ooked round.

From the big tent opened a smaller one, which was to serve Androvsky as
a dressing-room and both of them as a baggage room. She did not go into
that, but saw, with one glance of soft inquiry, the two small, low beds,
the strips of gay carpet, the dressing-table, the stand and the two cane
chairs which furnished the sleeping-tent. Then she looked back to the
aperture. In the distance, standing alone at the edge of the hill, she
saw Androvsky, bathed in the sunset, looking out over the hidden desert
from which rose the wild sound of African music, steadily growing
louder. It seemed to her as if he must be gazing at the plains of
heaven, so magically brilliant and tender, so pellucidly clear and
delicate was the atmosphere and the colour of the sky. She saw no other
form, only his, in this poem of light, in this wide world of the sinking
sun. And the music seemed to be about his feet, to rise from the sand
and throb in its breast.

At that moment the figure of Liberty, which she had seen in the shadows
of the dancing-house, came in at the tent door and laid, for the first
time, her lips on Domini's. That kiss was surely the consecration of
the life of the sands. But to-day there had been another consecration.
Domini had a sudden impulse to link the two consecrations together.

She drew from her breast the wooden crucifix Androvsky had thrown into
the stream at Sidi-Zerzour, and, softly going to one of the beds, she
pinned the crucifix above it on the canvas of the tent. Then she turned
and went out into the glory of the sunset to meet the fierce music that
was rising from the desert.

CHAPTER XVIII

Night had fallen over the desert, a clear purple night, starry but
without a moon. Around the Bordj, and before a Cafe Maure built of brown
earth and palm-wood, opposite to it, the Arabs who were halting to sleep
at Arba on their journeys to and from Beni-Mora were huddled, sipping
coffee, playing dominoes by the faint light of an oil lamp, smoking
cigarettes and long pipes of keef. Within the court of the Bordj the
mules were feeding tranquilly in rows. The camels roamed the plain
among the tamarisk bushes, watched over by shrouded shadowy guardians
sleepless as they were. The mountains, the palms of Beni-Mora, were lost
in the darkness that lay over the desert.

On the low hill, at some distance beyond the white tent of Domini and
Androvsky, the obscurity was lit up fiercely by the blaze of a huge
fir