casions, twice in the oasis through the
brown villages, once out into the desert on the caravan road that
Batouch had told her led at last to Tombouctou. They did not travel far
along it, but Domini knew at once that this route held more fascination
for her than the route to Sidi-Zerzour. There was far more sand in this
region of the desert. The little humps crowned with the scrub the
camels feed on were fewer, so that the flatness of the ground was more
definite. Here and there large dunes of golden-coloured sand rose,
some straight as city walls, some curved like seats in an amphitheatre,
others indented, crenellated like battlements, undulating in beastlike
shapes. The distant panorama of desert was unbroken by any visible oasis
and powerfully suggested Eternity to Domini.

"When I go out into the desert for my long journey I shall go by this
road," she said to Androvsky.

"You are going on a journey?" he said, looking at her as if startled.

"Some day."

"All alone?"

"I suppose I must take a caravan, two or three Arabs, some horses, a
tent or two. It's easy to manage. Batouch will arrange it for me."

Androvsky still looked startled, and half angry, she thought.

They had pulled up their horses among the sand dunes. It was near
sunset, and the breath of evening was in the sir, making its coolness
even more ethereal, more thinly pure than in the daytime. The atmosphere
was so clear that when they glanced back they could see the flag
fluttering upon the white of the great hotel of Beni-Mora, many
kilometres away among the palms; so still that they could hear the bark
of a Kabyle off near a nomad's tent pitched in the green land by the
water-springs of old Beni-Mora. When they looked in front of them they
seemed to see thousands of leagues of flatness, stretching on and on
till the pale yellowish brown of it grew darker, merged into a strange
blueness, like the blue of a hot mist above a southern lake, then into
violet, then into--the thing they could not see, the summoning thing
whose voice Domini's imagination heard, like a remote and thrilling
echo, whenever she was in the desert.

"I did not know you were going on a journey, Madame," Androvsky said.

"Don't you remember?" she rejoined laughingly, "that I told you on the
tower I thought peace must dwell out there. Well, some day I shall set
out to find it."

"That seems a long time ago, Madame," he muttered.

Sometimes, when speaking to her, he dropped