bed in the dark that night Domini heard the church clock chime
the hours. She was not restless, though she was wakeful. Indeed, she
felt like a woman to whom an injection of morphia had been administered,
as if she never wished to move again. She lay there counting the minutes
that made the passing hours, counting them calmly, with an inexorable
and almost cold self-possession. The process presently became
mechanical, and she was able, at the same time, to dwell upon the events
that had followed upon the discovery of the murdered woman by the tent:
Androvsky's pulling aside of the door of the tent to find it empty,
their short ride to the encampment close by, their rousing up of the
sleeping Arabs within, filthy nomads clothed in patched garments,
unveiled women with wrinkled, staring faces and huge plaits of false
hair and amulets. From the tents the strange figures had streamed forth
into the light of the moon and the fading fires, gesticulating, talking
loudly, furiously, in an uncouth language that was unintelligible to
her. Led by Androvsky they had come to the corpse, while the air was
rent by the frantic barking of all the guard dogs and the howling of the
dog that had been a witness of the murder. Then in the night had risen
the shrill wailing of the women, a wailing that seemed to pierce the
stars and shudder out to the remotest confines of the desert, and in
the cold white radiance of the moon a savage vision of grief had been
presented to her eyes: naked arms gesticulating as if they strove to
summon vengeance from heaven, claw-like hands casting earth upon the
heads from which dangled Fatma hands, chains of tarnished silver and
lumps of coral that reminded her of congealed blood, bodies that swayed
and writhed as if stricken with convulsions or rent by seven devils.
She remembered how strange had seemed to her the vast calm, the
vast silence, that encompassed this noisy outburst of humanity, how
inflexible had looked the enormous moon, how unsympathetic the brightly
shining stars, how feverish and irritable the flickering illumination of
the flames that spurted up and fainted away like things still living but
in the agonies of death.

Then had followed her silent ride back to Beni-Mora with Androvsky along
the straight road which had always fascinated her spirit of adventure.
They had ridden slowly, without looking at each other, without
exchanging a word. She had felt dry and weary, like an old woman who ha