e sky was slowly fading into a
luminous mystery that rose from the underworld, a mystery that at first
was faint and tremulous, pale with a pallor of silver and primrose, but
that deepened slowly into a live and ardent gold against which a group
of three palm trees detached themselves from the desert like messengers
sent forth by it to give a salutation to the moon. They were jet black
against the gold, distinct though very distant. The night, and the vast
plain from which they rose, lent them a significance that was unearthly.
Their long, thin stems and drooping, feathery leaves were living and
pathetic as the night thoughts of a woman who has suffered, but who
turns, with a gesture of longing that will not be denied, to the
luminance that dwells at the heart of the world. And those black palms
against the gold, that stillness of darkness and light in immensity,
banished Domini's faint sense of horror. The spectres faded away. She
fixed her eyes on the palms.

Now all the notes of the living things that do not sleep by night, but
make music by reedy pools, in underwood, among the blades of grass and
along the banks of streams, were audible to her again, filling her mind
with the mystery of existence. The glassy note of the frogs was like
a falling of something small and pointed upon a sheet of crystal. The
whirs of the insects suggested a ceaselessly active mentality. The faint
cries of the birds dropped down like jewels slipping from the trees.
And suddenly she felt that she was as nothing in the vastness and the
complication of the night. Even the passion that she knew lay, like a
dark and silent flood, within her soul, a flood that, once released from
its boundaries, had surely the power to rush irresistibly forward to
submerge old landmarks and change the face of a world--even that seemed
to lose its depth for a moment, to be shallow as the first ripple of
a tide upon the sand. And she forgot that the first ripple has all the
ocean behind it.

Red deepened and glowed in the gold behind the three palms, and the
upper rim of the round moon, red too as blood, crept about the desert.
Domini, leaning forward with one hand upon her horse's warm neck,
watched until the full circle was poised for a moment on the horizon,
holding the palms in its frame of fire. She had never seen a moon look
so immense and so vivid as this moon that came up into the night like a
portent, fierce yet serene, moon of a barbaric world, such as