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.