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."