He pointed, and along the right-hand edge of the oasis Domini saw grey, calm waters. The palms ran out into them and were bathed by them softly. And on their bosom here and there rose small, dim islets. Yes, there was water, and yet-- The mystery of it was a mystery she had never known to brood even over a white northern sea in a twilight hour of winter, was deeper than the mystery of the Venetian /laguna morta/, when the Angelus bell chimes at sunset, and each distant boat, each bending rower and patient fisherman, becomes a marvel, an eerie thing in the gold.
"Is it mirage?" she said to him almost in a whisper.
And suddenly she shivered.
"Yes, it is, it must be."
He did not answer. His left hand, holding the rein, dropped down on the saddle peak, and he stared across the waste, leaning forward and moving his lips. She looked at him and forgot even the mirage in a sudden longing to understand exactly what he was feeling. His mystery --the mystery of that which is human and is forever stretching out its arms--was as the fluid mystery of the mirage, and seemed to blend at that moment with the mystery she knew lay in herself. The mirage was within them as it was far off before them in the desert, still, grey, full surely of indistinct movement, and even perhaps of sound they could not hear.
At last he turned and looked at her.
"Yes, it must be mirage," he said. "The nothing that seems to be so much. A man comes out into the desert and he finds there mirage. He travels right out and that's what he reaches--or at least he can't reach it, but just sees it far away. And that's all. And is that what a man finds when he comes out into the world?"
It was the first time he had spoken without any trace of reserve to her, for even on the tower, though there had been tumult in his voice and a fierceness of some strange passion in his words, there had been struggle in his manner, as if the pressure of feeling forced him to speak in despite of something which bade him keep silence. Now he spoke as if to someone whom he knew and with whom he had talked of many things.
"But you ought to know better than I do," she answered.
"I!"
"Yes. You are a man, and have been in the world, and must know what it has to give--whether there's only mirage, or something that can be grasped and felt and lived in, and----"
"Yes, I'm a man and I ought to know," he replied. "Well, I don't know, but I mean to know."
There was a savage sound in his voice.
"I should like to know, too," Domini said quietly. "And I feel as if it was the desert that was going to teach me."
"The desert--how?"
"I don't know."
He pointed again to the mirage.
"But that's what there is in the desert."
"That--and what else?"
"Is there anything else?"
"Perhaps everything," she answered. "I am like you. I want to know."
He looked straight into her eyes and there was something dominating in his expression.
"You think it is the desert that could teach you whether the world holds anything but a mirage," he said slowly. "Well, I don't think it would be the desert that could teach me."
She said nothing more, but let her horse go and rode off. He followed, and as he rode awkwardly, yet bravely, pressing his strong legs against his animal's flanks and holding his thin body bent forward, he looked at Domini's upright figure and brilliant, elastic grace--that gave in to her horse as wave gives to wind--with a passion of envy in his eyes.
They did not speak again till the great palm gardens of the oasis they had seen far off were close upon them. From the desert they looked both shabby and superb, as if some millionaire had poured forth money to create a Paradise out here, and, when it was nearly finished, had suddenly repented of his whim and refused to spend another farthing.
The thousands upon thousands of mighty trees were bounded by long, irregular walls of hard earth, at the top of which were stuck distraught thorn bushes. These walls gave the rough, penurious aspect which was in such sharp contrast to the exotic mystery they guarded.
Yet in the fierce blaze of the sun their meanness was not disagreeable. Domini even liked it. It seemed to her as if the desert had thrown up waves to protect this daring oasis which ventured to fling its green glory like a defiance in the face of the Sahara. A wide track of earth, sprinkled with stones and covered with deep ruts, holes and hummocks, wound in from the desert between the earthen walls and vanished into the heart of the oasis. They followed it.
Domini was filled with a sort of romantic curiosity. This luxury of palms far out in the midst of desolation, untended apparently by human hands--for no figures moved among them, there was no one on the road-- suggested some hidden purpose and activity, some concealed personage, perhaps an Eastern Anteoni, whose lair lay surely somewhere beyond them. As she had felt the call of the desert she now felt the call of the oasis. In this land thrilled eternally a summons to go onward, to seek, to penetrate, to be a passionate pilgrim. She wondered whether her companion's heart could hear it.
"I don't know why it is," she said, "but out here I always feel expectant. I always feel as if some marvellous thing might be going to happen to me."
She did not add "Do you?" but looked at him as if for a reply.
"Yes, Madame," he said.
"I suppose it is because I am new to Africa. This is my first visit here. I am not like you. I can't speak Arabic."
She suddenly wondered whether the desert was new to him as to her. She had assumed that it was. Yet as he spoke Arabic it was almost certain that he had been much in Africa.
"I do not speak it well," he answered.
And he looked away towards the dense thickets of the palms. The track narrowed till the trees on either side cast patterns of moving shade across it and the silent mystery was deepened. As far as the eye could see the feathery, tufted foliage swayed in the little wind. The desert had vanished, but sent in after them the message of its soul, the marvellous breath which Domini had drunk into her lungs so long before she saw it. That breath was like a presence. It dwells in all oases.