Читать книгу The Garden of Allah - Robert Hichens - Страница 12

Table of Contents

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, and came out into the air at a dizzy height, shutting the door forcibly behind her with an energetic movement of her strong arms.

The top of the tower was small and square, and guarded by a white parapet breast high. In the centre of it rose the outer walls and the ceiling of the top of the staircase, which prevented a person standing on one side of the tower from seeing anybody who was standing at the opposite side. There was just sufficient space between parapet and staircase wall for two people to pass with difficulty and manoeuvring.

But Domini was not concerned with such trivial details, as she would have thought them had she thought of them. Directly she had shut the little door and felt herself alone—alone as an eagle in the sky—she took the step forward that brought her to the parapet, leaned her arms on it, looked out and was lost in a passion of contemplation.

At first she did not discern any of the multitudinous minutiae in the great evening vision beneath and around her. She only felt conscious of depth, height, space, colour, mystery, calm. She did not measure. She did not differentiate. She simply stood there, leaning lightly on the snowy plaster work, and experienced something that she had never experienced before, that she had never imagined. It was scarcely vivid; for in everything that is vivid there seems to be something small, the point to which wonders converge, the intense spark to which many fires have given themselves as food, the drop which contains the murmuring force of innumerable rivers. It was more than vivid. It was reliantly dim, as is that pulse of life which is heard through and above the crash of generations and centuries falling downwards into the abyss; that persistent, enduring heart-beat, indifferent in its mystical regularity, that ignores and triumphs, and never grows louder nor diminishes, inexorably calm, inexorably steady, undefeated—more—utterly unaffected by unnumbered millions of tragedies and deaths.

Many sounds rose from far down beneath the tower, but at first Domini did not hear them. She was only aware of an immense, living silence, a silence flowing beneath, around and above her in dumb, invisible waves. Circles of rest and peace, cool and serene, widened as circles in a pool towards the unseen limits of the satisfied world, limits lost in the hidden regions beyond the misty, purple magic where sky and desert met. And she felt as if her brain, ceaselessly at work from its birth, her heart, unresting hitherto in a commotion of desires, her soul, an eternal flutter of anxious, passionate wings, folded themselves together gently like the petals of roses when a summer night comes into a garden.

She was not conscious that she breathed while she stood there. She thought her bosom ceased to rise and fall. The very blood dreamed in her veins as the light of evening dreamed in the blue.

She knew the Great Pause that seems to divide some human lives in two, as the Great Gulf divided him who lay in Abraham’s bosom from him who was shrouded in the veil of fire.