id not know
what now she knew. He cursed himself for what he had done. At last he
had been able to pray. Yes, but what was prayer now, what was prayer to
the man who looked at the two tents and understood what they meant? He
moved away and began to walk up and down near to the two tents. He did
not know where Domini was. At a little distance he saw the servants
busy preparing the evening meal. Smoke rose up before the cook's tent,
curling away stealthily among a group of palm trees, beneath which some
Arab boys were huddled, staring with wide eyes at the unusual sight of
travellers. They came from a tiny village at a short distance off, half
hidden among palm gardens. The camels were feeding. A mule was rolling
voluptuously in the sand. At a well a shepherd was watering his flocks,
which crowded about him baaing expectantly. The air seemed to breathe
out a subtle aroma of peace and of liberty. And this apparent presence
of peace, this vision of the calm of others, human beings and animals,
added to the torture of Androvsky. As he walked to and fro he felt as
if he were being devoured by his passions, as if he were losing the
last vestiges of self-control. Never in the monastery, never even in the
night when he left it, had he been tormented like this. For now he had
a terrible companion whom, at that time, he had not known. Memory walked
with him before the tents, the memory of his body, recalling and calling
for the past.

He had destroyed that past himself. But for him it might have been also
the present, the future. It might have lasted for years, perhaps till
death took him or Domini. Why not? He had only had to keep silence, to
insist on remaining in the desert, far from the busy ways of men.
They could have lived as certain others lived, who loved the free, the
solitary life, in an oasis of their own, tending their gardens of palms.
Life would have gone like a sunlit dream. And death? At that thought he
shuddered. Death--what would that have been to him? What would it be now
when it came? He put the thought from him with force, as a man thrusts
away from him the filthy hand of a clamouring stranger assailing him in
the street.

This evening he had no time to think of death. Life was enough, life
with this terror which he had deliberately placed in it.

He thought of himself as a madman for having spoken to Domini. He cursed
himself as a madman. For he knew, although he strove furiously not to
know, how irrevoca