Liberty with upraised arms, beating cymbals like monstrous
spheres of fire.

And she saw palm trees waving, immense palm trees in the south. It
seemed to her that she travelled as far away from Beni-Mora as she had
travelled from England in coming to Beni-Mora. She made her way towards
the sun, joining the pale crowd of the Desert's worshippers. And always,
as she travelled, she heard the clashing of the cymbals of Liberty. A
conviction was born in her that Fate meant her to know the Desert well,
strangely well; that the Desert was waiting calmly for her to come to
it and receive that which it had to give to her; that in the Desert
she would learn more of the meaning of life than she could ever learn
elsewhere. It seemed to her suddenly that she understood more clearly
than hitherto in what lay the intense, the over-mastering and hypnotic
attraction exercised already by the Desert over her nature. In the
Desert there must be, there was--she felt it--not only light to warm
the body, but light to illuminate the dark places of the soul. An
almost fatalistic idea possessed her. She saw a figure--one of the
Messengers--standing with her beside the corpse of her father and
whispering in her ear "Beni-Mora"; taking her to the map and pointing to
the word there, filling her brain and heart with suggestions, till--as
she had thought almost without reason, and at haphazard--she chose
Beni-Mora as the place to which she would go in search of recovery, of
self-knowledge. It had been pre-ordained. The Messenger had been sent.
The Messenger had guided her. And he would come again, when the time was
ripe, and lead her on into the Desert. She felt it. She knew it.

She looked round at the Arabs. She was as much a fatalist as any one of
them. She looked at the stranger. What was he?

Abruptly in her imagination a vision rose. She gazed once more into
the crowd that thronged about the Desert having received gifts at the
Desert's hands, and in it she saw the stranger.

He was kneeling, his hands were stretched out, his head was bowed, and
he was praying. And, while he prayed, Liberty stood by him smiling, and
her fiery cymbals were like the aureoles that illumine the beautiful
faces of the saints.

For some reason that she could not understand her heart began to beat
fast, and she felt a burning sensation behind her eyes.

She thought that this extraordinary music, that this amazing dance,
excited her too much.

The white bundle a