d that
it was. In its so-called monotony she discovered eternal interest. Of
old she had thought the sea the most wonderful thing in Nature. In the
desert she seemed to possess the sea with something added to it, a
calm, a completeness, a mystical tenderness, a passionate serenity. She
thought of the sea as a soul striving to fulfil its noblest aspirations,
to be the splendid thing it knew how to dream of. But she thought of
the desert as a soul that need strive no more, having attained. And she,
like the Arabs, called it always in her heart the Garden of Allah. For
in this wonderful calm, bright as the child's idea of heaven; clear as
a crystal with a sunbeam caught in it, silent as a prayer that will
be answered silently, God seemed to draw very near to His wandering
children. In the desert was the still, small voice, and the still, small
voice was the Lord.

Often at dawn or sundown, when, perhaps in the distance of the sands,
or near at hand beneath the shade of the palms of some oasis by a
waterspring, she watched the desert men in their patched rags, with
their lean, bronzed faces and eagle eyes turned towards Mecca, bowing
their heads in prayer to the soil that the sun made hot, she remembered
Count Anteoni's words, "I like to see men praying in the desert," and
she understood with all her heart and soul why. For the life of the
desert was the most perfect liberty that could be found on earth, and to
see men thus worshipping in liberty set before her a vision of free will
upon the heights. When she thought of the world she had known and left,
of the men who would always live in it and know no other world, she was
saddened for a moment. Could she ever find elsewhere such joy as she had
found in the simple and unfettered life of the wastes? Could she ever
exchange this life for another life, even with Androvsky?

One day she spoke to him of her intense joy in the wandering fate, and
the pain that came to her whenever she thought of exchanging it for a
life of civilisation in the midst of fixed groups of men.

They had halted for the noonday rest at a place called Sidi-Hamdam, and
in the afternoon were going to ride on to a Bordj called Mogar, where
they meant to stay two or three days, as Batouch had told them it was
a good halting place, and near to haunts of the gazelle. The tents had
already gone forward, and Domini and Androvsky were lying upon a rug
spread on the sand, in the shadow of the grey wall of a tra