imals and people were moving to and fro.
Round about, under the sheltering shadow of the windowless wall, were
many Arabs, some squatting on their haunches, some standing upright with
their backs against the stone, some moving from one group to another,
gesticulating and talking vivaciously. Boys were playing a game with
stones set in an ordered series of small holes scooped by their fingers
in the dust. A negro crossed the flat space before the Bordj carrying on
his head a huge earthen vase to the well near by, where a crowd of black
donkeys, just relieved of their loads of brushwood, was being watered.
From the south two Spahis were riding in on white horses, their scarlet
cloaks floating out over their saddles; and from the west, moving slowly
to a wailing sound of indistinct music, a faint beating of tomtoms, was
approaching a large caravan in a cloud of dust which floated back from
it and melted away into the radiance of the sunset.

When they gained the great open space before the building they were
bathed in the soft golden light, in which all these figures of Africans,
and all these animals, looked mysterious and beautiful, and full of that
immeasurable significance which the desert sheds upon those who move in
it, specially at dawn or at sundown. From the plateau they dominated the
whole of the plain they had traversed as far as Beni-Mora, which on the
morrow would fade into the blue horizon. Its thousands of palms made
a darkness in the gold, and still the tower of the hotel was faintly
visible, pointing like a needle towards the sky. The range of mountains
showed their rosy flanks in the distance. They, too, on the morrow would
be lost in the desert spaces, the last outposts of the world of hill
and valley, of stream and sea. Only in the deceptive dream of the mirage
would they appear once more, looming in a pearl-coloured shaking veil
like a fluid on the edge of some visionary lagune.

Domini was glad that on this first night of their journey they could
still see Beni-Mora, the place where they had found each other and been
given to each other by the Church. As the camel stopped before the great
doorway of the Bordj she turned in the palanquin and looked down upon
the desert, motioning to the camel-driver to leave the beast for a
moment. She put her arm through Androvsky's and made his eyes follow
hers across the vast spaces made magical by the sinking sun to that
darkness of distant palms which, to her, wou