When they came to the tents it was necessary to entertain these personages with coffee, and they finally departed promising a speedy return, and full of invitations, which were cordially accepted by Batouch on his employer's behalf before either Domini or Androvsky had time to say a word.
As the /cortege/ disappeared over the sands towards the city Domini burst into a little laugh, and drew Androvsky out to the tent door to see them go.
"Society in the sands!" she exclaimed gaily. "Boris, this is a new experience. Look at our guests making their way to their palaces!"
Slowly the potentates progressed across the white dunes towards the city. Shabah wore a long red cloak. His brother was in pink and gold, with white billowing trousers. The Caid of the Nomads was in green.
They all moved with a large and conscious majesty, surrounded by their obsequious attendants. Above them the purple sky showed a bright evening star. Near it was visible the delicate silhouette of the young moon. Scattered over the waste rose many koubbahs, grey in the white, with cupolas of gypse. Hundreds of dogs were barking in the distance.
To the left, on the vast, rolling slopes of sand, glared the innumerable fires kindled before the tents of the Ouled Nails. Before the sleeping tent rose the minarets and the gilded cupolas of the city which it dominated from its mountain of sand. Behind it was the blanched immensity of the plain, of the lonely desert from which Domini and Androvsky had come to face this barbaric stir of life. And the city was full of music, of tomtoms throbbing, of bugles blowing in the Kasba, of pipes shrieking from hidden dwellings, and of the faint but multitudinous voices of men, carried to them on their desolate and treeless height by the frail wind of night that seemed a white wind, twin-brother of the sands.
"Let us go a step or two towards the city, Boris," Domini said, as their guests sank magnificently down into a fold of the dunes.
"Towards the city!" he answered. "Why not--?" He glanced behind him to the vacant, noiseless sands.
She set her impulse against his for the first time.
"No, this is our town life, our Sahara season. Let us give ourselves to it. The loneliness will be its antidote some day."
"Very well, Domini," he answered.
They went a little way towards the city, and stood still in the sand at the edge of their height.
"Listen, Boris! Isn't it strange in the night all this barbaric music?
It excites me."
"You are glad to be here."
She heard the note of disappointment in his voice, but did not respond to it.
"And look at all those fires, hundreds of them in the sand!"
"Yes," he said, "it is wonderful, but the solitudes are best. This is not the heart of the desert, this is what the Arabs call it, 'The belly of the Desert.' In the heart of the desert there is silence."
She thought of the falling of the wind when the Sahara took them, and knew that her love of the silence was intense. Nevertheless, to-night the other part of her was in the ascendant. She wanted him to share it. He did not. Could she provoke him to share it?
"Yet, as we rode in, I had a feeling that the heart of the desert was here," she said. "You know I said so."
"Do you say so still?"
"The heart, Boris, is the centre of life, isn't it?"
He was silent. She felt his inner feeling fighting hers.
"To-night," she said, putting her arm through his, and looking towards the city. "I feel a tremendous sympathy with human life such as I never felt before. Boris, it comes to me from you. Yes, it does. It is born of my love for you, and seems to link me, and you with me, to all these strangers, to all men and women, to everything that lives. It is as if I was not quite human before, and my love for you had made me completely human, had done something to me that even--even my love for God had not been able to do."
She lowered her voice at the last words. After a moment she added:
"Perhaps in isolation, even with you, I could not come to completeness. Perhaps you could not in isolation even with me. Boris, I think it's good for us to be in the midst of life for a time."
"You wish to remain here, Domini?"
"Yes, for a time."
The fatalistic feeling that had sometimes come upon her in this land entered into her at this moment. She felt, "It is written that we are to remain here."
"Let us remain here, Domini," he said quietly.
The note of disappointment had gone out of his voice, deliberately banished from it by his love for her, but she seemed to hear it, nevertheless, echoing far down in his soul. At that moment she loved him like a woman he had made a lover, but also like a woman he had made a mother by becoming a child.
"Thank you, Boris," she answered very quietly. "You are good to me."
"You are good to me," he said, remembering the last words of Father Roubier. "How can I be anything else?"
Directly he had spoken the words his body trembled violently.
"Boris, what is it?" she exclaimed, startled.
He took his arm away from hers.
"These--these noises of the city in the night coming across the sand- hills are extraordinary. I have become so used to silence that perhaps they get upon my nerves. I shall grow accustomed to them presently."
He turned towards the tents, and she went with him. It seemed to her that he had evaded her question, that he had not wished to answer it, and the sense sharply awakened in her by a return to life near a city made her probe for the reason of this. She did not find it, but in her mental search she found herself presently at Mogar. It seemed to her that the same sort of uneasiness which had beset her husband at Mogar beset him now more fiercely at Amara, that, as he had just said, his nerves were being tortured by something. But it could not be the noises from the city.
After dinner Batouch came to the tent to suggest that they should go down with him into the city. Domini, feeling certain that Androvsky would not wish to go, at once refused, alleging that she was tired.