and there through the flying sands and the
frantic palm leaves. The desert was at hand.

Ali began to sing, breathing his song into the back of Batouch's hood.

"The love of women is like the holiday song that the boy sings
gaily
In the sunny garden--
The love of women is like the little moon, the little happy moon
In the last night of Ramadan.
The love of women is like the great silence that steals at dusk
To kiss the scented blossoms of the orange tree.
Sit thee down beneath the orange tree, O loving man!
That thou mayst know the kiss that tells the love of women.

"Janat! Janat! Janat!"

Batouch stirred uneasily, pulled his hood from his eyes and looked into
the storm gravely. Then he shifted on the camel's hump and said to Ali:

"How shall we get to Arba? The wind is like all the Touaregs going to
battle. And when we leave the oasis----"

"The wind is going down, Batouch-ben-Brahim," responded Ali, calmly.
"This evening the Roumis can lie in the tents."

Batouch's thick lips curled with sarcasm. He spat into the wind, blew
his nose in his burnous, and answered:

"You are a child, and can sing a pretty song, but--"

Ali pointed with his delicate hand towards the south.

"Do you not see the light in the sky?"

Batouch stared before him, and perceived that there was in truth a
lifting of the darkness beyond, a whiteness growing where the desert
lay.

"As we come into the desert the wind will fall," said Ali; and again he
began to sing to himself:

"Janat! Janat! Janat!"

Domini could not see the light in the south, and no premonition warned
her of any coming abatement of the storm. Once more she had begun to
listen to the roaring of the wind and to wait for the larger voice of
the desert, for the triumphant clarion of the sands that would announce
to her her entry with Androvsky into the life of the wastes. Again she
personified the Sahara, but now more vividly than ever before. In the
obscurity she seemed to see it far away, like a great heroic figure,
waiting for her and her passion, waiting in a region of gold and silken
airs at the back of the tempest to crown her life with a joy wide as its
dreamlike spaces, to teach her mind the inner truths that lie beyond the
crowded ways of men and to open her heart to the most profound messages
of Nature.

She listened, holding Androvsky's hand, and she felt that he was
listening too, with an inte