and-storms are rare at this season of the year."

"An old bedouin like Tahar is safe enough. To-morrow or the day
after... but I see you are impatient, you are growing tired of my
company."

Owen assured Beclere he was mistaken, only a sedentary life was
impossible to him, and he was anxious to be off again.

"So there is something of the wanderer in you, for no business calls
you."

"No, my agent manages everything for me; it is, I suppose, mere
restlessness." And Owen spoke of going in quest of Tahar.

"To pass him again in the desert," and they went towards the point
where they might watch for Tahar, Beclere knowing by the sun the
direction in which to look. There was no route, nothing in the empty
space extending from their feet to the horizon--a line inscribed
across the empty sky--nothing to be seen although the sun hung in
the middle of the sky, the rays falling everywhere; it would have
seemed that the smallest object should be visible, but this was not
so--there was nothing. Even when he strained his eyes Owen could not
distinguish which was sand, which was earth, which was stone, even
the colour of the emptiness was undecided. Was it dun? Was it tawny?
Striving to express himself, Owen could find nothing more explicit
to say than that the colour of the desert was the colour of
emptiness, and they sat down trying to talk of falconry. But it was
impossible to talk in front of this trackless plain, _cela coupe la
parole_, flowing away to the south, to the west, to the east, ending--
it was impossible to imagine it ending anywhere, no more than we
can imagine the ends of the sky; and the desert conveyed the same
impression of loneliness--in a small way, of course--as the great
darkness of the sky; "for the sky," Owen said, half to himself, half
to his companion, "is dark and cold the moment one gets beyond the
atmosphere of the earth."

"The desert is, at all events, warm," Beclere interjected.

Hot, trackless spaces, burning solitudes through which nobody ever
went or came. It was the silence that frightened Owen; not even in
the forest, in the dark solitudes avoided by the birds, is there
silence. There is a wind among the tree-tops, and when the wind is
still the branches sway a little; there is nearly always a swaying
among the branches, and even when there is none, the falling of some
giant too old to subsist longer breaks the silence, frightens the
wild beast, who retires growling. The sea conveys t