They were escorted by a gigantic man, almost black, with a zigzag scar across the left side of his face, who wore a shining brown burnous over a grey woollen jacket. He pushed the two women into the train as if he were pushing bales, and got in after them, showing enormous bare legs, with calves that stuck out like lumps of iron.
The darkness began to fade, and presently, as the grey light grew slowly stronger, the rain ceased, and it was possible to see through the glass of the carriage window.
The country began to discover itself, as if timidly, to Domini's eyes.
She had recently noticed that the train was going very slowly, and she could now see why. They were mounting a steep incline. The rich, damp earth of the plains beyond Robertville, with its rank grass, its moist ploughland and groves of eucalyptus, was already left behind. The train was crawling in a cup of the hills, grey, sterile and abandoned, without roads or houses, without a single tree. Small, grey-green bushes flourished here and there on tiny humps of earth, but they seemed rather to emphasise than to diminish the aspect of poverty presented by the soil, over which the dawn, rising from the wet arms of night, shed a cold and reticent illumination. By a gash in the rounded hills, where the earth was brownish yellow, a flock of goats with flapping ears tripped slowly, followed by two Arab boys in rags.
One of the boys was playing upon a pipe coverd with red arabesques.
Domini heard two or three bars of the melody. They were ineffably wild and bird-like, very clear and sweet. They seemed to her to match exactly the pure and ascetic light cast by the dawn over these bare, grey hills, and they stirred her abruptly from the depressed lassitude in which the dreary chances of recent travel had drowned her. She began, with a certain faint excitement, to realise that these low, round-backed hills were Africa, that she was leaving behind the sea, so many of whose waves swept along European shores, that somewhere, beyond the broken and near horizon line toward which the train was creeping, lay the great desert, her destination, with its pale sands and desolate cities, its sunburnt tribes of workers, its robbers, warriors and priests, its ethereal mysteries of mirage, its tragic splendours of colour, of tempest and of heat. A sense of a wider world than the compressed world into which physical fatigue had decoyed her woke in her brain and heart. The little Arab, playing carelessly upon his pipe with the red arabesques, was soon invisible among his goats beside the dry water-course that was probably the limit of his journeying, but Domini felt that like a musician at the head of a procession he had played her bravely forward into the dawn and Africa.
At Ah-Souf Domini changed into another train and had the carriage to herself. The recruits had reached their destination. Hers was a longer pilgramage and still towards the sun. She could not afterwards remember what she thought about during this part of her journey.
Subsequent events so coloured all her memories of Africa that every fold of its sun-dried soil was endowed in her mind with the significance of a living thing. Every palm beside a well, every stunted vine and clambering flower upon an /auberge/ wall, every form of hill and silhouette of shadow, became in her heart intense with the beauty and the pathos she used, as a child, to think must lie beyond the sunset.
And so she forgot.
A strange sense of leaving all things behind had stolen over her. She was really fatigued by travel and by want of sleep, but she did not know it. Lying back in her seat, with her head against the dirty white covering of the shaking carriage, she watched the great change that was coming over the land.
It seemed as if God were putting forth His hand to withdraw gradually all things of His creation, all the furniture He had put into the great Palace of the world; as if He meant to leave it empty and utterly naked.
So Domini thought.
First He took the rich and shaggy grass, and all the little flowers that bloomed modestly in it. Then He drew away the orange groves, the oleander and the apricot trees, the faithful eucalyptus with its pale stems and tressy foliage, the sweet waters that fertilised the soil, making it soft and brown where the plough seamed it into furrows, the tufted plants and giant reeds that crowd where water is. And still, as the train ran on, His gifts were fewer. At last even the palms were gone, and the Barbary fig displayed no longer among the crumbling boulders its tortured strength, and the pale and fantastic evolutions of its unnatural foliage. Stones lay everywhere upon the pale yellow or grey-brown earth. Crystals glittered in the sun like shallow jewels, and far away, under clouds that were dark and feathery, appeared hard and relentless mountains, which looked as if they were made of iron carved into horrible and jagged shapes. Where they fell into ravines they became black. Their swelling bosses and flanks, sharp sometimes as the spines of animals, were steel coloured. Their summits were purple, deepening where the clouds came down to ebony.
Journeying towards these terrible fastnesses were caravans on which Domini looked with a heavy and lethargic interest. Many Kabyles, fairer than she was, moved slowly on foot towards their rock villages.
Over the withered earth they went towards the distant mountains and the clouds. The sun was hidden. The wind continued to rise. Sand found its way in through the carriage windows. The mountains, as Domini saw them more clearly, looked more gloomy, more unearthly. There was something unnatural in their hard outlines, in the rigid mystery of their innumerable clefts. That all these people should be journeying towards them was pathetic, and grieved the imagination.