hed the two women into the train as if he were pushing
bales, and got in after them, showing enormous bare legs, with calves
that stuck out like lumps of iron.

The darkness began to fade, and presently, as the grey light grew slowly
stronger, the rain ceased, and it was possible to see through the glass
of the carriage window.

The country began to discover itself, as if timidly, to Domini's eyes.
She had recently noticed that the train was going very slowly, and she
could now see why. They were mounting a steep incline. The rich, damp
earth of the plains beyond Robertville, with its rank grass, its moist
ploughland and groves of eucalyptus, was already left behind. The train
was crawling in a cup of the hills, grey, sterile and abandoned,
without roads or houses, without a single tree. Small, grey-green bushes
flourished here and there on tiny humps of earth, but they seemed rather
to emphasise than to diminish the aspect of poverty presented by the
soil, over which the dawn, rising from the wet arms of night, shed a
cold and reticent illumination. By a gash in the rounded hills, where
the earth was brownish yellow, a flock of goats with flapping ears
tripped slowly, followed by two Arab boys in rags. One of the boys was
playing upon a pipe coverd with red arabesques. Domini heard two or
three bars of the melody. They were ineffably wild and bird-like,
very clear and sweet. They seemed to her to match exactly the pure and
ascetic light cast by the dawn over these bare, grey hills, and they
stirred her abruptly from the depressed lassitude in which the dreary
chances of recent travel had drowned her. She began, with a certain
faint excitement, to realise that these low, round-backed hills were
Africa, that she was leaving behind the sea, so many of whose waves
swept along European shores, that somewhere, beyond the broken and near
horizon line toward which the train was creeping, lay the great desert,
her destination, with its pale sands and desolate cities, its sunburnt
tribes of workers, its robbers, warriors and priests, its ethereal
mysteries of mirage, its tragic splendours of colour, of tempest and
of heat. A sense of a wider world than the compressed world into which
physical fatigue had decoyed her woke in her brain and heart. The little
Arab, playing carelessly upon his pipe with the red arabesques, was soon
invisible among his goats beside the dry water-course that was probably
the limit of his journeying, b