Again Domini thought of the approach to London, and of the dominion of great cities, those octopus monsters created by men, whose tentacles are strong to seize and stronger still to keep. She was infected by Androvsky's dread of a changed life, and through her excitement, that pulsed with interest and curiosity, she felt a faint thrill of something that was like fear.
"Boris," she said, "I feel as if your thoughts were being conveyed to me by your touch. Perhaps the solitudes are best."
By a simultaneous impulse they pulled in their horses and listened.
Sounds came to them over the sands, thin and remote. They could not tell what they were, but they knew that they heard something which suggested the distant presence of life.
"What is it?" said Domini.
"I don't know, but I hear something. It travels to us from the minarets."
They both leaned forward on their horses' necks, holding each other's hand.
"I feel the tumult of men," Androvsky said presently.
"And I. But it seems as if no men could have elected to build a city here."
"Here in the 'Belly of the desert,'" he said, quoting the Arabs' name for Amara.
"Boris"--she spoke in a more eager voice, clasping his hand strongly--"you remember the /fumoir/ in Count Anteoni's garden. The place where it stood was the very heart of the garden."
"Yes."
"We understood each other there."
He pressed her hand without speaking.
"Amara seems to me the heart of the Garden of Allah. Perhaps--perhaps we shall----"
She paused. Her eyes were fixed upon his face.
"What, Domini?" he asked.
He looked expectant, but anxious, and watched her, but with eyes that seemed ready to look away from her at a word.
"Perhaps we shall understand each other even better there."
He looked down at the white sand.
"Better!" he repeated. "Could we do that?"
She did not answer. The far-off villages gleamed mysteriously on their little mountains, like unreal things that might fade away as castles fade in the fire. The sky above the minarets was changing in colour slowly. Its blue was being invaded by a green that was a sister colour. A curious light, that seemed to rise from below rather than to descend from above, was transmuting the whiteness of the sands. A lemon yellow crept through them, but they still looked cold and strange, and immeasurably vast. Domini fancied that the silence of the desert deepened so that, in it, they might hear the voices of Amara more distinctly.
"You know," she said, "when one looks out over the desert from a height, as we did from the tower of Beni-Mora, it seems to call one.
There's a voice in the blue distance that seems to say, 'Come to me! I am here--hidden in my retreat, beyond the blue, and beyond the mirage, and beyond the farthest verge!'"
"Yes, I know."
"I have always felt, when we travelled in the desert, that the calling thing, the soul of the desert, retreated as I advanced, and still summoned me onward but always from an infinite distance."
"And I too, Domini."
"Now I don't feel that. I feel as if now we were coming near to the voice, as if we should reach it at Amara, as if there it would tell us its secret."
"Imagination!" he said.
But he spoke seriously, almost mystically. His voice was at odds with the word it said. She noticed that and was sure that he was secretly sharing her sensation. She even suspected that he had perhaps felt it first.
"Let us ride on," he said. "Do you see the change in the light? Do you see the green in the sky? It is cooler, too. This is the wind of evening."
Their hands fell apart and they rode slowly on, up the long slope of the sands.
Presently they saw that they had come out of the trackless waste and that though still a long way from the city they were riding on a desert road which had been trodden by multitudes of feet. There were many footprints here. On either side were low banks of sand, beaten into a rough symmetry by implements of men, and shallow trenches through which no water ran. In front of them they saw the numerous caravans, now more distinct, converging from left and right slowly to this great isle of the desert which stretched in a straight line to the minarets.
"We are on a highway," Domini said.
Androvsky sighed.
"I feel already as if we were in the midst of a crowd," he answered.
"Our love for peace oughtn't to make us hate our fellowmen!" she said.
"Come, Boris, let us chase away our selfish mood!"
She spoke in a more cheerful voice and drew her rein a little tighter.
Her horse quickened its pace.
"And think how our stay at Amara will make us love the solitudes when we return to them again. Contrast is the salt of life."
"You speak as if you didn't believe what you are saying."
She laughed.
"If I were ever inclined to tell you a lie," she said, "I should not dare to. Your mind penetrates mine too deeply."
"You could not tell me a lie."
"Do you hear the dogs barking?" she said, after a moment. "They are among those tents that are like flies on the sands around the city.
That is the tribe of the Ouled Nails I suppose. Batouch says they camp here. What multitudes of tents! Those are the suburbs of Amara. I would rather live in them than in the suburbs of London. Oh, how far away we are, as if we were at the end of the world!"
Either her last words, or her previous change of manner to a lighter cheerfulness, almost a briskness, seemed to rouse Androvsky to a greater confidence, even to anticipation of possible pleasure.
"Yes. After all it is only the desert men who are here. Amara is their Metropolis, and in it we shall only see their life."
His horse plunged. He had touched it sharply with his heel.
"I believe you hate the thought of civilisation," she exclaimed.
"And you?"
"I never think of it. I feel almost as if I had never known it, and could never know it."
"Why should you? You love the wilds."
"They make my whole nature leap. Even when I was a child it was so. I remember once reading /Maud/. In it I came upon a passage--I can't remember it well, but it was about the red man--"
She thought for a moment, looking towards the city.