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.