. He obeyed her eyes and looked to his right,
to the small lemon-yellow dunes that were close to them. At perhaps a
hundred yards from the road was a dune that ran parallel with it. The
fire of the sinking sun caught its smooth crest, and above this crest,
moving languidly towards the city, were visible the heads and busts of
three women, the lower halves of whose bodies were concealed by the
sand of the farther side of the dune. They were dancing-girls. On their
heads, piled high with gorgeous handkerchiefs, were golden crowns which
glittered in the sun-rays, and tufts of scarlet feathers. Their oval
faces, covered with paint, were partially concealed by long strings of
gold coins, which flowed from their crowns down over their large breasts
and disappeared towards their waists, which were hidden by the sand.
Their dresses were of scarlet, apple-green and purple silks, partially
covered by floating shawls of spangled muslin. Beneath their crowns and
handkerchiefs burgeoned forth plaits of false hair decorated with coral
and silver ornaments. Their hands, which they held high, gesticulating
above the crest of the dune, were painted blood red.

These busts and heads glided slowly along in the setting sun, and
presently sank down and vanished into some depression of the dunes. For
an instant one blood-red hand was visible alone, waving a signal above
the sand to someone unseen. Its fingers fluttered like the wings of a
startled bird. Then it, too, vanished, and the sharply-cold lemon yellow
of the dunes stretched in vivid loneliness beneath the evening sky.

To both of them this brief vision of women in the sand brought home
the solitude of the desert and the barbarity of the life it held, the
ascetism of this supreme manifestation of Nature and the animal passion
which fructifies in its heart.

"Do you know what that made me think of, Boris?" Domini said, as the
red hand with its swiftly-moving fingers disappeared. "You'll smile,
perhaps, and I scarcely know why. It made me think of the Devil in a
monastery."

Androvsky did not smile. Nor did he answer. She felt sure that he, too,
had been strongly affected by that glimpse of Sahara life. His silence
gave Batouch an opportunity of pouring forth upon them a flood of
poetical description of the dancing-girls of Amara, all of whom he
seemed to know as intimate friends. Before he ceased they came into the
city.

The road was still majestically broad. They looked with in