rose a
great chorus of life; voices of men and beasts, cries of naked children
playing Cora on the sand-hills, of mothers to straying infants, shrill
laughter of unveiled girls wantonly gay, the calls of men, the barking
of multitudes of dogs,--the guard dogs of the nomads that are never
silent night or day,--the roaring of hundreds of camels now being
unloaded for the night, the gibbering of the mad beggars who roam
perpetually on the outskirts of the encampments like wolves seeking what
they may devour, the braying of donkeys, the whinnying of horses. And
beneath these voices of living things, foundation of their uprising
vitality, pulsed barbarous music, the throbbing tomtoms that are for
ever heard in the lands of the sun, fetish music that suggests fatalism,
and the grand monotony of the enormous spaces, and the crude passion
that repeats itself, and the untiring, sultry loves and the untired,
sultry languors of the children of the sun.

The silence of the sands, which Domini and Androvsky had known and
loved, was merged in the tumult of the sands. The one had been mystical,
laying the soul to rest. The other was provocative, calling the soul to
wake. At this moment the sands themselves seemed to stir with life and
to cry aloud with voices.

"The very sky is barbarous to-night!" Domini exclaimed. "Did you ever
see such colour, Boris?"

"Over the minarets it is like a great wound," he answered.

"No wonder men are careless of human life in such a land as this. All
the wildness of the world seems to be concentrated here. Amara is like
the desert city of some tremendous dream. It looks wicked and unearthly,
but how superb!"

"Look at those cupolas!" he said. "Are there really Oriental palaces
here? Has Batouch told us the truth for once?"

"Or less than the truth? I could believe anything of Amara at this
moment. What hundreds of camels! They remind me of Arba, our first
halting-place." She looked at him and he at her.

"How long ago that seems!" she said.

"A thousand years ago."

They both had a memory of a great silence, in the midst of this growing
tumult in which the sky seemed now to take its part, calling with the
voices of its fierce colours, with the voices of the fires that burdened
it in the west.

"Silence joined us, Domini," Androvsky said.

"Yes. Perhaps silence is the most beautiful voice in the world."

Far off, along the great white road, they saw two horsemen galloping to
meet them fr