om the city, one dressed in brilliant saffron yellow, the
other in the palest blue, both crowned with large and snowy turbans.

"Who can they be?" said Domini, as they drew near. "They look like two
princes of the Sahara."

Then she broke into a merry laugh.

"Batouch! and Ali!" she exclaimed.

The servants galloped up then, without slackening speed deftly wheeled
their horses in a narrow circle, and were beside them, going with them,
one on the right hand, the other on the left.

"Bravo!" Domini cried, delighted at this feat of horsemanship. "But what
have you been doing? You are transformed!"

"Madame, we have been to the Bain Maure," replied Batouch, calmly,
swelling out his broad chest under his yellow jacket laced with gold.
"We have had our heads shaved till they are smooth and beautiful as
polished ivory. We have been to the perfumer"--he leaned confidentially
towards her, exhaling a pungent odour of amber--"to the tailor, to
the baboosh bazaar!"--he kicked out a foot cased in a slipper that was
bright almost as a gold piece--"to him who sells the cherchia." He shook
his head till the spangled muslin that flowed about it trembled. "Is it
not right that your servants should do you honour in the city?"

"Perfectly right," she answered with a careful seriousness. "I am proud
of you both."

"And Monsieur?" asked Ali, speaking in his turn.

Androvsky withdrew his eyes from the city, which was now near at hand.

"Splendid!" he said, but as if attending to the Arabs with difficulty.
"You are splendid."

As they came towards the old wall which partially surrounds Amara, and
which rises from a deep natural moat of sand, they saw that the ground
immediately before the city which, from a distance, had looked almost
fiat, was in reality broken up into a series of wavelike dunes, some
small with depressions like deep crevices between them, others large
with summits like plateaux. These dunes were of a sharp lemon yellow
in the evening light, a yellow that was cold in its clearness, almost
setting the teeth on edge. They went away into great rolling slopes of
sand on which the camps of the nomads and the Ouled Nails were pitched,
some near to, some distant from, the city, but they themselves were
solitary. No tents were pitched close to the city, under the shadow of
its wall. As Androvsky spoke, Domini exclaimed:

"Boris---look! That is the most extraordinary thing I have ever seen!"

She put her hand on his arm