upon them
glances that seemed expressive of a disdainful pity. In front, beyond a
watercourse, now dried up, rose the low hill on which stood the Bordj,
a huge, square building, with two square towers pierced with loopholes.
From a distance it resembled a fort threatening the desert in
magnificent isolation. Its towers were black against the clear lemon of
the failing sunlight. Pigeons, that looked also black, flew perpetually
about them, and the telegraph posts, that bordered the way at regular
intervals on the left, made a diminishing series of black vertical lines
sharply cutting the yellow till they were lost to sight in the south.
To Domini these posts were like pointing fingers beckoning her onward to
the farthest distances of the sun. Drugged by the long journey over the
flats, and the unceasing caress of the air, that was like an importunate
lover ever unsatisfied, she watched from the height on which she was
perched this evening scene of roaming, feeding animals, staring nomads,
monotonous herbage and vague, surely-retreating mountains, with quiet,
dreamy eyes. Everything which she saw seemed to her beautiful, a little
remote and a little fantastic. The slow movement of the camels, the
swifter movements of the circling pigeons about the square towers on
the hill, the motionless, or gently-gliding, Arabs with their clubs held
slantwise, the telegraph poles, one smaller than the other, diminishing
till--as if magically--they disappeared in the lemon that was growing
into gold, were woven together for her by the shuttle of the desert
into a softly brilliant tapestry--one of those tapestries that is like
a legend struck to sleep as the Beauty in her palace. As they began to
mount the hill, and the radiance of the sky increased, this impression
faded, for the life that centred round the Bordj was vivid, though
sparse in comparison with the eddying life of towns, and had that air
of peculiar concentration which may be noted in pictures representing a
halt in the desert.

No longer did the strongly-built Bordj seem to Domini like a fort
threatening the oncomer, but like a stalwart host welcoming him, a host
who kept open house in this treeless desolation that yet had, for her,
no feature that was desolate. It was earth-coloured, built of stone, and
had in the middle of the facade that faced them an immense hospitable
doorway with a white arch above it. This doorway gave a partial view of
a vast courtyard, in which an