ed there like
a pyramid; but a slender, delicately outlined pyramid, a pyramid so
poetically ornate that the imagination figured in it the earliest ruin
of a great Asiatic city.

We advanced a few steps and sat down upon the portion of a large rock
which was still in the shade. But it was now eleven o'clock, and the
shadow, which ceased at our feet, was disappearing rapidly.

"How beautiful this silence!" she said to me; "and how the depth of it
is deepened by the rhythmic quiver of the wave upon the shore."

"If you will give your understanding to the three immensities which
surround us, the water, the air, and the sands, and listen exclusively
to the repeating sounds of flux and reflux," I answered her, "you will
not be able to endure their speech; you will think it is uttering a
thought which will annihilate you. Last evening, at sunset, I had that
sensation; and it exhausted me."

"Oh! let us talk, let us talk," she said, after a long pause. "I
understand it. No orator was ever more terrible. I think," she
continued, presently, "that I perceive the causes of the harmonies which
surround us. This landscape, which has but three marked colors,--the
brilliant yellow of the sands, the blue of the sky, the even green
of the sea,--is grand without being savage; it is immense, yet not
a desert; it is monotonous, but it does not weary; it has only three
elements, and yet it is varied."

"Women alone know how to render such impressions," I said. "You would be
the despair of a poet, dear soul that I divine so well!"

"The extreme heat of mid-day casts into those three expressions of the
infinite an all-powerful color," said Pauline, smiling. "I can here
conceive the poesy and the passion of the East."

"And I can perceive its despair."

"Yes," she said, "this dune is a cloister,--a sublime cloister."

We now heard the hurried steps of our guide; he had put on his Sunday
clothes. We addressed a few ordinary words to him; he seemed to think
that our mood had changed, and with that reserve that comes of misery,
he kept silence. Though from time to time we pressed each other's hands
that we might feel the mutual flow of our ideas and impressions,
we walked along for half an hour in silence, either because we were
oppressed by the heat which rose in waves from the burning sands, or
because the difficulty of walking absorbed our attention. Like children,
we held each other's hands; in fact, we could hardly have made a doze