pollo. Nothing
mattered here. Even Death wore a robe of gold and went with an airy
step. Ah, yes, from this region of quivering light and heat the Arabs
drew their easy and lustrous resignation. Out here one was in the hands
of a God who surely sang as He created and had not created fear.

Many minutes passed, but Domini was careless of time as of all else.
The green line broke into feathery tufts, broadened into a still far-off
dimness of palms.

"Water!"

Androvsky's voice spoke as if startled. Domini pulled up. Their horses
stood side by side, and at once, with the cessation of motion, the
mysticism of the desert came upon them and the marvel of its silence,
and they seemed to be set there in a wonderful dream, themselves and
their horses dreamlike.

"Water!" he said again.

He pointed, and along the right-hand edge of the oasis Domini saw grey,
calm waters. The palms ran out into them and were bathed by them softly.
And on their bosom here and there rose small, dim islets. Yes, there was
water, and yet--The mystery of it was a mystery she had never known to
brood even over a white northern sea in a twilight hour of winter, was
deeper than the mystery of the Venetian _laguna morta_, when the Angelus
bell chimes at sunset, and each distant boat, each bending rower and
patient fisherman, becomes a marvel, an eerie thing in the gold.

"Is it mirage?" she said to him almost in a whisper.

And suddenly she shivered.

"Yes, it is, it must be."

He did not answer. His left hand, holding the rein, dropped down on the
saddle peak, and he stared across the waste, leaning forward and moving
his lips. She looked at him and forgot even the mirage in a sudden
longing to understand exactly what he was feeling. His mystery--the
mystery of that which is human and is forever stretching out its
arms--was as the fluid mystery of the mirage, and seemed to blend at
that moment with the mystery she knew lay in herself. The mirage was
within them as it was far off before them in the desert, still, grey,
full surely of indistinct movement, and even perhaps of sound they could
not hear.

At last he turned and looked at her.

"Yes, it must be mirage," he said. "The nothing that seems to be so
much. A man comes out into the desert and he finds there mirage. He
travels right out and that's what he reaches--or at least he can't reach
it, but just sees it far away. And that's all. And is that what a man
finds when he comes out into