ut Domini felt that like a musician at the
head of a procession he had played her bravely forward into the dawn and
Africa.

At Ah-Souf Domini changed into another train and had the carriage to
herself. The recruits had reached their destination. Hers was a longer
pilgramage and still towards the sun. She could not afterwards remember
what she thought about during this part of her journey. Subsequent
events so coloured all her memories of Africa that every fold of its
sun-dried soil was endowed in her mind with the significance of a living
thing. Every palm beside a well, every stunted vine and clambering
flower upon an _auberge_ wall, every form of hill and silhouette of
shadow, became in her heart intense with the beauty and the pathos she
used, as a child, to think must lie beyond the sunset.

And so she forgot.

A strange sense of leaving all things behind had stolen over her. She
was really fatigued by travel and by want of sleep, but she did not
know it. Lying back in her seat, with her head against the dirty white
covering of the shaking carriage, she watched the great change that was
coming over the land.

It seemed as if God were putting forth His hand to withdraw gradually
all things of His creation, all the furniture He had put into the great
Palace of the world; as if He meant to leave it empty and utterly naked.

So Domini thought.

First He took the rich and shaggy grass, and all the little flowers
that bloomed modestly in it. Then He drew away the orange groves, the
oleander and the apricot trees, the faithful eucalyptus with its pale
stems and tressy foliage, the sweet waters that fertilised the soil,
making it soft and brown where the plough seamed it into furrows, the
tufted plants and giant reeds that crowd where water is. And still,
as the train ran on, His gifts were fewer. At last even the palms
were gone, and the Barbary fig displayed no longer among the crumbling
boulders its tortured strength, and the pale and fantastic evolutions
of its unnatural foliage. Stones lay everywhere upon the pale yellow or
grey-brown earth. Crystals glittered in the sun like shallow jewels, and
far away, under clouds that were dark and feathery, appeared hard and
relentless mountains, which looked as if they were made of iron carved
into horrible and jagged shapes. Where they fell into ravines they
became black. Their swelling bosses and flanks, sharp sometimes as
the spines of animals, were steel coloured. Th