to Allah as in the mosque of Sidi-Zazan.

Then she was in the palanquin with Androvsky close beside her.

At this moment Batouch took hold of the curtains of the palanquin to
draw them close, but she put out her hand and stopped him. She wanted to
see the last of the church, of the tormented gardens she had learnt to
love.

He looked astonished, but yielded to her gesture, and told the
camel-driver to make the animal rise to its feet. The driver took his
stick and plied it, crying out, "A-ah! A-ah!" The camel turned its
head towards him, showing its teeth, and snarling with a sort of dreary
passion.

"A-ah!" shouted the driver. "A-ah! A-ah!"

The camel began to get up.

As it did so, from the shrouded group of desert men one started forward
to the palanquin, throwing off his burnous and gesticulating with
thin naked arms, as if about to commit some violent act. It was the
sand-diviner. Made fantastic and unreal by the whirling sand grains,
Domini saw his lean face pitted with small-pox; his eyes, blazing with
an intelligence that was demoniacal, fixed upon her; the long wound that
stretched from his cheek to his forehead. The pleading that had been
mingled with the almost tyrannical command of his demeanour had vanished
now. He looked ferocious, arbitrary, like a savage of genius full of
some frightful message of warning or rebuke. As the camel rose he
cried aloud some words in Arabic. Domini heard his voice, but could not
understand the words. Laying his hands on the stuff of the palanquin he
shouted again, then took away his hands and shook them above his head
towards the desert, still staring at Domini with his fanatical eyes.

The wind shrieked, the sand grains whirled in spirals about his body,
the camel began to move away from the church slowly towards the village.

"A-ah!" cried the camel-driver. "A-ah!"

In the storm his call sounded like a wail of despair.

CHAPTER XVII

As the voice of the Diviner fainted away on the wind, and the vision of
his wounded face and piercing eyes was lost in the whirling sand grains,
Androvsky stretched out his hand and drew together the heavy curtains
of the palanquin. The world was shut out. They were alone for the first
time as man and wife; moving deliberately on this beast they could not
see, but whose slow and monotonous gait swung them gently to and fro,
out from the last traces of civilisation into the life of the sands.
With each soft step the camel took t