ike a far horizon," he answered. "And there's no sun to-day."

"I suppose even in the desert we cannot have it always," she said. And
in her voice, too, there was a touch of melancholy, as if she had caught
his mood. A minute later she added:

"I feel exactly as if I were on a hill top and were coming to a view of
the sea."

Almost as she spoke they cantered in among the tents of the attendants,
and reined in their horses at the edge of a slope that was almost a
precipice. Then they sat still in their saddles, gazing.

They had been living for weeks in the midst of vastness, and had become
accustomed to see stretched out around them immense tracts of land
melting away into far blue distances, but this view from Mogar made them
catch their breath and stiffed their pulses.

It was gigantic. There was even something unnatural in its appearance
of immensity, as if it were, perhaps, deceptive, and existed in their
vision of it only. So, surely, might look a plain to one who had taken
haschish, which enlarges, makes monstrous and threateningly terrific.
Domini had a feeling that no human eyes could really see such infinite
tracts of land and water as those she seemed to be seeing at this
moment. For there was water here, in the midst of the desert. Infinite
expanses of sea met infinite plains of snow. Or so it seemed to both
of them. And the sea was grey and calm as a winter sea, breathing its
plaint along a winter land. From it, here and there, rose islets whose
low cliffs were a deep red like the red of sandstone, a sad colour that
suggests tragedy, islets that looked desolate, and as if no life had
ever been upon them, or could be. Back from the snowy plains stretched
sand dunes of the palest primrose colour, sand dunes innumerable,
myriads and myriads of them, rising and falling, rising and falling,
till they were lost in the grey distance of this silent world. In the
foreground, at their horses' feet, wound from the hill summit a broad
track faintly marked in the deep sand, and flanked by huge dunes shaped,
by the action of the winds, into grotesque semblances of monsters,
leviathans, beasts with prodigious humps, sphinxes, whales. This track
was presently lost in the blanched plains. Far away, immeasurably far,
sea and snow blended and faded into the cloudy grey. Above the near
dunes two desert eagles were slowly wheeling in a weary flight,
occasionally sinking towards the sand, then rising again towards the
clouds