ke-charmers--who
are immune from the poison of serpents and the acrobats who come from
far-off Persia and Arabia to spread their carpets in the shadow of the
Agha's dwelling and delight the eyes of negro and Kabyle, of Soudanese
and Touareg with their feats of strength; of the haschish smokers who,
assembled by night in an underground house whose ceiling and walls were
black as ebony, gave themselves up to day-dreams of shifting glory, in
which the things of earth and the joys and passions of men reappeared,
but transformed by the magic influence of the drug, made monstrous or
fairylike, intensified or turned to voluptuous languors, through which
the Ouled Nail floated like a syren, promising ecstasies unknown even in
Baghdad, where the pale Circassian lifts her lustrous eyes, in which the
palms were heavy with dates of solid gold, and the streams were gliding
silver.

Often they had smiled over Batouch's opulent descriptions of the marvels
of Ain-Amara, which they suspected to be very far away from the reality,
and yet, nevertheless, when they saw the minarets soaring above the
sands to the brassy heaven, it seemed to them both as if, perhaps, they
might be true. The place looked intensely barbaric. The approach to it
was grandiose.

Wide as the sands had been, they seemed to widen out into a greater
immensity of arid pallor before the city gates as yet unseen. The
stretch of blue above looked vaster here, the horizons more remote, the
radiance of the sun more vivid, more inexorable. Nature surely expanded
as if in an effort to hold her arm against some tremendous spectacle set
in its bosom by the activity of men, who were strong and ardent as
the giants of old, who had powers and a passion for employing them
persistently not known in any other region of the earth. The immensity
of Mogar brought sadness to the mind. The immensity of Ain-Amara brought
excitement. Even at this distance from it, when its minarets were still
like shadowy fingers of an unlifted hand, Androvsky and Domini were
conscious of influences streaming forth from its battlements over the
sloping sands like a procession that welcomed them to a new phase of
desert life.

"And people talk of the monotony of the Sahara!" Domini said speaking
out of their mutual thought. "Everything is here, Boris; you've never
drawn near to London. Long before you reach the first suburbs you feel
London like a great influence brooding over the fields and the woods.
H