “Is it far?”

“Only a few minutes, Madame.”

“I shall like to walk there.”

Suzanne collapsed. Her bones became as wax with apprehension. She saw
herself toiling over leagues of sand towards some nameless hovel.

“Suzanne, you can get into the omnibus and take the handbags.”

At the sweet word omnibus a ray of hope stole into the maid’s heart, and
when a nicely-dressed man, in a long blue coat and indubitable trousers,
assisted her politely into a vehicle which was unmistakable she almost
wept for joy.

Meanwhile Domini, escorted serenely by the poet, walked towards the long
gardens of Beni-Mora. She passed over a wooden bridge. White dust was
flying from the road, along which many of the Arab aristocracy were
indolently strolling, carrying lightly in their hands small red roses or
sprigs of pink geranium. In their white robes they looked, she thought,
like monks, though the cigarettes many of them were smoking fought
against the illusion. Some of them were dressed like Batouch in
pale-coloured cloth. They held each other’s hands loosely as they
sauntered along, chattering in soft contralto voices. Two or three were
attended by servants, who walked a pace or two behind them on the left.
These were members of great families, rulers of tribes, men who had
influence over the Sahara people. One, a shortish man with a coal-black
beard, moved so majestically that he seemed almost a giant. His face was
very pale. On one of his small, almost white, hands glittered a diamond
ring. A boy with a long, hooked nose strolled gravely near him, wearing
brown kid gloves and a turban spangled with gold.

“That is the Kaid of Tonga, Madame,” whispered Batouch, looking at the
pale man reverently. “He is here _en permission_.”

“How white he is.”

“They tried to poison him. Ever since he is ill inside. That is his
brother. The brown gloves are very chic.”

A light carriage rolled rapidly by them in a white mist of dust. It was
drawn by a pair of white mules, who whisked their long tails as they
trotted briskly, urged on by a cracking whip. A big boy with heavy brown
eyes was the coachman. By his side sat a very tall young negro with a
humorous pointed nose, dressed in primrose yellow. He grinned at Batouch
out of the mist, which accentuated the coal-black hue of his whimsical,
happy face.

“That is the Agha’s son with Mabrouk.”

They turned aside from the road and came into a long tunnel formed by
mimosa trees that met above a broad path. To right and left were other
little paths branching among the trunks of fruit trees and the narrow
twigs of many bushes that grew luxuriantly. Between sandy brown banks,
carefully flattened and beaten hard by the spades of Arab gardeners,
glided streams of opaque water that were guided from the desert by a
system of dams. The Kaid’s mill watched over them and the great wall
of the fort. In the tunnel the light was very delicate and tinged with
green. The noise of the water flowing was just audible. A few Arabs were
sitting on benches in dreamy attitudes, with their heelless slippers
hanging from the toes of their bare feet. Beyond the entrance of the
tunnel Domini could see two horsemen galloping at a tremendous pace into
the desert. Their red cloaks streamed out over the sloping quarters of
their horses, which devoured the earth as if in a frenzy of emulation.
They disappeared into the last glories of the sun, which still lingered
on the plain and blazed among the summits of the red mountains.

All the contrasts of this land were exquisite to Domini and, in some
mysterious way, suggested eternal things; whispering through colour,
gleam, and shadow, through the pattern of leaf and rock, through the
air, now fresh, now tenderly warm and perfumed, through the silence that
hung like a filmy cloud in the golden heaven.

She and Batouch entered the tunnel, passing at once into definite
evening. The quiet of these gardens was delicious, and was only
interrupted now and then by the sound of wheels upon the road as a
carriage rolled by to some house which was hidden in the distance of the
oasis. The seated Arabs scarcely disturbed it by their murmured talk.
Many of them indeed said nothing, but rested like lotus-eaters in
graceful attitudes, with hanging hands, and eyes, soft as the eyes of
gazelles, that regarded the shadowy paths and creeping waters with a
grave serenity born of the inmost spirit of idleness.

But Batouch loved to talk, and soon began a languid monologue.

He told Domini that he had been in Paris, where he had been the guest of
a French poet who adored the East; that he himself was “instructed,” and
not like other Arabs; that he smoked the hashish and could sing the love
songs of the Sahara; that he had travelled far in the desert, to Souf
and to Ouargla beyond the ramparts of the Dunes; that he composed
verses in the night when the uninstructed, the brawlers, the drinkers of
absinthe and the domino players were sleeping or wasting their time
in the darkness over the pastimes of the lewd, when the sybarites
were sweating under the smoky arches of the Moorish baths, and the
_marechale_ of the dancing-girls sat in her flat-roofed house guarding
the jewels and the amulets of her gay confederation. These verses were
written both in Arabic and in French, and the poet of Paris and his
friends had found them beautiful as the dawn, and as the palm trees of
Ourlana by the Artesian wells. All the girls of the Ouled Nails were
celebrated in these poems--Aishoush and Irena, Fatma and Baali. In them
also were enshrined legends of the venerable marabouts who slept in the
Paradise of Allah, and tales of the great warriors who had fought above
the rocky precipices of Constantine and far off among the sands of
the South. They told the stories of the Koulouglis, whose mothers were
Moorish slaves, and romances in which figured the dark-skinned Beni
M’Zab and the freed negroes who had fled away from the lands in the very
heart of the sun.

All this information, not wholly devoid of a naive egoism, Batouch
poured forth gently and melodiously as they walked through the twilight
in the tunnel. And Domini was quite content to listen. The strange names
the poet mentioned, his liquid pronunciation of them, his allusions
to wild events that had happened long ago in desert places, and to the
lives of priests of his old religion, of fanatics, and girls who rode
on camels caparisoned in red to the dancing-houses of Sahara cities--all
these things cradled her humour at this moment and seemed to plant her,
like a mimosa tree, deep down in this sand garden of the sun.

She had forgotten her bitter sensation in the railway carriage when it
was recalled to her mind by an incident that clashed with her present
mood.

Steps sounded on the path behind them, going faster than they were, and
presently Domini saw her fellow-traveller striding along, accompanied
by a young Arab who was carrying the green bag. The stranger was looking
straight before him down the tunnel, and he went by swiftly. But his
guide had something to say to Batouch, and altered his pace to keep
beside them for a moment. He was a very thin, lithe, skittish-looking
youth, apparently about twenty-three years old, with a chocolate-brown
skin, high cheek bones, long, almond-shaped eyes twinkling with
dissipated humour, and a large mouth that smiled showing pointed white
teeth. A straggling black moustache sprouted on his upper lip, and long
coarse strands of jet-black hair escaped from under the front of a fez
that was pushed back on his small head. His neck was thin and long, and
his hands were wonderfully delicate and expressive, with rosy and quite
perfect nails. When he laughed he had a habit of throwing his head
forward and tucking in his chin, letting the tassel of his fez fall over
his temple to left or right. He was dressed in white with a burnous,
and had a many-coloured piece of silk with frayed edges wound about his
waist, which was as slim as a young girl’s.

He spoke to Batouch with intense vivacity in Arabic, at the same
time shooting glances half-obsequious, half-impudent, wholly and even
preternaturally keen and intelligent at Domini. Batouch replied with the
dignified languor that seemed peculiar to him. The colloquy continued
for two or three minutes. Domini thought it sounded like a quarrel, but
she was not accustomed to Arabs’ talk. Meanwhile, the stranger in front
had slackened his pace, and was obviously lingering for his neglectful
guide. Once or twice he nearly stopped, and made a movement as if to
turn round. But he checked it and went on slowly. His guide spoke more
and more vehemently, and suddenly, tucking in his chin and displaying
his rows of big and dazzling teeth, burst into a gay and boyish laugh,
at the same time shaking his head rapidly. Then he shot one last sly
look at Domini and hurried on, airily swinging the green bag to and fro.
His arms had tiny bones, but they were evidently strong, and he walked
with the light ease of a young animal. After he had gone he turned his
head once and stared full at Domini. She could not help laughing at the
vanity and consciousness of his expression. It was childish. Yet there
was something ruthless and wicked in it too. As he came up to the
stranger the latter looked round, said something to him, and then
hastened forward. Domini was struck by the difference between their
gaits. For the stranger, although he was so strongly built and muscular,
walked rather heavily and awkwardly, with a peculiar shuffling motion
of his feet. She began to wonder how old he was. About thirty-five or
thirty-seven, she thought.

“That is Hadj,” said Batouch in his soft, rich voice.

“Hadj?”

“Yes. He is my cousin. He lives in Beni-Mora, but he, too, has been in
Paris. He has been in prison too.”

“What for?”

“Stabbing.”

Batouch gave this piece of information with quiet indifference, and
continued

“He likes to laugh. He is lazy. He has earned a great deal of money, and
now he has none. To-night he is very gay, because he has a client.”

“I see. Then he is a guide?”

“Many people in Beni-Mora are guides. But Hadj is always lucky in
getting the English.”

“That man with him isn’t English!” Domini exclaimed.

She had wondered what the traveller’s nationality was, but it had never
occurred to her that it might be the same as her own.

“Yes, he is. And he is going to the Hotel du Desert. You and he are the
only English here, and almost the only travellers. It is too early for
many travellers yet. They fear the heat. And besides, few English come
here now. What a pity! They spend money, and like to see everything.
Hadj is very anxious to buy a costume at Tunis for the great _fete_ at
the end of Ramadan. It will cost fifty or sixty francs. He hopes the
Englishman is rich. But all the English are rich and generous.”

Here Batouch looked steadily at Domini with his large, unconcerned eyes.

“This one speaks Arabic a little.”

Domini made no reply. She was surprised by this piece of information.
There was something, she thought, essentially un-English about the
stranger. He was certainly not dressed by an English tailor. But it was
not only that which had caused her mistake. His whole air and look, his
manner of holding himself, of sitting, of walking--yes, especially of
walking--were surely foreign. Yet, when she came to think about it, she
could not say that they were characteristic of any other country. Idly
she had said to herself that the stranger might be an Austrian or a
Russian. But she had been thinking of his colouring. It happened that
two _attaches_ of those two nations, whom she had met frequently in
London, had hair of that shade of rather warm brown.

“He does not look like an Englishman,” she said presently.

“He can talk in French and in Arabic, but Hadj says he is English.”

“How should Hadj know?”

“Because he has the eyes of the jackal, and has been with many English.
We are getting near to the Catholic church, Madame. You will see it
through the trees. And there is Monsieur the Cure coming towards us. He
is coming from his house, which is near the hotel.”

At some distance in the twilight of the tunnel Domini saw a black figure
in a soutane walking very slowly towards them. The stranger, who had
been covering the ground rapidly with his curious, shuffling stride,
was much nearer to it than they were, and, if he kept on at his
present pace, would soon pass it. But suddenly Domini saw him pause and
hesitate. He bent down and seemed to be doing something to his boot.
Hadj dropped the green bag, and was evidently about to kneel down, and
assist him when he lifted himself up abruptly and looked before him, as
if at the priest who was approaching, then turned sharply to the right
into a path which led out of the garden to the arcades of the Rue
Berthe. Hadj followed, gesticulating frantically, and volubly explaining
that the hotel was in the opposite direction. But the stranger did not
stop. He only glanced swiftly back over his shoulder once, and then
continued on his way.

“What a funny man that is!” said Batouch. “What does he want to do?”

Domini did not answer him, for the priest was just passing them, and she
saw the church to the left among the trees. It was a plain, unpretending
building, with a white wooden door set in an arch. Above the arch were
a small cross, two windows with rounded tops, a clock, and a white tower
with a pink roof. She looked at it, and at the priest, whose face was
dark and meditative, with lustrous, but sad, brown eyes. Yet she thought
of the stranger.

Her attention was beginning to be strongly fixed upon the unknown man.
His appearance and manner were so unusual that it was impossible not to
notice him.

“There is the hotel, Madame!” said Batouch.

Domini saw it standing at right angles to the church, facing the
gardens. A little way back from the church was the priest’s house, a
white building shaded by date palms and pepper trees. As they drew near
the stranger reappeared under the arcade, above which was the terrace of
the hotel. He vanished through the big doorway, followed by Hadj.

While Suzanne was unpacking Domini came out on to the broad terrace
which ran along the whole length of the Hotel du Desert. Her bedroom
opened on to it in front, and at the back communicated with a small
salon. This salon opened on to a second and smaller terrace, from which
the desert could be seen beyond the palms. There seemed to be no guests
in the hotel. The verandah was deserted, and the peace of the soft
evening was profound. Against the white parapet a small, round table and
a cane armchair had been placed. A subdued patter of feet in slippers
came up the stairway, and an Arab servant appeared with a tea-tray.
He put it down on the table with the precise deftness which Domini had
already observed in the Arabs at Robertville, and swiftly vanished. She
sat down in the chair and poured out the tea, leaning her left arm on
the parapet.

Her head was very tired and her temples felt compressed. She was
thankful for the quiet round her. Any harsh voice would have been
intolerable to her just then. There were many sounds in the village, but
they were vague, and mingled, flowing together and composing one sound
that was soothing, the restrained and level voice of Life. It hummed in
Domini’s ears as she sipped her tea, and gave an under-side of romance
to the peace. The light that floated in under the round arches of the
terrace was subdued. The sun had just gone down, and the bright colours
bloomed no more upon the mountains, which looked like silent monsters
that had lost the hue of youth and had suddenly become mysteriously old.
The evening star shone in a sky that still held on its Western border
some last pale glimmerings of day, and, at its signal, many dusky
wanderers folded their loose garments round them, slung their long guns
across their shoulders, and prepared to start on their journey, helped
by the cool night wind that blows in the desert when the sun departs.

Domini did not know of them, but she felt the near presence of the
desert, and the feeling quieted her nerves. She was thankful at this
moment that she was travelling without any woman friend and was not
persecuted by any sense of obligation. In her fatigue, to rest passive
in the midst of quiet, and soft light, calm in the belief, almost the
certainty, that this desert village contained no acquaintance to disturb
her, was to know all the joy she needed for the moment. She drank it
in dreamily. Liberty had always been her fetish. What woman had more
liberty than she had, here on this lonely verandah, with the shadowy
trees below?

The bell of the church near by chimed softly, and the familiar sound
fell strangely upon Domini’s ears out here in Africa, reminding her of
many sorrows. Her religion was linked with terrible memories, with cruel
struggles, with hateful scenes of violence. Lord Rens had been a man of
passionate temperament. Strong in goodness when he had been led by love,
he had been equally strong in evil when hate had led him. Domini had
been forced to contemplate at close quarters the raw character of a
warped man, from whom circumstance had stripped all tenderness, nearly
all reticence. The terror of truth was known to her. She had shuddered
before it, but she had been obliged to watch it during many years. In
coming to Beni-Mora she had had a sort of vague, and almost childish,
feeling that she was putting the broad sea between herself and it. Yet
before she had started it had been buried in the grave. She never wished
to behold such truth again. She wanted to look upon some other truth
of life--the truth of beauty, of calm, of freedom. Lord Rens had always
been a slave, the slave of love, most of all when he was filled with
hatred, and Domini, influenced by his example, instinctively connected
love with a chain. Only the love a human being has for God seemed to her
sometimes the finest freedom; the movement of the soul upward into the
infinite obedient to the call of the great Liberator. The love of man
for woman, of woman for man, she thought of as imprisonment, bondage.
Was not her mother a slave to the man who had wrecked her life and
carried her spirit beyond the chance of heaven? Was not her father a
slave to her mother? She shrank definitely from the contemplation of
herself loving, with all the strength she suspected in her heart, a
human being. In her religion only she had felt in rare moments something
of love. And now here, in this tremendous and conquering land, she felt
a divine stirring in her love for Nature. For that afternoon Nature, so
often calm and meditative, or gently indifferent, as one too complete to
be aware of those who lack completeness, had impetuously summoned her
to worship, had ardently appealed to her for something more than a
temperate watchfulness or a sober admiration. There had been a most
definite demand made upon her. Even in her fatigue and in this dreamy
twilight she was conscious of a latent excitement that was not lulled to
sleep.

And as she sat there, while the darkness grew in the sky and spread
secretly along the sandy rills among the trees, she wondered how
much she held within her to give in answer to this cry to her of
self-confident Nature. Was it only a little? She did not know. Perhaps
she was too tired to know. But however much it was it must seem meagre.
What is even a woman’s heart given to the desert or a woman’s soul to
the sea? What is the worship of anyone to the sunset among the hills, or
to the wind that lifts all the clouds from before the face of the moon?

A chill stole over Domini. She felt like a very poor woman, who can
never know the joy of giving, because she does not possess even a mite.

The church bell chimed again among the palms. Domini heard voices quite
clearly below her under the arcade. A French café was installed there,
and two or three soldiers were taking their _aperitif_ before dinner
out in the air. They were talking of France, as people in exile talk of
their country, with the deliberateness that would conceal regret and the
child’s instinctive affection for the mother. Their voices made Domini
think again of the recruits, and then, because of them, of Notre Dame de
la Garde, the mother of God, looking towards Africa. She remembered the
tragedy of her last confession. Would she be able to confess here to
the Father whom she had seen strolling in the tunnel? Would she learn to
know here what she really was?

How warm it was in the night, and how warmth, as it develops the
fecundity of the earth, develops also the possibilities in many men and
women. Despite her lassitude of body, which kept her motionless as an
idol in her chair, with her arm lying along the parapet of the verandah,
Domini felt as if a confused crowd of things indefinable, but violent,
was already stirring within her nature, as if this new climate was
calling armed men into being. Could she not hear the murmur of their
voices, the distant clashing of their weapons?

Without being aware of it she was dropping into sleep. The sound of a
footstep on the wooden floor of the verandah recalled her. It was at
some distance behind her. It crossed the verandah and stopped. She felt
quite certain that it was the step of her fellow-traveller, not because
she knew he was staying in the hotel, but rather because of the curious,
uneven heaviness of the tread.

What was he doing? Looking over the parapet into the fruit gardens,
where the white figures of the Arabs were flitting through the trees?

He was perfectly silent. Domini was now wide awake. The feeling of calm
serenity had left her. She was nervously troubled by this presence near
her, and swiftly recalled the few trifling incidents of the day which
had begun to delineate a character for her. They were, she found, all
unpleasant, all, at least, faintly disagreeable. Yet, in sum, what was
their meaning? The sketch they traced was so slight, so confused, that
it told little. The last incident was the strangest. And again she saw
the long and luminous pathway of the tunnel, flickering with light
and shade, carpeted with the pale reflections of the leaves and narrow
branches of the trees, the black figure of the priest far down it, and
the tall form of the stranger in an attitude of painful hesitation. Each
time she had seen him, apparently desirous of doing something definite,
hesitation had overtaken him. In his indecision there was something
horrible to her, something alarming.

She wished he was not standing behind her, and her discomfort increased.
She could still hear the voices of the soldiers in the café. Perhaps he
was listening to them. They sounded louder.

The speakers were getting up from their seats. There was a jingling of
spurs, a tramp of feet, and the voices died away. The church bell
chimed again. As it did so Domini heard heavy and uneven steps cross the
verandah hurriedly. An instant later she heard a window shut sharply.

“Suzanne!” she called.

Her maid appeared, yawning, with various parcels in her hands.

“Yes, Mademoiselle.”

“I sha’n’t go down to the _salle-a-manger_ to-night. Tell them to give
me some dinner in my _salon_.”

“Yes, Mademoiselle.”

“You did not see who was on the verandah just now?”

The maid looked surprised.

“I was in Mademoiselle’s room.”

“Yes. How near the church is.”

“Mademoiselle will have no difficulty in getting to Mass. She will not
be obliged to go among all the Arabs.”

Domini smiled.

“I have come here to be among the Arabs, Suzanne.”

“The porter of the omnibus tells me they are dirty and very dangerous.
They carry knives, and their clothes are full of fleas.”

“You will feel quite differently about them in the morning. Don’t forget
about dinner.”

“I will speak about it at once, Mademoiselle.”

Suzanne disappeared, walking as one who suspects an ambush.

After dinner Domini went again to the verandah. She found Batouch there.
He had now folded a snow-white turban round his head, and looked like
a young high priest of some ornate religion. He suggested that Domini
should come out with him to visit the Rue des Ouled Nails and see the
strange dances of the Sahara. But she declined.

“Not to-night, Batouch. I must go to bed. I haven’t slept for two
nights.”

“But I do not sleep, Madame. In the night I compose verses. My brain is
alive. My heart is on fire.”

“Yes, but I am not a poet. Besides, I may be here for a long time. I
shall have many evenings to see the dances.”

The poet looked displeased.

“The gentleman is going,” he said. “Hadj is at the door waiting for him
now. But Hadj is afraid when he enters the street of the dancers.”

“Why?”

“There is a girl there who wishes to kill him. Her name is Aishoush. She
was sent away from Beni-Mora for six months, but she has come back, and
after all this time she still wishes to kill Hadj.”

“What has he done to her?”

“He has not loved her. Yes, Hadj is afraid, but he will go with the
gentleman because he must earn money to buy a costume for the _fete_ of
Ramadan. I also wish to buy a new costume.”

He looked at Domini with a dignified plaintiveness. His pose against
the pillar of the verandah was superb. Over his blue cloth jacket he
had thrown a thin white burnous, which hung round him in classic folds.
Domini could scarcely believe that so magnificent a creature was touting
for a franc. The idea certainly did occur to her, but she banished it.
For she was a novice in Africa.

“I am too tired to go out to-night,” she said decisively.

“Good-night, Madame. I shall be here to-morrow morning at seven o’clock.
The dawn in the garden of the gazelles is like the flames of Paradise,
and you can see the Spahis galloping upon horses that are beautiful
as--”

“I shall not get up early to-morrow.”

Batouch assumed an expression that was tragically submissive and turned
to go. Just then Suzanne appeared at the French window of her bedroom.
She started as she perceived the poet, who walked slowly past her to the
staircase, throwing his burnous back from his big shoulders, and stood
looking after him. Her eyes fixed themselves upon the section of bare
leg that was visible above his stockings white as the driven snow, and a
faintly sentimental expression mingled with their defiance and alarm.

Domini got up from her chair and leaned over the parapet. A streak
of yellow light from the doorway of the hotel lay upon the white road
below, and in a moment she saw two figures come out from beneath the
verandah and pause there. Hadj was one, the stranger was the other.
The stranger struck a match and tried to light a cigar, but failed. He
struck another match, and then another, but still the cigar would not
draw. Hadj looked at him with mischievous astonishment.

“If Monsieur will permit me--” he began.

But the stranger took the cigar hastily from his mouth and flung it
away.

“I don’t want to smoke,” Domini heard him say in French.

Then he walked away with Hadj into the darkness.

As they disappeared Domini heard a faint shrieking in the distance. It
was the music of the African hautboy.

The night was marvellously dry and warm. The thickly growing trees in
the garden scarcely moved. It was very still and very dark. Suzanne,
standing at her window, looked like a shadow in her black dress. Her
attitude was romantic. Perhaps the subtle influence of this Sahara
village was beginning to steal even over her obdurate spirit.

The hautboy went on crying. Its notes, though faint, were sharp and
piercing. Once more the church bell chimed among the date palms, and
the two musics, with their violently differing associations, clashing
together smote upon Domini’s heart with a sense of trouble, almost of
tragedy. The pulses in her temples throbbed, and she clasped her hands
tightly together. That brief moment, in which she heard the duet of
those two voices, was one of the most interesting, yet also one of the
most painful she had ever known. The church bell was silent now, but the
hautboy did not cease. It was barbarous and provocative, shrill with a
persistent triumph.

Domini went to bed early, but she could not sleep. Just before midnight
she heard someone walking up and down on the verandah. The step was
heavy and shuffling. It came and went, came and went, without pause till
she was in a fever of uneasiness. Only when two chimed from the church
did it cease at last.

She whispered a prayer to Notre Dame de la Garde, The Blessed Virgin,
looking towards Africa. For the first time she felt the loneliness of
her situation and that she was far away.



CHAPTER V

Towards morning Domini slept. It was nearly eight o’clock when she
awoke. The room was full of soft light which told of the sun outside,
and she got up at once, put on a pair of slippers and opened the French
window on to the verandah. Already Beni-Mora was bathed in golden beams
and full of gentle activities. A flock of goats pattered by towards the
edge of the oasis. The Arab gardeners were lazily sweeping small leaves
from the narrow paths under the mimosa and pepper trees. Soldiers in
loose white suits, dark blue sashes and the fez, were hastening from
the Fort towards the market. A distant bugle rang out and the snarl of
camels was audible from the village. Domini stood on the verandah for
a moment, drinking in the desert air. It made her feel very pure and
clean, as if she had just bathed in clear water. She looked up at
the limpid sky, which seemed full of hope and of the power to grant
blessings, and she was glad that she had come to Beni-Mora. Her lonely
sensation of the previous night had gone. As she stood in the sun she
was conscious that she needed re-creation and that here she might find
it. The radiant sky, the warm sun and the freedom of the coming day and
of many coming desert days, filled her heart with an almost childish
sensation. She felt younger than she had felt for years, and even
foolishly innocent, like a puppy dog or a kitten. Her thick black hair,
unbound, fell in a veil round her strong, active body, and she had the
rare consciousness that behind that other more mysterious veil her soul
was to-day a less unfit companion for its mate than it had been since
her mother’s sin.

Cleanliness--what a blessed condition that was, a condition to breed
bravery. In this early morning hour Beni-Mora looked magically clean.
Domini thought of the desperate dirt of London mornings, of the sooty
air brooding above black trees and greasy pavements. Surely it was
difficult to be clean of soul there. Here it would be easy. One would
tune one’s lyre in accord with Nature and be as a singing palm tree
beside a water-spring. She took up a little vellum-bound book which she
had laid at night upon her dressing-table. It was _Of the Imitation of
Christ_, and she opened it at haphazard and glanced down on a sunlit
page. Her eyes fell on these words:

“Love watcheth, and sleeping, slumbereth not. When weary it is not
tired; when straitened it is not constrained; when frightened it is
not disturbed; but like a vivid flame and a burning torch it mounteth
upwards and securely passeth through all. Whosoever loveth knoweth the
cry of this voice.”

The sunlight on the page of the little book was like the vivid flame
and the burning torch spoken of in it. Heat, light, a fierce vitality.
Domini had been weary so long, weary of soul, that she was almost
startled to find herself responding quickly to the sacred passion on the
page, to the bright beam that kissed it as twin kisses twin. She knelt
down to say her morning prayer, but all she could whisper was:

“O, God, renew me. O, God, renew me. Give me power to feel, keenly,
fiercely, even though I suffer. Let me wake. Let me feel. Let me be a
living thing once more. O, God, renew me, renew me!”

While she prayed she pressed her face so hard against her hands that
patches of red came upon her cheeks. And afterwards it seemed to her as
if her first real, passionate prayer in Beni-Mora had been almost like a
command to God. Was not such a fierce prayer perhaps a blasphemy?

She rose from that prayer to the first of her new days.

After breakfast she looked over the edge of the verandah and saw Batouch
and Hadj squatting together in the shadow of the trees below. They were
smoking cigarettes and talking eagerly. Their conversation, which was in
Arabic, sounded violent. The accented words were like blows. Domini had
not looked over the parapet for more than a minute before the two guides
saw her and rose smiling to their feet.

“I am waiting to show the village to Madame,” said Batouch, coming out
softly into the road, while Hadj remained under the trees, exposing his
teeth in a sarcastic grin, which plainly enough conveyed to Domini his
pity for her sad mistake in not engaging him as her attendant.

Domini nodded, went back into her room and put on a shady hat. Suzanne
handed her a large parasol lined with green, and she descended the
stairs rather slowly. She was not sure whether she wanted a companion in
her first walk about Beni-Mora. There would be more savour of freedom in
solitude. Yet she had hardly the heart to dismiss Batouch, with all his
dignity and determination. She resolved to take him for a little while
and then to get rid of him on some pretext. Perhaps she would make some
purchases in the bazaars and send him to the hotel with them.

“Madame has slept well?” asked the poet as she emerged into the sun.

“Pretty well,” she answered, nodding again to Hadj, whose grin became
more mischievous, and opening her parasol. “Where are we going?”

“Wherever Madame wishes. There is the market, the negro village, the
mosque, the casino, the statue of the Cardinal, the bazaars, the garden
of the Count Ferdinand Anteoni.”

“A garden,” said Domini. “Is it a beautiful one?”

Batouch was about to burst into a lyric ecstasy, but he checked himself
and said:

“Madame shall see for herself and tell me afterwards if in all Europe
there is one such garden.”

“Oh, the English gardens are wonderful,” she said, smiling at his
patriotic conceit.

“No doubt. Madame shall tell me, Madame shall tell me,” he repeated with
imperturbable confidence.

“But first I wish to go for a moment into the church,” she said. “Wait
for me here, Batouch.”

She crossed the road, passed the modest, one-storied house of the
priest, and came to the church, which looked out on to the quiet
gardens. Before going up the steps and in at the door she paused for
a moment. There was something touching to her, as a Catholic, in this
symbol of her faith set thus far out in the midst of Islamism. The cross
was surely rather lonely, here, raised above the white-robed men to whom
it meant nothing. She was conscious that since she had come to this
land of another creed, and of another creed held with fanaticism, her
sentiment for her own religion, which in England for many years had been
but lukewarm, had suddenly gained in strength. She had an odd, almost
manly, sensation that it was her duty in Africa to stand up for her
faith, not blatantly in words to impress others, but perseveringly in
heart to satisfy herself. Sometimes she felt very protective. She
felt protective today as she looked at this humble building, which she
likened to one of the poor saints of the Thebaid, who dwelt afar in
desert places, and whose devotions were broken by the night-cries of
jackals and by the roar of ravenous beasts. With this feeling strong
upon her she pushed open the door and went in.

The interior was plain, even ugly. The walls were painted a hideous
drab. The stone floor was covered with small, hard, straw-bottomed
chairs and narrow wooden forms for the patient knees of worshippers.
In the front were two rows of private chairs, with velvet cushions of
various brilliant hues and velvet-covered rails. On the left was a high
stone pulpit. The altar, beyond its mean black and gold railing,
was dingy and forlorn. On it there was a tiny gold cross with a gold
statuette of Christ hanging, surmounted by a canopy with four pillars,
which looked as if made of some unwholesome sweetmeat. Long candles
of blue and gold and bouquets of dusty artificial flowers flanked it.
Behind it, in a round niche, stood a painted figure of Christ holding
a book. The two adjacent side chapels had domed roofs representing the
firmament. Beneath the pulpit stood a small harmonium. At the opposite
end of the church was a high gallery holding more chairs. The mean,
featureless windows were filled with glass half white, half staring red
dotted with yellow crosses. Round the walls were reliefs of the fourteen
stations of the Cross in white plaster on a gilt ground framed in grey
marble. From the roof hung vulgar glass chandeliers with ropes tied
with faded pink ribands. Several frightful plaster statues daubed
with scarlet and chocolate brown stood under the windows, which were
protected with brown woollen curtains. Close to the entrance were a
receptacle for holy water in the form of a shell, and a confessional of
stone flanked by boxes, one of which bore the words, “Graces obtenues,”
 the other, “Demandes,” and a card on which was printed, “Litanies en
honneur de Saint Antoine de Padoue.”

There was nothing to please the eye, nothing to appeal to the senses.
There was not even the mystery which shrouds and softens, for the
sunshine streamed in through the white glass of the windows, revealing,
even emphasising, as if with deliberate cruelty, the cheap finery, the
tarnished velvet, the crude colours, the meretricious gestures and poses
of the plaster saints. Yet as Domini touched her forehead and breast
with holy water, and knelt for a moment on the stone floor, she was
conscious that this rather pitiful house of God moved her to an emotion
she had not felt in the great and beautiful churches to which she was
accustomed in England and on the Continent. Through the windows she saw
the outlines of palm leaves vibrating in the breeze; African fingers,
feeling, with a sort of fluttering suspicion, if not enmity, round the
heart of this intruding religion, which had wandered hither from some
distant place, and, stayed, confronting the burning glance of the
desert. Bold, little, humble church! Domini knew that she would love it.
But she did not know then how much.

She wandered round slowly with a grave face. Yet now and then, as she
stood by one of the plaster saints, she smiled. They were indeed strange
offerings at the shrine of Him who held this Africa in the hollow of His
hand, of Him who had ordered the pageant of the sun which she had seen
last night among the mountains. And presently she and this little church
in which she stood alone became pathetic in her thoughts, and even the
religion which the one came to profess in the other pathetic too. For
here, in Africa, she began to realise the wideness of the world, and
that many things must surely seem to the Creator what these plaster
saints seemed just then to her.

“Oh, how little, how little!” she whispered to herself. “Let me be
bigger! Oh, let me grow, and here, not only hereafter!”

The church door creaked. She turned her head and saw the priest whom she
had met in the tunnel entering. He came up to her at once, saluted her,
and said:

“I saw you from my window, Madame, and thought I would offer to show you
our little church here. We are very proud of it.”

Domini liked his voice and his naive remark. His face, too, though
undistinguished, looked honest, kind, and pathetic, but with a pathos
that was unaffected and quite unconscious. The lower part of it was
hidden by a moustache and beard.

“Thank you,” she answered. “I have been looking round already.”

“You are a Catholic, Madame?”

“Yes.”

The priest looked pleased. There was something childlike in the mobility
of his face.

“I am glad,” he said simply. “We are not a rich community in Beni-Mora,
but we have been fortunate in bygone years. Our great Cardinal, the
Father of Africa, loved this place and cherished his children here.”

“Cardinal Lavigerie?”

“Yes, Madame. His house is now a native hospital. His statue faces the
beginning of the great desert road, But we remember him and his spirit
is still among us.”

The priest’s eyes lit up as he spoke. The almost tragic expression of
his face changed to one of enthusiasm.

“He loved Africa, I believe,” Domini said.

“His heart was here. And what he did! I was to have been one of his
_freres armes_, but my health prevented, and afterwards the association
was dissolved.”

The sad expression returned to his face.

“There are many temptations in such a land and climate as this,” he
said. “And men are weak. But there are still the White Fathers whom he
founded. Glorious men. They carry the Cross into the wildest places of
the world. The most fanatical Arabs respect the White Marabouts.”

“You wish you were with them?”

“Yes, Madame. But my health only permits me to be a humble parish priest
here. Not all who desire to enter the most severe life can do so. If
it were otherwise I should long since have been a monk. The Cardinal
himself showed me that my duty lay in other paths.”

He pointed out to Domini one or two things in the church which he
admired and thought worthy; the carving of the altar rail into grapes,
ears of corn, crosses, anchors; the white embroidered muslin that draped
the tabernacle; the statue of a bishop in a red and gold mitre holding a
staff and Bible, and another statue representing a saint with a languid
and consumptive expression stretching out a Bible, on the leaves of
which a tiny, smiling child was walking.

As they were about to leave the church he made Domini pause in front of
a painting of Saint Bruno dressed in a white monkish robe, beneath which
was written in gilt letters:

     “Saint Bruno ordonne a ses disciples
     De renoncer aux biens terrestres
     Pour acquerir les biens celestes.”

The disciples stood around the saint in grotesque attitudes of pious
attention.

“That, I think, is very beautiful,” he said. “Who could look at it
without feeling that the greatest act of man is renunciation?”

His dark eyes flamed. Just then a faint soprano bark came to them from
outside the church door, a very discreet and even humble, but at
the same time anxious, bark. The priest’s face changed. The almost
passionate asceticism of it was replaced by a soft and gentle look.

“Bous-Bous wants me,” he said, and he opened the door for Domini to pass
out.

A small white and yellow dog, very clean and well brushed, was sitting
on the step in an attentive attitude. Directly the priest appeared it
began to wag its short tail violently and to run round his feet, curving
its body into semi-circles. He bent down and patted it.

“My little companion, Madame,” he said. “He was not with me yesterday,
as he was being washed.”

Then he took off his hat and walked towards his house, accompanied by
Bous-Bous, who had suddenly assumed an air of conscious majesty, as of
one born to preside over the fate of an important personage.

Domini stood for a moment under the palm trees looking after them. There
was a steady shining in her eyes.

“Madame is a Catholic too?” asked Batouch, staring steadily at her.

Domini nodded. She did not want to discuss religion with an Arab minor
poet just then.

“Take me to the market,” she said, mindful of her secret resolve to get
rid of her companion as soon as possible.

They set out across the gardens.

It was a celestial day. All the clear, untempered light of the world
seemed to have made its home in Beni-Mora. Yet the heat was not
excessive, for the glorious strength of the sun was robbed of its
terror, its possible brutality, by the bright and feathery dryness and
coolness of the airs. She stepped out briskly. Her body seemed suddenly
to become years younger, full of elasticity and radiant strength.

“Madame is very strong. Madame walks like a Bedouin.”

Batouch’s voice sounded seriously astonished, and Domini burst out
laughing.

“In England there are many strong women. But I shall grow stronger here.
I shall become a real Arab. This air gives me life.”

They were just reaching the road when there was a clatter of hoofs, and
a Spahi, mounted on a slim white horse, galloped past at a tremendous
pace, holding his reins high above the red peak of his saddle and
staring up at the sun. Domini looked after him with critical admiration.

“You’ve got some good horses here,” she said when the Spahi had
disappeared.

“Madame knows how to ride?”

She laughed again.

“I’ve ridden ever since I was a child.”

“You can buy a fine horse here for sixteen pounds,” remarked Batouch,
using the pronoun “tu,” as is the custom of the Arabs.

“Find me a good horse, a horse with spirit, and I’ll buy him,” Domini
said. “I want to go far out in the desert, far away from everything.”

“You must not go alone.”

“Why not?”

“There are bandits in the desert.”

“I’ll take my revolver,” Domini said carelessly. “But I will go alone.”

They were in sight of the market now, and the hum of voices came to
them, with nasal cries, the whine of praying beggars, and the fierce
braying of donkeys. At the end of the small street in which they were
Domini saw a wide open space, in the centre of which stood a quantity
of pillars supporting a peaked roof. Round the sides of the square were
arcades swarming with Arabs, and under the central roof a mob of figures
came and went, as flies go and come on a piece of meat flung out into a
sunny place.

“What a quantity of people! Do they all live in Beni-Mora?” she asked.

“No, they come from all parts of the desert to sell and to buy. But most
of those who sell are Mozabites.”

Little children in bright-coloured rags came dancing round Domini,
holding out their copper-coloured hands, and crying shrilly, “‘Msee,
M’dame! ‘Msee, M’dame!” A deformed man, who looked like a distorted
beetle, crept round her feet, gazing up at her with eyes that squinted
horribly, and roaring in an imperative voice some Arab formula in which
the words “Allah-el-Akbar” continually recurred. A tall negro, with a
long tuft of hair hanging from his shaven head, followed hard upon her
heels, rolling his bulging eyes, in which two yellow flames were caught,
and trying to engage her attention, though with what object she could
not imagine. From all directions tall men with naked arms and legs, and
fluttering white garments, came slowly towards her, staring intently at
her with lustrous eyes, whose expression seemed to denote rather a calm
and dignified appraisement than any vulgar curiosity. Boys, with the
whitest teeth she had ever beheld, and flowers above their well-shaped,
delicate ears, smiled up at her with engaging impudence. Her nostrils
were filled with a strange crowd of odours, which came from humanity
dressed in woollen garments, from fruits exposed for sale in rush
panniers, from round close bouquets of roses ringed with tight borders
of green leaves, from burning incense twigs, from raw meat, from amber
ornaments and strong perfumes in glass phials figured with gold attar of
rose, orange blossom, geranium and white lilac. In the shining heat of
the sun sounds, scents and movements mingled, and were almost painfully
vivid and full of meaning and animation. Never had a London mob on some
great _fete_ day seemed so significant and personal to Domini as this
little mob of desert people, come together for the bartering of beasts,
the buying of burnouses, weapons, skins and jewels, grain for their
camels, charms for their women, ripe glistening dates for the little
children at home in the brown earth houses.

As she made her way slowly through the press, pioneered by Batouch, who
forced a path with great play of his huge shoulders and mighty arms, she
was surprised to find how much at home she felt in the midst of these
fierce and uncivilised-looking people. She had no sense of shrinking
from their contact, no feeling of personal disgust at their touch. When
her eyes chanced to meet any of the bold, inquiring eyes around her she
was inclined to smile as if in recognition of these children of the sun,
who did not seem to her like strangers, despite the unknown language
that struggled fiercely in their throats. Nevertheless, she did not wish
to stay very long among them now. She was resolved to get a full and
delicately complete first impression of Beni-Mora, and to do that she
knew that she must detach herself from close human contact. She
desired the mind’s bird’s-eye view--a height, a watchtower and a little
solitude. So, when the eager Mozabite merchants called to her she did
not heed them, and even the busy patter of the informing Batouch fell
upon rather listless ears.

“I sha’n’t stay here,” she said to him. “But I’ll buy some perfumes.
Where can I get them?”

A thin youth, brooding above a wooden tray close by, held up in his
delicate fingers a long bottle, sealed and furnished with a tiny label,
but Batouch shook his head.

“For perfumes you must go to Ahmeda, under the arcade.”

They crossed a sunlit space and stood before a dark room, sunk lightly
below the level of the pathway in a deserted corner. Shadows congregated
here, and in the gloom Domini saw a bent white figure hunched against
the blackened wall, and heard an old voice murmuring like a drowsy bee.
The perfume-seller was immersed in the Koran, his back to the buying
world. Batouch was about to call upon him, when Domini checked the
exclamation with a quick gesture. For the first time the mystery that
coils like a great black serpent in the shining heart of the East
startled and fascinated her, a mystery in which indifference and
devotion mingle. The white figure swayed slowly to and fro, carrying
the dull, humming voice with it, and now she seemed to hear a far-away
fanaticism, the bourdon of a fatalism which she longed to understand.

“Ahmeda!”

Batouch shouted. His voice came like a stone from a catapult. The
merchant turned calmly and without haste, showing an aquiline face
covered with wrinkles, tufted with white hairs, lit by eyes that shone
with the cruel expressiveness of a falcon’s. After a short colloquy in
Arabic he raised himself from his haunches, and came to the front of the
room, where there was a small wooden counter. He was smiling now with a
grace that was almost feminine.

“What perfume does Madame desire?” he said in French.

Domini gazed at him as at a deep mystery, but with the searching
directness characteristic of her, a fearlessness so absolute that it
embarrassed many people.

“Please give me something that is of the East--not violets, not lilac.”

“Amber,” said Batouch.

The merchant, still smiling, reached up to a shelf, showing an arm like
a brown twig, and took down a glass bottle covered with red and green
lines. He removed the stopper, made Domini take off her glove, touched
her bare hand with the stopper, then with his forefinger gently rubbed
the drop of perfume which had settled on her skin till it was slightly
red.

“Now, smell it,” he commanded.

Domini obeyed. The perfume was faintly medicinal, but it filled her
brain with exotic visions. She shut her eyes. Yes, that was a voice of
Africa too. Oh! how far away she was from her old life and hollow days.
The magic carpet had been spread indeed, and she had been wafted into a
strange land where she had all to learn.

“Please give me some of that,” she said.

The merchant poured the amber into a phial, where it lay like a thread
in the glass, weighed it in a scales and demanded a price. Batouch began
at once to argue with vehemence, but Domini stopped him.

“Pay him,” she said, giving Batouch her purse.

The perfume-seller took the money with dignity, turned away, squatted
upon his haunches against the blackened wall, and picked up the
broad-leaved volume which lay upon the floor. He swayed gently and
rhythmically to and fro. Then once more the voice of the drowsy bee
hummed in the shadows. The worshipper and the Prophet stood before the
feet of Allah.

And the woman--she was set afar off, as woman is by white-robed men in
Africa.

“Now, Batouch, you can carry the perfume to the hotel and I will go to
that garden.”

“Alone? Madame will never find it.”

“I can ask the way.”

“Impossible! I will escort Madame to the gate. There I will wait
for her. Monsieur the Count does not permit the Arabs to enter with
strangers.”

“Very well,” Domini said.

The seller of perfumes had led her towards a dream. She was not
combative, and she would be alone in the garden. As they walked towards
it in the sun, through narrow ways where idle Arabs lounged with happy
aimlessness, Batouch talked of Count Anteoni, the owner of the garden.

Evidently the Count was the great personage of Beni-Mora. Batouch spoke
of him with a convinced respect, describing him as fabulously rich,
fabulously generous to the Arabs.

“He never gives to the French, Madame, but when he is here each Friday,
upon our Sabbath, he comes to the gate with a bag of money in his hand,
and he gives five franc pieces to every Arab who is there.”

“And what is he? French?”

“He is Italian; but he is always travelling, and he has made gardens
everywhere. He has three in Africa alone, and in one he keeps many
lions. When he travels he takes six Arabs with him. He loves only the
Arabs.”

Domini began to feel interested in this wandering maker of gardens, who
was a pilgrim over the world like Monte Cristo.

“Is he young?” she asked.

“No.”

“Married?”

“Oh, no! He is always alone. Sometimes he comes here and stays for three
months, and is never once seen outside the garden. And sometimes for a
year he never comes to Beni-Mora. But he is here now. Twenty Arabs
are always working in the garden, and at night ten Arabs with guns are
always awake, some in a tent inside the door and some among the trees.

“Then there is danger at night?”

“The garden touches the desert, and those who are in the desert without
arms are as birds in the air without wings.”

They had come out from among the houses now into a broad, straight road,
bordered on the left by land that was under cultivation, by fruit trees,
and farther away by giant palms, between whose trunks could be seen
the stony reaches of the desert and spurs of grey-blue and faint
rose-coloured mountains. On the right was a shady garden with fountains
and stone benches, and beyond stood a huge white palace built in the
Moorish style, and terraced roofs and a high tower ornamented with green
and peacock-blue tiles. In the distance, among more palms, appeared a
number of low, flat huts of brown earth. The road, as far as the eyes
could see, stretched straight forward through enormous groves of palms,
whose feathery tops swayed gently in the light wind that blew from the
desert. Upon all things rained a flood of blue and gold. A blinding
radiance made all things glad.

“How glorious light is!” Domini exclaimed, as she looked down the road
to the point where its whiteness was lost in the moving ocean of the
trees.

Batouch assented without enthusiasm, having always lived in the light.

“As we return from the garden we will visit the tower,” he said,
pointing to the Moorish palace. “It is a hotel, and is not yet open,
but I know the guardian. From the tower Madame will see the whole of
Beni-Mora. Here is the negro village.”

They traversed its dusty alleys slowly. On the side where the low
brown dwellings threw shadows some of the inhabitants were dreaming or
chattering, wrapped in garments of gaudy cotton. Little girls in the
fiercest orange colour, with tattooed foreheads and leathern amulets,
darted to and fro, chasing each other and shrieking with laughter. Naked
babies, whose shaven heads made a warm resting-place for flies, stared
at Domini with a lustrous vacancy of expression. At the corners of the
alleys unveiled women squatted, grinding corn in primitive hand-mills,
or winding wool on wooden sticks. Their heads were covered with plaits
of imitation hair made of wool, in which barbaric silver ornaments were
fastened, and their black necks and arms jingled with chains and bangles
set with squares of red coral and large dull blue and green stones. Some
of them called boldly to Batouch, and he answered them with careless
impudence. The palm-wood door of one of the houses stood wide open, and
Domini looked in. She saw a dark space with floor and walls of earth,
a ceiling of palm and brushwood, a low divan of earth without mat or
covering of any kind.

“They have no furniture?” she asked Batouch.

“No. What do they want with it? They live out here in the sun and go in
to sleep.”

Life simplified to this extent made her smile. Yet she looked at the
squatting figures in the gaudy cotton rags with a stirring of envy. The
memory of her long and complicated London years, filled with a multitude
of so-called pleasures which had never stifled the dull pain set up in
her heart by the rude shock of her mother’s sin and its result, made
this naked, sunny, barbarous existence seem desirable. She stood for a
moment to watch two women sorting grain for cous-cous. Their guttural
laughter, their noisy talk, the quick and energetic movements of their
busy black hands, reminded her of children’s gaiety. And Nature rose
before her in the sunshine, confronting artifice and the heavy languors
of modern life in cities. How had she been able to endure the yoke so
long?

“Will Madame take me to London with her when she returns?” said Batouch,
slyly.

“I am not going back to London for a very long time,” she replied with
energy.

“You will stay here many weeks?”

“Months, perhaps. And perhaps I shall travel on into the desert. Yes, I
must do that.”

“If we followed the white road into the desert, and went on and on for
many days, we should come at last to Tombouctou,” said Batouch. “But
very likely we should be killed by the Touaregs. They are fierce and
they hate strangers.”

“Would you be afraid to go?” Domini asked him, curiously.

“Why afraid?”

“Of being killed?”

He looked calmly surprised. “Why should I be afraid to die? All must
pass through that door. It does not matter whether it is to-day or
to-morrow.”

“You have no fear of death, then?”

“Of course not. Have you, Madame?” He gazed at Domini with genuine
astonishment.

“I don’t know,” she answered.

And she wondered and could not tell.

“There is the Villa Anteoni.”

Batouch lifted his hand and pointed. They had turned aside from the
way to Tombouctou, left the village behind them, and come into a narrow
track which ran parallel to the desert. The palm trees rustled on their
right, the green corn waved, the narrow cuttings in the earth gleamed
with shallow water. But on their other side was limitless sterility; the
wide, stony expanse of the great river bed, the Oued-Beni-Mora, then a
low earth cliff, and then the immense airy flats stretching away into
the shining regions of the sun. At some distance, raised on a dazzling
white wall above the desert in an unshaded place, Domini saw a narrow,
two-sided white house, with a flat roof and a few tiny loopholes instead
of windows. One side looked full upon the waterless river bed, the
other, at right angles to it, ran back towards a thicket of palms and
ended in an arcade of six open Moorish arches, through which the fierce
blue of the cloudless sky stared, making an almost theatrical effect.
Beyond, masses of trees were visible, looking almost black against the
intense, blinding pallor of wall, villa and arcade, the intense blue
above.

“What a strange house!” Domini said. “There are no windows.”

“They are all on the other side, looking into the garden.”

The villa fascinated Domini at once. The white Moorish arcade framing
bare, quivering blue, blue from the inmost heart of heaven, intense as
a great vehement cry, was beautiful as the arcade of a Geni’s home in
Fairyland. Mystery hung about this dwelling, a mystery of light, not
darkness, secrets of flame and hidden things of golden meaning. She felt
almost like a child who is about to penetrate into the red land of the
winter fire, and she hastened her steps till she reached a tall white
gate set in an arch of wood, and surmounted with a white coat of arms
and two lions. Batouch struck on it with a white knocker and then began
to roll a cigarette.

“I will wait here for Madame.”

Domini nodded. A leaf of wood was pulled back softly in the gate, and
she stepped into the garden and confronted a graceful young Arab dressed
in pale green, who saluted her respectfully and gently closed the door.

“May I walk about the garden a little?” she asked.

She did not look round her yet, for the Arab’s face interested and even
charmed her. It was aristocratic, enchantingly indolent, like the
face of a happy lotus-eater. The great, lustrous eyes were tender as
a gazelle’s and thoughtless as the eyes of a sleepy child. His
perfectly-shaped feet were bare on the shining sand. In one hand he held
a large red rose and in the other a half-smoked cigarette.

Domini could not kelp smiling at him as she put her question, and he
smiled contentedly back at her as he answered, in a low, level voice:

“You can go where you will. Shall I show you the paths?”

He lifted his hand and calmly smelt his red rose, keeping his great eyes
fixed upon her. Domini’s wish to be alone had left her. This was surely
the geni of the garden, and his company would add to its mystery and
fragrance.

“You need not stay by the door?” she asked.

“No one will come. There is no one in Beni-Mora. And Hassan will stay.”

He pointed with his rose to a little tent that was pitched close to the
gate beneath a pepper tree. In it Domini saw a brown boy curled up like
a dog and fast asleep. She began to feel as if she had eaten hashish.
The world seemed made for dreaming.

“Thank you, then.”

And now for the first time she looked round to see whether Batouch had
implied the truth. Must the European gardens give way to this Eastern
garden, take a lower place with all their roses?

She stood on a great expanse of newly-raked smooth sand, rising in a
very gentle slope to a gigantic hedge of carefully trimmed evergreens,
which projected at the top, forming a roof and casting a pleasant shade
upon the sand. At intervals white benches were placed under this hedge.
To the right was the villa. She saw now that it was quite small. There
were two lines of windows--on the ground floor and the upper story. The
lower windows opened on to the sand, those above on to a verandah with
a white railing, which was gained by a white staircase outside the house
built beneath the arches of the arcade. The villa was most delicately
simple, but in this riot of blue and gold its ivory cleanliness, set
there upon the shining sand which was warm to the foot, made it look
magical to Domini. She thought she had never known before what spotless
purity was like.

“Those are the bedrooms,” murmured the Arab at her side.

“There are only bedrooms?” she asked in surprise.

“The other rooms, the drawing-room of Monsieur the Count, the
dining-room, the smoking-room, the Moorish bath, the room of the little
dog, the kitchen and the rooms for the servants are in different parts
of the garden. There is the dining-room.”

He pointed with his rose to a large white building, whose dazzling walls
showed here and there through the masses of trees to the left, where a
little raised sand-path with flattened, sloping sides wound away into a
maze of shadows diapered with gold.

“Let us go down that path,” Domini said almost in a whisper.

The spell of the place was descending upon her. This was surely a home
of dreams, a haven where the sun came to lie down beneath the trees and
sleep.

“What is your name?” she added.

“Smain,” replied the Arab. “I was born in this garden. My father,
Mohammed, was with Monsieur the Count.”

He led the way over the sand, moving silently on his long, brown feet,
straight as a reed in a windless place. Domini followed, holding her
breath. Only sometimes she let her strong imagination play utterly at
its will. She let it go now as she and Smain turned into the golden
diapered shadows of the little path and came into the swaying mystery
of the trees. The longing for secrecy, for remoteness, for the beauty of
far away had sometimes haunted her, especially in the troubled moments
of her life. Her heart, oppressed, had overleaped the horizon line
in answer to a calling from hidden things beyond. Her emotions had
wandered, seeking the great distances in which the dim purple twilight
holds surely comfort for those who suffer. But she had never thought to
find any garden of peace that realised her dreams. Nevertheless, she was
already conscious that Smain with his rose was showing her the way to
her ideal, that her feet were set upon its pathway, that its legendary
trees were closing round her.

Behind the evergreen hedge she heard the liquid bubbling of a hidden
waterfall, and when they had left the untempered sunlight behind them
this murmur grew louder. It seemed as if the green gloom in which they
walked acted as a sounding-board to the delicious voice. The little
path wound on and on between two running rills of water, which slipped
incessantly away under the broad and yellow-tipped leaves of dwarf
palms, making a music so faint that it was more like a remembered sound
in the mind than one which slid upon the ear. On either hand towered a
jungle of trees brought to this home in the desert from all parts of the
world.

There were many unknown to Domini, but she recognised several varieties
of palms, acacias, gums, fig trees, chestnuts, poplars, false pepper
trees, the huge olive trees called Jamelons, white laurels, indiarubber
and cocoanut trees, bananas, bamboos, yuccas, many mimosas and
quantities of tall eucalyptus trees. Thickets of scarlet geranium flamed
in the twilight. The hibiscus lifted languidly its frail and rosy cup,
and the red gold oranges gleamed amid leaves that looked as if they had
been polished by an attentive fairy.

As she went with Smain farther into the recesses of the garden the voice
of the waterfall died away. No birds were singing. Domini thought that
perhaps they dared not sing lest they might wake the sun from its golden
reveries, but afterwards, when she knew the garden better, she often
heard them twittering with a subdued, yet happy, languor, as if joining
in a nocturn upon the edge of sleep. Under the trees the sand was
yellow, of a shade so voluptuously beautiful that she longed to touch
it with her bare feet like Smain. Here and there it rose in symmetrical
little pyramids, which hinted at absent gardeners, perhaps enjoying a
siesta.

Never before had she fully understood the enchantment of green, quite
realised how happy a choice was made on that day of Creation when it was
showered prodigally over the world. But now, as she walked secretly over
the yellow sand between the rills, following the floating green robe of
Smain, she rested her eyes, and her soul, on countless mingling shades
of the delicious colour; rough, furry green of geranium leaves, silver
green of olives, black green of distant palms from which the sun held
aloof, faded green of the eucalyptus, rich, emerald green of fan-shaped,
sunlit palms, hot, sultry green of bamboos, dull, drowsy green of
mulberry trees and brooding chestnuts. It was a choir of colours in one
colour, like a choir of boys all with treble voices singing to the sun.

Gold flickered everywhere, weaving patterns of enchantment, quivering,
vital patterns of burning beauty. Down the narrow, branching paths that
led to inner mysteries the light ran in and out, peeping between the
divided leaves of plants, gliding over the slippery edges of the palm
branches, trembling airily where the papyrus bent its antique head,
dancing among the big blades of sturdy grass that sprouted in tufts here
and there, resting languidly upon the glistening magnolias that were
besieged by somnolent bees. All the greens and all the golds of Creation
were surely met together in this profound retreat to prove the perfect
harmony of earth with sun.

And now, growing accustomed to the pervading silence, Domini began to
hear the tiny sounds that broke it. They came from the trees and
plants. The airs were always astir, helping the soft designs of Nature,
loosening a leaf from its stem and bearing it to the sand, striking a
berry from its place and causing it to drop at Domini’s feet, giving a
faded geranium petal the courage to leave its more vivid companions
and resign itself to the loss of the place it could no longer fill with
beauty. Very delicate was the touch of the dying upon the yellow sand.
It increased the sense of pervading mystery and made Domini more deeply
conscious of the pulsing life of the garden.

“There is the room of the little dog,” said Smain.

They had come out into a small open space, over which an immense
cocoanut tree presided. Low box hedges ran round two squares of grass
which were shadowed by date palms heavy with yellow fruit, and beneath
some leaning mulberry trees Domini saw a tiny white room with two glass
windows down to the ground. She went up to it and peeped in, smiling.

There, in a formal salon, with gilt chairs, oval, polished tables, faded
rugs and shining mirrors, sat a purple china dog with his tail curled
over his back sternly staring into vacancy. His expression and his
attitude were autocratic and determined, betokening a tyrannical nature,
and Domini peeped at him with precaution, holding herself very still
lest he should become aware of her presence and resent it.

“Monsieur the Count paid much money for the dog,” murmured Smain. “He is
very valuable.”

“How long has he been there?”

“For many years. He was there when I was born, and I have been married
twice and divorced twice.”

Domini turned from the window and looked at Smain with astonishment. He
was smelling his rose like a dreamy child.

“You have been divorced twice?”

“Yes. Now I will show Madame the smoking-room.”

They followed another of the innumerable alleys of the garden. This one
was very narrow and less densely roofed with trees than those they had
already traversed. Tall shrubs bent forward on either side of it, and
their small leaves almost meeting, were transformed by the radiant
sunbeams into tongues of pale fire, quivering, well nigh transparent.
As she approached them Domini could not resist the fancy that they would
burn her. A brown butterfly flitted forward between them and vanished
into the golden dream beyond.

“Oh, Smain, how you must love this garden!” she said.

A sort of ecstasy was waking within her. The pure air, the caressing
warmth, the enchanted stillness and privacy of this domain touched her
soul and body like the hands of a saint with power to bless her.

“I could live here for ever,” she added, “without once wishing to go out
into the world.”

Smain looked drowsily pleased.

“We are coming to the centre of the garden,” he said, as they passed
over a palm-wood bridge beneath which a stream glided under the red
petals of geraniums.

The tongues of flame were left behind. Green darkness closed in upon
them and the sand beneath their feet looked blanched. The sense of
mystery increased, for the trees were enormous and grew densely here.
Pine needles lay upon the ground, and there was a stirring of sudden
wind far up above their heads in the tree-tops.

“This is the part of the garden that Monsieur the Count loves,” said
Smain. “He comes here every day.”

“What is that?” said Domini, suddenly stopping on the pale sand.

A thin and remote sound stole to them down the alley, clear and frail as
the note of a night bird.

“It is Larbi playing upon the flute. He is in love. That is why he plays
when he ought to be watering the flowers and raking out the sand.”

The distant love-song of the flute seemed to Domini the last touch of
enchantment making this indeed a wonderland. She could not move, and
held up her hands to stay the feet of Smain, who was quite content
to wait. Never before had she heard any music that seemed to mean and
suggest so much to her as this African tune played by an enamoured
gardener. Queer and uncouth as it was, distorted with ornaments and
tricked out with abrupt runs, exquisitely unnecessary grace notes,
and sudden twitterings prolonged till a strange and frivolous Eternity
tripped in to banish Time, it grasped Domini’s fancy and laid a spell
upon her imagination. For it sounded as naively sincere as the song of a
bird, and as if the heart from which it flowed were like the heart of
a child, a place of revelation, not of concealment. The sun made men
careless here. They opened their windows to it, and one could see into
the warm and glowing rooms. Domini looked at the gentle Arab youth
beside her, already twice married and twice divorced. She listened to
Larbi’s unending song of love. And she said to herself, “These people,
uncivilised or not, at least live, and I have been dead all my life,
dead in life.” That was horribly possible. She knew it as she felt the
enormously powerful spell of Africa descending upon her, enveloping
her quietly but irresistibly. The dream of this garden was quick with
a vague and yet fierce stirring of realities. There was a murmuring
of many small and distant voices, like the voices of innumerable tiny
things following restless activities in a deep forest. As she stood
there the last grain of European dust was lifted from Domini’s soul. How
deeply it had been buried, and for how many years.

“The greatest act of man is the act of renunciation.” She had just heard
those words. The eyes of the priest had flamed as he spoke them, and she
had caught the spark of his enthusiasm. But now another fire seemed lit
within her, and she found herself marvelling at such austerity. Was it
not a fanatical defiance flung into the face of the sun? She shrank from
her own thought, like one startled, and walked on softly in the green
darkness.

Larbi’s flute became more distant. Again and again it repeated the same
queer little melody, changing the ornamentation at the fantasy of the
player. She looked for him among the trees but saw no one. He must be in
some very secret place. Smain touched her.

“Look!” he said, and his voice was very low.

He parted the branches of some palms with his delicate hands, and
Domini, peering between them, saw in a place of deep shadows an isolated
square room, whose white walls were almost entirely concealed by masses
of purple bougainvillea. It had a flat roof. In three of its sides were
large arched window-spaces without windows. In the fourth was a narrow
doorway without a door. Immense fig trees and palms and thickets of
bamboo towered around it and leaned above it. And it was circled by a
narrow riband of finely-raked sand.

“That is the smoking-room of Monsieur the Count,” said Smain. “He spends
many hours there. Come and I will show the inside to Madame.”

They turned to the left and went towards the room. The flute was close
to them now. “Larbi must be in there,” Domini whispered to Smain, as a
person whispers in a church.

“No, he is among the trees beyond.”

“But someone is there.”

She pointed to the arched window-space nearest to them. A thin spiral of
blue-grey smoke curled through it and evaporated into the shadows of
the trees. After a moment it was followed gently and deliberately by
another.

“It is not Larbi. He would not go in there. It must be----”

He paused. A tall, middle-aged man had come to the doorway of the little
room and looked out into the garden with bright eyes.



CHAPTER VI

Domini drew back and glanced at Smain. She was not accustomed to feeling
intrusive, and the sudden sensation rendered her uneasy.

“It is Monsieur the Count,” Smain said calmly and quite aloud.

The man in the doorway took off his soft hat, as if the words effected
an introduction between Domini and him.

“You were coming to see my little room, Madame?” he said in French. “If
I may show it to you I shall feel honoured.”

The timbre of his voice was harsh and grating, yet it was a very
interesting, even a seductive, voice, and, Domini thought, peculiarly
full of vivid life, though not of energy. His manner at once banished
her momentary discomfort. There is a freemasonry between people born in
the same social world. By the way in which Count Anteoni took off his
hat and spoke she knew at once that all was right.

“Thank you, Monsieur,” she answered. “I was told at the gate you gave
permission to travellers to visit your garden.”

“Certainly.”

He spoke a few words in fluent Arabic to Smain, who turned away and
disappeared among the trees.

“I hope you will allow me to accompany you through the rest of the
garden,” he said, turning again to Domini. “It will give me great
pleasure.”

“It is very kind of you.”

The way in which the change of companion had been effected made it seem
a pleasant, inevitable courtesy, which neither implied nor demanded
anything.

“This is my little retreat,” Count Anteoni continued, standing aside
from the doorway that Domini might enter.

She drew a long breath when she was within.

The floor was of fine sand, beaten flat and hard, and strewn with
Eastern rugs of faint and delicate hues, dim greens and faded rose
colours, grey-blues and misty topaz yellows. Round the white walls ran
broad divans, also white, covered with prayer rugs from Bagdad, and
large cushions, elaborately worked in dull gold and silver thread, with
patterns of ibises and flamingoes in flight. In the four angles of the
room stood four tiny smoking-tables of rough palm wood, holding
hammered ash-trays of bronze, green bronze torches for the lighting of
cigarettes, and vases of Chinese dragon china filled with velvety red
roses, gardenias and sprigs of orange blossom. Leather footstools,
covered with Tunisian thread-work, lay beside them. From the arches of
the window-spaces hung old Moorish lamps of copper, fitted with small
panes of dull jewelled glass, such as may be seen in venerable church
windows. In a round copper brazier, set on one of the window-seats,
incense twigs were drowsily burning and giving out thin, dwarf columns
of scented smoke. Through the archways and the narrow doorway the
dense walls of leafage were visible standing on guard about this airy
hermitage, and the hot purple blossoms of the bougainvillea shed a cloud
of colour through the bosky dimness.

And still the flute of Larbi showered soft, clear, whimsical music from
some hidden place close by.

Domini looked at her host, who was standing by the doorway, leaning one
arm against the ivory-white wall.

“This is my first day in Africa,” she said simply. “You may imagine what
I think of your garden, what I feel in it. I needn’t tell you. Indeed, I
am sure the travellers you so kindly let in must often have worried you
with their raptures.”

“No,” he answered, with a still gravity which yet suggested kindness,
“for I leave nearly always before the travellers come. That sounds a
little rude? But you would not be in Beni-Mora at this season, Madame,
if it could include you.”

“I have come here for peace,” Domini replied simply.

She said it because she felt as if it was already understood by her
companion.

Count Anteoni took down his arm from the white wall and pulled a branch
of the purple flowers slowly towards him through the doorway.

“There is peace--what is generally called so, at least--in Beni-Mora,”
 he answered rather slowly and meditatively. “That is to say, there is
similarity of day with day, night with night. The sun shines untiringly
over the desert, and the desert always hints at peace.”

He let the flowers go, and they sprang softly back, and hung quivering
in the space beyond his thin figure. Then he added:

“Perhaps one should not say more than that.”

“No.”

Domini sat down for a moment. She looked up at him with her direct eyes
and at the shaking flowers. The sound of Larbi’s flute was always in her
ears.

“But may not one think, feel a little more?” she asked.

“Oh, why not? If one can, if one must? But how? Africa is as fierce and
full of meaning as a furnace, you know.”

“Yes, I know--already,” she replied.

His words expressed what she had already felt here in Beni-Mora,
surreptitiously and yet powerfully. He said it, and last night the
African hautboy had said it. Peace and a flame. Could they exist
together, blended, married?

“Africa seems to me to agree through contradiction,” she added, smiling
a little, and touching the snowy wall with her right hand. “But then,
this is my first day.”

“Mine was when I was a boy of sixteen.”

“This garden wasn’t here then?”

“No. I had it made. I came here with my mother. She spoilt me. She let
me have my whim.”

“This garden is your boy’s whim?”

“It was. Now it is a man’s----”

He seemed to hesitate.

“Paradise,” suggested Domini.

“I think I was going to say hiding-place.”

There was no bitterness in his odd, ugly voice, yet surely the words
implied bitterness. The wounded, the fearful, the disappointed, the
condemned hide. Perhaps he remembered this, for he added rather quickly:

“I come here to be foolish, Madame, for I come here to think. This is my
special thinking place.”

“How strange!” Domini exclaimed impulsively, and leaning forward on the
divan.

“Is it?”

“I only mean that already Beni-Mora has seemed to me the ideal place for
that.”

“For thought?”

“For finding out interior truth.”

Count Anteoni looked at her rather swiftly and searchingly. His eyes
were not large, but they were bright, and held none of the languor
so often seen in the eyes of his countrymen. His face was expressive
through its mobility rather than through its contours. The features were
small and refined, not noble, but unmistakably aristocratic. The nose
was sensitive, with wide nostrils. A long and straight moustache,
turning slightly grey, did not hide the mouth, which had unusually pale
lips. The ears were set very flat against the head, and were finely
shaped. The chin was pointed. The general look of the whole face was
tense, critical, conscious, but in the defiant rather than in the timid
sense. Such an expression belongs to men who would always be aware of
the thoughts and feelings of others concerning them, but who would throw
those thoughts and feelings off as decisively and energetically as a dog
shakes the waterdrops from its coat on emerging from a swim.

“And sending it forth, like Ishmael, to shift for itself in the desert,”
 he said.

The odd remark sounded like neither statement nor question, merely like
the sudden exclamation of a mind at work.

“Will you allow me to take you through the rest of the garden, Madame?”
 he added in a more formal voice.

“Thank you,” said Domini, who had already got up, moved by the examining
look cast at her.

There was nothing in it to resent, and she had not resented it, but it
had recalled her to the consciousness that they were utter strangers to
each other.

As they came out on the pale riband of sand which circled the little
room Domini said:

“How wild and extraordinary that tune is!”

“Larbi’s. I suppose it is, but no African music seems strange to me. I
was born on my father’s estate, near Tunis. He was a Sicilian; but came
to North Africa each winter. I have always heard the tomtoms and the
pipes, and I know nearly all the desert songs of the nomads.”

“This is a love-song, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Larbi is always in love, they tell me. Each new dancer catches him
in her net. Happy Larbi!”

“Because he can love so easily?”

“Or unlove so easily. Look at him, Madame.”

At a little distance, under a big banana tree, and half hidden by clumps
of scarlet geraniums, Domini saw a huge and very ugly Arab, with an
almost black skin, squatting on his heels, with a long yellow and red
flute between his thick lips. His eyes were bent down, and he did not
see them, but went on busily playing, drawing from his flute coquettish
phrases with his big and bony fingers.

“And I pay him so much a week all the year round for doing that,” the
Count said.

His grating voice sounded kind and amused. They walked on, and Larbi’s
tune died gradually away.

“Somehow I can’t be angry with the follies and vices of the Arabs,” the
Count continued. “I love them as they are; idle, absurdly amorous,
quick to shed blood, gay as children, whimsical as--well, Madame, were I
talking to a man I might dare to say pretty women.”

“Why not?”

“I will, then. I glory in their ingrained contempt of civilisation.
But I like them to say their prayers five times in the day as it is
commanded, and no Arab who touches alcohol in defiance of the Prophet’s
law sets foot in my garden.”

There was a touch of harshness in his voice as he said the last words,
the sound of the autocrat. Somehow Domini liked it. This man had
convictions, and strong ones. That was certain. There was something
oddly unconventional in him which something in her responded to. He was
perfectly polite, and yet, she was quite sure, absolutely careless of
opinion. Certainly he was very much a man.

“It is pleasant, too,” he resumed, after a slight pause, “to be
surrounded by absolutely thoughtless people with thoughtful faces and
mysterious eyes--wells without truth at the bottom of them.”

She laughed.

“No one must think here but you!”

“I prefer to keep all the folly to myself. Is not that a grand
cocoanut?”

He pointed to a tree so tall that it seemed soaring to heaven.

“Yes, indeed. Like the one that presides over the purple dog.”

“You have seen my fetish?”

“Smain showed him to me, with reverence.”

“Oh, he is king here. The Arabs declare that on moonlight nights they
have heard him joining in the chorus of the Kabyle dogs.”

“You speak almost as if you believed it.”

“Well, I believe more here than I believe anywhere else. That is partly
why I come here.”

“I can understand that--I mean believing much here.”

“What! Already you feel the spell of Beni-Mora, the desert spell! Yes,
there is enchantment here--and so I never stay too long.”

“For fear of what?”

Count Anteoni was walking easily beside her. He walked from the hips,
like many Sicilians, swaying very slightly, as if he liked to be aware
how supple his body still was. As Domini spoke he stopped. They were now
at a place where four paths joined, and could see four vistas of green
and gold, of magical sunlight and shadow.

“I scarcely know; of being carried who knows where--in mind or heart.
Oh, there is danger in Beni-Mora, Madame, there is danger. This
startling air is full of influences, of desert spirits.”

He looked at her in a way she could not understand--but it made her
think of the perfume-seller in his little dark room, and of the sudden
sensation she had had that mystery coils, like a black serpent, in the
shining heart of the East.

“And now, Madame, which path shall we take? This one leads to my
drawing-room, that on the right to the Moorish bath.”

“And that?”

“That one goes straight down to the wall that overlooks the Sahara.”

“Please let us take it.”

“The desert spirits are calling to you? But you are wise. What makes
this garden remarkable is not its arrangement, the number and variety of
its trees, but the fact that it lies flush with the Sahara--like a man’s
thoughts of truth with Truth, perhaps.”

He turned up the tail of the sentence and his harsh voice gave a little
grating crack.

“I don’t believe they are so different from one another as the garden
and the desert.”

She looked at him directly.

“It would be too ironical.”

“But nothing is,” the Count said.

“You have discovered that in this garden?”

“Ah, it is new to you, Madame!”

For the first time there was a sound of faint bitterness in his voice.

“One often discovers the saddest thing in the loveliest place,” he
added. “There you begin to see the desert.”

Far away, at the small orifice of the tunnel of trees down which they
were walking, appeared a glaring patch of fierce and quivering sunlight.

“I can only see the sun,” Domini said.

“I know so well what it hides that I imagine I actually see the desert.
One loves one’s kind, assiduous liar. Isn’t it so?”

“The imagination? But perhaps I am not disposed to allow that it is a
liar.”

“Who knows? You may be right.”

He looked at her kindly with his bright eyes. It had not seem to strike
him that their conversation was curiously intimate, considering that
they were strangers to one another, that he did not even know her name.
Domini wondered suddenly how old he was. That look made him seem much
older than he had seemed before. There was such an expression in his
eyes as may sometimes be seen in eyes that look at a child who is
kissing a rag doll with deep and determined affection. “Kiss your doll!”
 they seemed to say. “Put off the years when you must know that dolls can
never return a kiss.”

“I begin to see the desert now,” Domini said after a moment of silent
walking. “How wonderful it is!”

“Yes, it is. The most wonderful thing in Nature. You will think it much
more wonderful when you fancy you know it well.”

“Fancy!”

“I don’t think anyone can ever really know the desert. It is the thing
that keeps calling, and does not permit one to draw near.”

“But then, one might learn to hate it.”

“I don’t think so. Truth does just the same, you know. And yet men keep
on trying to draw near.”

“But sometimes they succeed.”

“Do they? Not when they live in gardens.”

He laughed for the first time since they had been together, and all his
face was covered with a network of little moving lines.

“One should never live in a garden, Madame.”

“I will try to take your word for it, but the task will be difficult.”

“Yes? More difficult, perhaps, when you see what lies beside my thoughts
of truth.”

As he spoke they came out from the tunnel and were seized by the fierce
hands of the sun. It was within half an hour of noon, and the radiance
was blinding. Domini put up her parasol sharply, like one startled. She
stopped.

“But how tremendous!” she exclaimed.

Count Anteoni laughed again, and drew down the brim of his grey hat
over his eyes. The hand with which he did it was almost as burnt as an
Arab’s.

“You are afraid of it?”

“No, no. But it startled me. We don’t know the sun really in Europe.”

“No. Not even in Southern Italy, not even in Sicily. It is fierce
there in summer, but it seems further away. Here it insists on the most
intense intimacy. If you can bear it we might sit down for a moment?”

“Please.”

All along the edge of the garden, from the villa to the boundary of
Count Anteoni’s domain, ran a straight high wall made of earth bricks
hardened by the sun and topped by a coping of palm wood painted white.
This wall was some eight feet high on the side next to the desert, but
the garden was raised in such a way that the inner side was merely a
low parapet running along the sand path. In this parapet were cut small
seats, like window-seats, in which one could rest and look full upon the
desert as from a little cliff. Domini sat down on one of them, and the
Count stood by her, resting one foot on the top of the wall and leaning
his right arm on his knee.

“There is the world on which I look for my hiding-place,” he said. “A
vast world, isn’t it?”

Domini nodded without speaking.

Immediately beneath them, in the narrow shadow of the wall, was a path
of earth and stones which turned off at the right at the end of the
garden into the oasis. Beyond lay the vast river bed, a chaos of hot
boulders bounded by ragged low earth cliffs, interspersed here and there
with small pools of gleaming water. These cliffs were yellow. From their
edge stretched the desert, as Eternity stretches from the edge of Time.
Only to the left was the immeasurable expanse intruded upon by a long
spur of mountains, which ran out boldly for some distance and then
stopped abruptly, conquered and abashed by the imperious flats. Beneath
the mountains were low, tent-like, cinnamon-coloured undulations, which
reminded Domini of those made by a shaken-out sheet, one smaller than
the other till they melted into the level. The summits of the most
distant mountains, which leaned away as if in fear of the desert, were
dark and mistily purple. Their flanks were iron grey at this hour,
flecked in the hollows with the faint mauve and pink which became
carnation colour when the sun set.

Domini scarcely looked at them. Till now she had always thought that
she loved mountains. The desert suddenly made them insignificant, almost
mean to her. She turned her eyes towards the flat spaces. It was in them
that majesty lay, mystery, power, and all deep and significant things.
In the midst of the river bed, and quite near, rose a round and squat
white tower with a small cupola. Beyond it, on the little cliff, was a
tangle of palms where a tiny oasis sheltered a few native huts. At an
immense distance, here and there, other oases showed as dark stains show
on the sea where there are hidden rocks. And still farther away, on all
hands, the desert seemed to curve up slightly like a shallow wine-hued
cup to the misty blue horizon line, which resembled a faintly seen and
mysterious tropical sea, so distant that its sultry murmur was lost in
the embrace of the intervening silence.

An Arab passed on the path below the wall. He did not see them. A white
dog with curling lips ran beside him. He was singing to himself in
a low, inward voice. He went on and turned towards the oasis, still
singing as he walked slowly.

“Do you know what he is singing?” the Count asked.

Domini shook her head. She was straining her ears to hear the melody as
long as possible.

“It is a desert song of the freed negroes of Touggourt--‘No one but God
and I knows what is in my heart.’”

Domini lowered her parasol to conceal her face. In the distance she
could still hear the song, but it was dying away.

“Oh! what is going to happen to me here?” she thought.

Count Anteoni was looking away from her now across the desert. A strange
impulse rose up in her. She could not resist it. She put down her
parasol, exposing herself to the blinding sunlight, knelt down on the
hot sand, leaned her arms on the white parapet, put her chin in the
upturned palms of her hands and stared into the desert almost fiercely.

“No one but God and I knows what is in my heart,” she thought. “But
that’s not true, that’s not true. For I don’t know.”

The last echo of the Arab’s song fainted on the blazing air. Surely it
had changed now. Surely, as he turned into the shadows of the palms,
he was singing, “No one but God knows what is in my heart.” Yes, he was
singing that. “No one but God--no one but God.”

Count Anteoni looked down at her. She did not notice it, and he kept his
eyes on her for a moment. Then he turned to the desert again.

By degrees, as she watched, Domini became aware of many things
indicative of life, and of many lives in the tremendous expanse that
at first had seemed empty of all save sun and mystery. She saw low,
scattered tents, far-off columns of smoke rising. She saw a bird pass
across the blue and vanish towards the mountains. Black shapes appeared
among the tiny mounds of earth, crowned with dusty grass and dwarf
tamarisk bushes. She saw them move, like objects in a dream, slowly
through the shimmering gold. They were feeding camels, guarded by nomads
whom she could not see.

At first she persistently explored the distances, carried forcibly by an
_elan_ of her whole nature to the remotest points her eyes could reach.
Then she withdrew her gaze gradually, reluctantly, from the hidden
summoning lands, whose verges she had with difficulty gained, and
looked, at first with apprehension, upon the nearer regions. But her
apprehension died when she found that the desert transmutes what is
close as well as what is remote, suffuses even that which the hand
could almost touch with wonder, beauty, and the deepest, most strange
significance.

Quite near in the river bed she saw an Arab riding towards the desert
upon a prancing black horse. He mounted a steep bit of path and came out
on the flat ground at the cliff top. Then he set his horse at a gallop,
raising his bridle hand and striking his heels into the flanks of the
beast. And each of his movements, each of the movements of his horse,
was profoundly interesting, and held the attention of the onlooker in a
vice, as if the fates of worlds depended upon where he was carried and
how soon he reached his goal. A string of camels laden with wooden bales
met him on the way, and this chance encounter seemed to Domini fraught
with almost terrible possibilities. Why? She did not ask herself. Again
she sent her gaze further, to the black shapes moving stealthily among
the little mounds, to the spirals of smoke rising into the glimmering
air. Who guarded those camels? Who fed those distant fires? Who watched
beside them? It seemed of vital consequence to her that she should know.

Count Anteoni took out his watch and glanced at it.

“I am looking to see if it is nearly the hour of prayer,” he said. “When
I am in Beni-Mora I usually come here then.”

“You turn to the desert as the faithful turn towards Mecca?”

“Yes. I like to see men praying in the desert.”

He spoke indifferently, but Domini felt suddenly sure that within
him there were depths of imagination, of tenderness, even perhaps of
mysticism.

“An atheist in the desert is unimaginable,” he added. “In cathedrals
they may exist very likely, and even feel at home. I have seen
cathedrals in which I could believe I was one, but--how many human
beings can you see in the desert at this moment, Madame?”

Domini, still with her round chin in her hands, searched the blazing
region with her eyes. She saw three running figures with the train of
camels which was now descending into the river bed. In the shadow of the
low white tower two more were huddled, motionless. She looked away to
right and left, but saw only the shallow pools, the hot and gleaming
boulders, and beyond the yellow cliffs the brown huts peeping through
the palms. The horseman had disappeared.

“I can see five,” she answered.

“Ah! you are not accustomed to the desert.”

“There are more?”

“I could count up to a dozen. Which are yours?”

“The men with the camels and the men under that tower.”

“There are four playing the _jeu des dames_ in the shadow of the cliff
opposite to us. There is one asleep under a red rock where the path
ascends into the desert. And there are two more just at the edge of the
little oasis--Filiash, as it is called. One is standing under a palm,
and one is pacing up and down.”

“You must have splendid eyes.”

“They are trained to the desert. But there are probably a score of Arabs
within sight whom I don’t see.”

“Oh! now I see the men at the edge of the oasis. How oddly that one is
moving. He goes up and down like a sailor on the quarter-deck.”

“Yes, it is curious. And he is in the full blaze of the sun. That can’t
be an Arab.”

He drew a silver whistle from his waistcoat pocket, put it to his lips
and sounded a call. In a moment Smain same running lightly over the
sand. Count Anteoni said something to him in Arabic. He disappeared, and
speedily returned with a pair of field-glasses. While he was gone Domini
watched the two doll-like figures on the cliff in silence. One was
standing under a large isolated palm tree absolutely still, as Arabs
often stand. The other, at a short distance from him and full in the
sun, went to and fro, to and fro, always measuring the same space
of desert, and turning and returning at two given points which never
varied. He walked like a man hemmed in by walls, yet around him were the
infinite spaces. The effect was singularly unpleasant upon Domini. All
things in the desert, as she had already noticed, became almost
terribly significant, and this peculiar activity seemed full of some
extraordinary and even horrible meaning. She watched it with straining
eyes.

Count Anteoni took the glasses from Smain and looked through them,
adjusting them carefully to suit his sight.

“_Ecco!_” he said. “I was right. That man is not an Arab.”

He moved the glasses and glanced at Domini.

“You are not the only traveller here, Madame.”

He looked through the glasses again.

“I knew that,” she said.

“Indeed?”

“There is one at my hotel.”

“Possibly this is he. He makes me think of a caged tiger, who has been
so long in captivity that when you let him out he still imagines the
bars to be all round him. What was he like?”

All the time he was speaking he was staring intently through the
glasses. As Domini did not reply he removed them from his eyes and
glanced at her inquiringly.

“I am trying to think what he looked like,” she said slowly. “But I feel
that I don’t know. He was quite unlike any ordinary man.”

“Would you care to see if you can recognise him? These are really
marvellous glasses.”

Domini took them from him with some eagerness.

“Twist them about till they suit your eyes.”

At first she could see nothing but a fierce yellow glare. She turned the
screw and gradually the desert came to her, startlingly distinct. The
boulders of the river bed were enormous. She could see the veins of
colour in them, a lizard running over one of them and disappearing into
a dark crevice, then the white tower and the Arabs beneath it. One was
an old man yawning; the other a boy. He rubbed the tip of his brown
nose, and she saw the henna stains upon his nails. She lifted the
glasses slowly and with precaution. The tower ran away. She came to the
low cliff, to the brown huts and the palms, passed them one by one,
and reached the last, which was separated from its companions. Under it
stood a tall Arab in a garment like a white night-shirt.

“He looks as if he had only one eye!” she exclaimed.

“The palm-tree man--yes.”

She travelled cautiously away from him, keeping the glasses level.

“Ah!” she said on an indrawn breath.

As she spoke the thin, nasal cry of a distant voice broke upon her ears,
prolonging a strange call.

“The Mueddin,” said Count Anteoni.

And he repeated in a low tone the words of the angel to the prophet: “Oh
thou that art covered arise . . . and magnify thy Lord; and purify thy
clothes, and depart from uncleanness.”

The call died away and was renewed three times. The old man and the
boy beneath the tower turned their faces towards Mecca, fell upon their
knees and bowed their heads to the hot stones. The tall Arab under the
palm sank down swiftly. Domini kept the glasses at her eyes. Through
them, as in a sort of exaggerated vision, very far off, yet intensely
distinct, she saw the man with whom she had travelled in the train. He
went to and fro, to and fro on the burning ground till the fourth call
of the Mueddin died away. Then, as he approached the isolated palm tree
and saw the Arab beneath it fall to the earth and bow his long body in
prayer, he paused and stood still as if in contemplation. The glasses
were so powerful that it was possible to see the expressions on faces
even at that distance. The expression on the traveller’s face was,
or seemed to be, at first one of profound attention. But this changed
swiftly as he watched the bowing figure, and was succeeded by a look of
uneasiness, then of fierce disgust, then--surely--of fear or horror. He
turned sharply away like a driven man, and hurried off along the cliff
edge in a striding walk, quickening his steps each moment till his
departure became a flight. He disappeared behind a projection of earth
where the path sank to the river bed.

Domini laid the glasses down on the wall and looked at Count Anteoni.

“You say an atheist in the desert is unimaginable?

“Isn’t it true?”

“Has an atheist a hatred, a horror of prayer?”

“Chi lo sa? The devil shrank away from the lifted Cross.”

“Because he knew how much that was true it symbolised.”

“No doubt had it been otherwise he would have jeered, not cowered. But
why do you ask me this question, Madame?”

“I have just seen a man flee from the sight of prayer.”

“Your fellow-traveller?”

“Yes. It was horrible.”

She gave him back the glasses.

“They reveal that which should be hidden,” she said.

Count Anteoni took the glasses slowly from her hands. As he bent to do
it he looked steadily at her, and she could not read the expression in
his eyes.

“The desert is full of truth. Is that what you mean?” he asked.

She made no reply. Count Anteoni stretched out his hand to the shining
expanse before them.

“The man who is afraid of prayer is unwise to set foot beyond the palm
trees,” he said.

“Why unwise?”

He answered her very gravely.

“The Arabs have a saying: ‘The desert is the garden of Allah.’”

* * * * *

Domini did not ascend the tower of the hotel that morning. She had seen
enough for the moment, and did not wish to disturb her impressions by
adding to them. So she walked back to the Hotel du Desert with Batouch.

Count Anteoni had said good-bye to her at the door of the garden, and
had begged her to come again whenever she liked, and to spend as many
hours there as she pleased.

“I shall take you at your word,” she said frankly. “I feel that I may.”

As they shook hands she gave him her card. He took out his. “By the
way,” he said, “the big hotel you passed in coming here is mine. I
built it to prevent a more hideous one being built, and let it to the
proprietor. You might like to ascend the tower. The view at sundown is
incomparable. At present the hotel is shut, but the guardian will show
you everything if you give him my card.”

He pencilled some words in Arabic on the back from right to left.

“You write Arabic, too?” Domini said, watching the forming of the pretty
curves with interest.

“Oh, yes; I am more than half African, though my father was a Sicilian
and my mother a Roman.”

He gave her the card, took off his hat and bowed. When the tall white
door was softly shut by Smain, Domini felt rather like a new Eve
expelled from Paradise, without an Adam as a companion in exile.

“Well, Madame?” said Batouch. “Have I spoken the truth?”

“Yes. No European garden can be so beautiful as that. Now I am going
straight home.”

She smiled to herself as she said the last word.

Outside the hotel they found Hadj looking ferocious. He exchanged some
words with Batouch, accompanying them with violent gestures. When he had
finished speaking he spat upon the ground.

“What is the matter with him?” Domini asked.

“The Monsieur who is staying here would not take him to-day, but went
into the desert alone. Hadj wishes that the nomads may cut his throat,
and that his flesh may be eaten by jackals. Hadj is sure that he is a
bad man and will come to a bad end.”

“Because he does not want a guide every day! But neither shall I.”

“Madame is quite different. I would give my life for Madame.”

“Don’t do that, but go this afternoon and find me a horse. I don’t want
a quiet one, but something with devil, something that a Spahi would like
to ride.”

The desert spirits were speaking to her body as well as to her mind. A
physical audacity was stirring in her, and she longed to give it vent.

“Madame is like the lion. She is afraid of nothing.”

“You speak without knowing, Batouch. Don’t come for me this afternoon,
but bring round a horse, if you can find one, to-morrow morning.”

“This very evening I will--”

“No, Batouch. I said to-morrow morning.”

She spoke with a quiet but inflexible decision which silenced him. Then
she gave him ten francs and went into the dark house, from which the
burning noonday sun was carefully excluded. She intended to rest after
_dejeuner_, and towards sunset to go to the big hotel and mount alone to
the summit of the tower.

It was half-past twelve, and a faint rattle of knives and forks from the
_salle-a-manger_ told her that _dejeuner_ was ready. She went upstairs,
washed her face and hands in cold water, stood still while Suzanne shook
the dust from her gown, and then descended to the public room. The keen
air had given her an appetite.

The _salle-a-manger_ was large and shady, and was filled with small
tables, at only three of which were people sitting. Four French officers
sat together at one. A small, fat, perspiring man of middle age,
probably a commercial traveller, who had eyes like a melancholy toad,
was at another, eating olives with anxious rapidity, and wiping his
forehead perpetually with a dirty white handkerchief. At the third was
the priest with whom Domini had spoken in the church. His napkin was
tucked under his beard, and he was drinking soup as he bent well over
his plate.

A young Arab waiter, with a thin, dissipated face, stood near the door
in bright yellow slippers. When Domini came in he stole forward to show
her to her table, making a soft, shuffling sound on the polished wooden
floor. The priest glanced up over his napkin, rose and bowed. The French
officers stared with an interest they were too chivalrous to attempt to
conceal. Only the fat little man was entirely unconcerned. He wiped his
forehead, stuck his fork deftly into an olive, and continued to look
like a melancholy toad entangled by fate in commercial pursuits.

Domini’s table was by a window, across which green Venetian shutters
were drawn. It was at a considerable distance from the other guests, who
did not live in the house, but came there each day for their meals. Near
it she noticed a table laid for one person, and so arranged that if he
came to _dejeuner_ he would sit exactly opposite to her. She wondered
if it was for the man at whom she had just been looking through Count
Anteoni’s field-glasses, the man who had fled from prayer in the “Garden
of Allah.” As she glanced at the empty chair standing before the knives
and forks, and the white cloth, she was uncertain whether she wished it
to be filled by the traveller or not. She felt his presence in Beni-Mora
as a warring element. That she knew. She knew also that she had come
there to find peace, a great calm and remoteness in which she could at
last grow, develop, loose her true self from cramping bondage, come
to an understanding with herself, face her heart and soul, and--as it
were--look them in the eyes and know them for what they were, good
or evil. In the presence of this total stranger there was something
unpleasantly distracting which she could not and did not ignore,
something which roused her antagonism and which at the same time
compelled her attention. She had been conscious of it in the train,
conscious of it in the tunnel at twilight, at night in the hotel, and
once again in Count Anteoni’s garden. This man intruded himself, no
doubt unconsciously, or even against his will, into her sight, her
thoughts, each time that she was on the point of giving herself to what
Count Anteoni called “the desert spirits.” So it had been when the train
ran out of the tunnel into the blue country. So it had been again when
she leaned on the white wall and gazed out over the shining fastnesses
of the sun. He was there like an enemy, like something determined,
egoistical, that said to her, “You would look at the greatness of the
desert, at immensity, infinity, God!--Look at me.” And she could
not turn her eyes away. Each time the man had, as if without effort,
conquered the great competing power, fastened her thoughts upon himself,
set her imagination working about his life, even made her heart beat
faster with some thrill of--what? Was it pity? Was it a faint horror?
She knew that to call the feeling merely repugnance would not be
sincere. The intensity, the vitality of the force shut up in a human
being almost angered her at this moment as she looked at the empty chair
and realised all that it had suddenly set at work. There was something
insolent in humanity as well as something divine, and just then she
felt the insolence more than the divinity. Terrifically greater, more
overpowering than man, the desert was yet also somehow less than man,
feebler, vaguer. Or else how could she have been grasped, moved, turned
to curiosity, surmise, almost to a sort of dread--all at the desert’s
expense--by the distant moving figure seen through the glasses?

Yes, as she looked at the little white table and thought of all this,
Domini began to feel angry. But she was capable of effort, whether
mental or physical, and now she resolutely switched her mind off from
the antagonistic stranger and devoted her thoughts to the priest,
whose narrow back she saw down the room in the distance. As she ate
her fish--a mystery of the seas of Robertville--she imagined his quiet
existence in this remote place, sunny day succeeding sunny day, each
one surely so like its brother that life must become a sort of dream,
through which the voice of the church bell called melodiously and the
incense rising before the altar shed a drowsy perfume. How strange it
must be really to live in Beni-Mora, to have your house, your work
here, your friendships here, your duties here, perhaps here too the
tiny section of earth which would hold at the last your body. It must be
strange and monotonous, and yet surely rather sweet, rather safe.

The officers lifted their heads from their plates, the fat man stared,
the priest looked quietly up over his napkin, and the Arab waiter
slipped forward with attentive haste. For the swing door of the
_salle-a-manger_ at this moment was pushed open, and the traveller--so
Domini called him in her thoughts--entered and stood looking with
hesitation from one table to another.

Domini did not glance up. She knew who it was and kept her eyes
resolutely on her plate. She heard the Arab speak, a loud noise of stout
boots tramping over the wooden floor, and the creak of a chair receiving
a surely tired body. The traveller sat down heavily. She went on slowly
eating the large Robertville fish, which was like something between a
trout and a herring. When she had finished it she gazed straight before
her at the cloth, and strove to resume her thoughts of the priest’s life
in Beni-Mora. But she could not. It seemed to her as if she were back
again in Count Anteoni’s garden. She looked once more through the
glasses, and heard the four cries of the Mueddin, and saw the pacing
figure in the burning heat, the Arab bent in prayer, the one who watched
him, the flight. And she was indignant with herself for her strange
inability to govern her mind. It seemed to her a pitiful thing of which
she should be ashamed.

She heard the waiter set down a plate upon the traveller’s table, and
then the noise of a liquid being poured into a glass. She could not keep
her eyes down any more. Besides, why should she? Beni-Mora was
breeding in her a self-consciousness--or a too acute consciousness of
others--that was unnatural in her. She had never been sensitive like
this in her former life, but the fierce African sun seemed now to have
thawed the ice of her indifference. She felt everything with almost
unpleasant acuteness. All her senses seemed to her sharpened. She
saw, she heard, as she had never seen and heard till now. Suddenly she
remembered her almost violent prayer--“Let me be alive! Let me feel!”
 and she was aware that such a prayer might have an answer that would be
terrible.

Looking up thus with a kind of severe determination, she saw the man
again. He was eating and was not looking towards her, and she fancied
that his eyes were downcast with as much conscious resolution as hers
had been a moment before. He wore the same suit as he had worn in the
train, but now it was flecked with desert dust. She could not “place”
 him at all. He was not of the small, fat man’s order. They would have
nothing in common. With the French officers? She could not imagine how
he would be with them. The only other man in the room--the servant had
gone out for the moment--was the priest. He and the priest--they would
surely be antagonists. Had he not turned aside to avoid the priest in
the tunnel? Probably he was one of those many men who actively hate
the priesthood, to whom the soutane is anathema. Could he find pleasant
companionship with such a man as Count Anteoni, an original man, no
doubt, but also a cultivated and easy man of the world? She smiled
internally at the mere thought. Whatever this stranger might be she felt
that he was as far from being a man of the world as she was from being a
Cockney sempstress or a veiled favourite in a harem. She could not,
she found, imagine him easily at home with any type of human being with
which she was acquainted. Yet no doubt, like all men, he had somewhere
friends, relations, possibly even a wife, children.

No doubt--then why could she not believe it?

The man had finished his fish. He rested his broad, burnt hands on the
table on each side of his plate and looked at them steadily. Then he
turned his head and glanced sideways at the priest, who was behind him
to the right. Then he looked again at his hands. And Domini knew that
all the time he was thinking about her, as she was thinking about
him. She felt the violence of his thought like the violence of a hand
striking her.

The Arab waiter brought her some ragout of mutton and peas, and she
looked down again at her plate.

As she left the room after _dejeuner_ the priest again got up and
bowed. She stopped for a moment to speak to him. All the French officers
surveyed her tall, upright figure and broad, athletic shoulders with
intent admiration. Domini knew it and was indifferent. If a hundred
French soldiers had been staring at her critically she would not have
cared at all. She was not a shy woman and was in nowise uncomfortable
when many eyes were fixed upon her. So she stood and talked a little to
the priest about Count Anteoni and her pleasure in his garden. And
as she did so, feeling her present calm self-possession, she wondered
secretly at the wholly unnatural turmoil--she called it that,
exaggerating her feeling because it was unusual--in which she had been a
few minutes before as she sat at her table.

The priest spoke well of Count Anteoni.

“He is very generous,” he said.

Then he paused, twisting his napkin, and added:

“But I never have any real intercourse with him, Madame. I believe he
comes here in search of solitude. He spends days and even weeks alone
shut up in his garden.”

“Thinking,” she said.

The priest looked slightly surprised.

“It would be difficult not to think, Madame, would it not?”

“Oh, yes. But Count Anteoni thinks rather as a Bashi-Bazouk fights, I
fancy.”

She heard a chair creak in the distance and glanced over her shoulder.
The traveller had turned sideways. At once she bade the priest good-bye
and walked away and out through the swing door.

All the afternoon she rested. The silence was profound. Beni-Mora was
enjoying a siesta in the heat. Domini revelled in the stillness. The
fatigue of travel had quite gone from her now and she began to feel
strangely at home. Suzanne had arranged photographs, books, flowers in
the little salon, had put cushions here and there, and thrown pretty
coverings over the sofa and the two low chairs. The room had an air
of cosiness, of occupation. It was a room one could sit in without
restlessness, and Domini liked its simplicity, its bare wooden floor and
white walls. The sun made everything right here. Without the sun--but
she could not think of Beni-Mora without the sun.

She read on the verandah and dreamed, and the hours slipped quickly
away. No one came to disturb her. She heard no footsteps, no movements
of humanity in the house. Now and then the sound of voices floated up
to her from the gardens, mingling with the peculiar dry noise of palm
leaves stirring in a breeze. Or she heard the distant gallop of horses’
feet. The church bell chimed the hours and made her recall the previous
evening. Already it seemed far off in the past. She could scarcely
believe that she had not yet spent twenty-four hours in Beni-Mora. A
conviction came to her that she would be there for a long while, that
she would strike roots into this sunny place of peace. When she heard
the church bell now she thought of the interior of the church and of the
priest with an odd sort of familiar pleasure, as people in England often
think of the village church in which they have always been accustomed to
worship, and of the clergyman who ministers in it Sunday after Sunday.
Yet at moments she remembered her inward cry in Count Anteoni’s garden,
“Oh, what is going to happen to me here?” And then she was dimly
conscious that Beni-Mora was the home of many things besides peace. It
held warring influences. At one moment it lulled her and she was like an
infant rocked in a cradle. At another moment it stirred her, and she
was a woman on the edge of mysterious possibilities. There must be
many individualities among the desert spirits of whom Count Anteoni
had spoken. Now one was with her and whispered to her, now another. She
fancied the light touch of their hands on hers, pulling gently at her,
as a child pulls you to take you to see a treasure. And their treasure
was surely far away, hidden in the distance of the desert sands.

As soon as the sun began to decline towards the west she put on her hat,
thrust the card Count Anteoni had given her into her glove and set out
towards the big hotel alone. She met Hadj as she walked down the arcade.
He wished to accompany her, and was evidently filled with treacherous
ideas of supplanting his friend Batouch, but she gave him a franc and
sent him away. The franc soothed him slightly, yet she could see that
his childish vanity was injured. There was a malicious gleam in
his long, narrow eyes as he looked after her. Yet there was genuine
admiration too. The Arab bows down instinctively before any dominating
spirit, and such a spirit in a foreign woman flashes in his eyes like
a bright flame. Physical strength, too, appeals to him with peculiar
force. Hadj tossed his head upwards, tucked in his chin, and muttered
some words in his brown throat as he noted the elastic grace with which
the rejecting foreign woman moved till she was out of his sight. And she
never looked back at him. That was a keen arrow in her quiver. He fell
into a deep reverie under the arcade and his face became suddenly like
the face of a sphinx.

Meanwhile Domini had forgotten him. She had turned to the left down a
small street in which some Indians and superior Arabs had bazaars.
One of the latter came out from the shadow of his hanging rugs and
embroideries as she passed, and, addressing her in a strange mixture
of incorrect French and English, begged her to come in and examine his
wares.

She shook her head, but could not help looking at him with interest.

He was the thinnest man she had ever seen, and moved and stood almost as
if he were boneless. The line of his delicate and yet arbitrary features
was fierce. His face was pitted with small-pox and marked by an old
wound, evidently made by a knife, which stretched from his left cheek to
his forehead, ending just over the left eyebrow. The expression of his
eyes was almost disgustingly intelligent. While they were fixed upon her
Domini felt as if her body were a glass box in which all her thoughts,
feelings, and desires were ranged for his inspection. In his demeanour
there was much that pleaded, but also something that commanded. His
fingers were unnaturally long and held a small bag, and he planted
himself right before her in the road.

“Madame, come in, venez avec moi. Venez--venez! I have much--I will
show--j’ai des choses extraordinaires! Tenez! Look!”

He untied the mouth of the bag. Domini looked into it, expecting to see
something precious--jewels perhaps. She saw only a quantity of sand,
laughed, and moved to go on. She thought the Arab was an impudent fellow
trying to make fun of her.

“No, no, Madame! Do not laugh! Ce sable est du desert. Il y a des
histoires la-dedans. Il y a l’histoire de Madame. Come bazaar! I will
read for Madame--what will be--what will become--I will read--I will
tell. Tenez!” He stared down into the bag and his face became suddenly
stern and fixed. “Deja je vois des choses dans la vie de Madame. Ah! Mon
Dieu! Ah! Mon Dieu!”

“No, no,” Domini said.

She had hesitated, but was now determined.

“I have no time to-day.”

The man cast a quick and sly glance at her, then stared once more
into the bag. “Ah! Mon Dieu! Ah! Mon Dieu!” he repeated. “The life to
come--the life of Madame--I see it in the bag!”

His face looked tortured. Domini walked on hurriedly. When she had
got to a little distance she glanced back. The man was standing in the
middle of the road and glaring into the bag. His voice came down the
street to her.

“Ah! Mon Dieu! Ah! Mon Dieu! I see it--I see--je vois la vie de
Madame--Ah! Mon Dieu!”

There was an accent of dreadful suffering in his voice. It made Domini
shudder.

She passed the mouth of the dancers’ street. At the corner there was
a large Cafe Maure, and here, on rugs laid by the side of the road,
numbers of Arabs were stretched, some sipping tea from glasses, some
playing dominoes, some conversing, some staring calmly into vacancy,
like animals drowned in a lethargic dream. A black boy ran by holding
a hammered brass tray on which were some small china cups filled with
thick coffee. Halfway up the street he met three unveiled women clad in
voluminous white dresses, with scarlet, yellow, and purple handkerchiefs
bound over their black hair. He stopped and the women took the cups with
their henna-tinted fingers. Two young Arabs joined them. There was a
scuffle. White lumps of sugar flew up into the air. Then there was a
babel of voices, a torrent of cries full of barbaric gaiety.

Before it had died out of Domini’s ears she stood by the statue of
Cardinal Lavigerie. Rather militant than priestly, raised high on a
marble pedestal, it faced the long road which, melting at last into a
faint desert track, stretched away to Tombouctou. The mitre upon the
head was worn surely as if it were a helmet, the pastoral staff with its
double cross was grasped as if it were a sword. Upon the lower cross was
stretched a figure of the Christ in agony. And the Cardinal, gazing
with the eyes of an eagle out into the pathless wastes of sand that lay
beyond the palm trees, seemed, by his mere attitude, to cry to all the
myriad hordes of men the deep-bosomed Sahara mothered in her mystery and
silence, “Come unto the Church! Come unto me!”

He called men in from the desert. Domini fancied his voice echoing along
the sands till the worshippers of Allah and of his Prophet heard it like
a clarion in Tombouctou.

When she reached the great hotel the sun was just beginning to set. She
drew Count Anteoni’s card from her glove and rang the bell. After a
long interval a magnificent man, with the features of an Arab but a skin
almost as black as a negro, opened the door.

“Can I go up the tower to see the sunset?” she asked, giving him the
card.

The man bowed low, escorted her through a long hall full of furniture
shrouded in coverings, up a staircase, along a corridor with numbered
rooms, up a second staircase and out upon a flat-terraced roof, from
which the tower soared high above the houses and palms of Beni-Mora, a
landmark visible half-a-day’s journey out in the desert. A narrow spiral
stair inside the tower gained the summit.

“I’ll go up alone,” Domini said. “I shall stay some time and I would
rather not keep you.”

She put some money into the Arab’s hand. He looked pleased, yet doubtful
too for a moment. Then he seemed to banish his hesitation and, with a
deprecating smile, said something which she could not understand. She
nodded intelligently to get rid of him. Already, from the roof, she
caught sight of a great visionary panorama glowing with colour and
magic. She was impatient to climb still higher into the sky, to look
down on the world as an eagle does. So she turned away decisively and
mounted the dark, winding stair till she reached a door. She pushed it
open with some difficulty, a

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