might have
shone upon Herod when he heard the voice of the Baptist in his dungeon,
or upon the wife of Pilate when in a dream she was troubled. It
suggested to her the powerful watcher of tragic events fraught with long
chains of consequence that would last on through centuries, as it turned
its blood-red gaze upon the desert, upon the palms, upon her, and,
leaning upon her horse's neck, she too--like Pilate's wife--fell into
a sort of strange and troubled dream for a moment, full of strong, yet
ghastly, light and of shapes that flitted across a background of fire.

In it she saw the priest with a fanatical look of warning in his eyes,
Count Anteoni beneath the trees of his garden, the perfume-seller in
his dark bazaar, Irena with her long throat exposed and her thin
arms drooping, the sand-diviner spreading forth his hands, Androvsky
galloping upon a horse as if pursued. This last vision returned again
and again. As the moon rose a stream of light that seemed tragic fell
across the desert and was woven mysteriously into the light of her
waking dream. The three palms looked larger. She fancied that she saw
them growing, becoming monstrous as they stood in the very centre of
the path of the nocturnal glory, and suddenly she remembered her thought
when she sat with Androvsky in the garden, that feeling grew in human
hearts like palms rising in the desert. But these palms were tragic and
aspired towards the blood-red moon. Suddenly she was seized with a
fear of feeling, of the growth of an intense sensation within her, and
realised, with an almost feverish vividness, the impotence of a soul
caught in the grip of a great passion, swayed hither and thither, led
into strange paths, along the edges, perhaps into depths of immeasurable
abysses. She had said to Androvsky that she would rather be the centre
of a world tragedy than die without having felt to the uttermost even if
it were sorrow. Was that not the speech of a mad woman, or at least of
a woman who was so ignorant of the life of feeling that her words were
idle and ridiculous? Again she felt desperately that she did not know
herself, and this lack of the most essential of all knowledge reduced
her for a moment to a bitterness of despair that seemed worse than the
bitterness of death. The vastness of the desert appalled her. The red
moon held within its circle all the blood of the martyrs, of life, of
ideals. She shivered in the saddle. Her nature seemed to shrink and