Читать книгу The Garden of Allah - Robert Hichens - Страница 10

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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.