n her eyes.

Tangled and vital impressions came to Domini as she watched. Now she saw
Jael and the tent, and the nails driven into the temples of the sleeping
warrior. Now she saw Medea in the moment before she tore to pieces her
brother and threw the bloody fragments in Aetes's path; Clytemnestra's
face while Agamemnon was passing to the bath, Delilah's when Samson lay
sleeping on her knee. But all these imagined faces of named women fled
like sand grains on a desert wind as the dance went on and the
recurrent melody came back and back and back with a savage and glorious
persistence. They were too small, too individual, and pinned the
imagination down too closely. This dagger dance let in upon her a larger
atmosphere, in which one human being was as nothing, even a goddess or
a siren prodigal of enchantments was a little thing not without a narrow
meanness of physiognomy.

She looked and listened till she saw a grander procession troop by,
garlanded with mystery and triumph: War as a shape with woman's eyes:
Night, without poppies, leading the stars and moon and all the vigorous
dreams that must come true: Love of woman that cannot be set aside, but
will govern the world from Eden to the abyss into which the nations fall
to the outstretched hands of God: Death as Life's leader, with a staff
from which sprang blossoms red as the western sky: Savage Fecundity that
crushes all barren things into the silent dust: and then the Desert.

That came in a pale cloud of sand, with a pale crowd of worshippers,
those who had received gifts from the Desert's hands and sought for
more: white-robed Marabouts who had found Allah in his garden and become
a guide to the faithful through all the circling years: murderers who
had gained sanctuary with barbaric jewels in their blood-stained hands:
once tortured men and women who had cast away terrible recollections in
the wastes among the dunes and in the treeless purple distances, and who
had been granted the sweet oases of forgetfulness to dwell in: ardent
beings who had striven vainly to rest content with the world of hills
and valleys, of sea-swept verges and murmuring rivers, and who had been
driven, by the labouring soul, on and on towards the flat plains where
roll for ever the golden wheels of the chariot of the sun. She saw, too,
the winds that are the Desert's best-loved children: Health with
shining eyes and a skin of bronze: Passion, half faun, half black-browed
Hercules: and