mounted to his rugged forehead. He glanced out of the window
and moved his hands uneasily. Domini noticed that they scarcely tallied
with his face. Though scrupulously clean, they looked like the hands of
a labourer, hard, broad, and brown. Even his wrists, and a small section
of his left forearm, which showed as he lifted his left hand from one
knee to the other, were heavily tinted by the sun. The spaces between
the fingers were wide, as they usually are in hands accustomed to
grasping implements, but the fingers themselves were rather delicate and
artistic.

Domini observed this swiftly. Then she saw that her neighbour was
unpleasantly conscious of her observation. This vexed her vaguely,
perhaps because even so trifling a circumstance was like a thin link
between them. She snapped it by ceasing to look at or think of him. The
window was down. A delicate and warm breeze drifted in, coming from
the thickets of the palms. In flashing out of the darkness of the gorge
Domini had had the sensation of passing into a new world and a new
atmosphere. The sensation stayed with her now that she was no longer
dreaming or giving the reins to her imagination, but was calmly herself.
Against the terrible rampart of rock the winds beat across the land of
the Tell. But they die there frustrated. And the rains journey thither
and fail, sinking into the absinthe-coloured pools of the gorge. And the
snows and even the clouds stop, exhausted in their pilgrimage. The gorge
is not their goal, but it is their grave, and the desert never sees
their burial. So Domini's first sense of casting away the known
remained, and even grew, but now strongly and quietly. It was well
founded, she thought. For she looked out of the carriage window towards
the barrier she was leaving, and saw that on this side, guarding the
desert from the world that is not desert, it was pink in the evening
light, deepening here and there to rose colour, whereas on the far side
it had a rainy hue as of rocks in England. And there was a lustre of
gold in the hills, tints of glowing bronze slashed with a red line as
the heart of a wound, but recalling the heart of a flower. The folds of
the earth glistened. There was flame down there in the river bed. The
wreckage of the land, the broken fragments, gleamed as if braided with
precious things. Everywhere the salt crystals sparkled with the violence
of diamonds. Everywhere there was a strength of colour that hurled
itself to