That same day, to the surprise of Batouch, they left Mogar. To both
Domini and Androvsky it seemed a tragic place, a place where the desert
showed them a countenance that was menacing.
They moved on towards the south, wandering aimlessly through the warm
regions of the sun. Then, as the spring drew into summer, and the heat
became daily more intense, they turned again northwards, and on an
evening in May pitched their camp on the outskirts of the Sahara city of
Amara.
This city, although situated in the northern part of the desert, was
called by the Arabs “The belly of the Sahara,” and also “The City of
Scorpions.” It lay in the midst of a vast region of soft and shifting
sand that suggested a white sea, in which the oasis of date palms, at
the edge of which the city stood, was a green island. From the south,
whence the wanderers came, the desert sloped gently upwards for a long
distance, perhaps half a day’s march, and many kilometres before the
city was reached, the minarets of its mosques were visible, pointing
to the brilliant blue sky that arched the whiteness of the sands. Round
about the city, on every side, great sand-hills rose like ramparts
erected by Nature to guard it from the assaults of enemies. These hills
were black with the tents of desert tribes, which, from far off, looked
like multitudes of flies that had settled on the sands. The palms of the
oasis, which stretched northwards from the city, could not be seen from
the south till the city was reached, and in late spring this region was
a strange and barbarous pageant of blue and white and gold; crude in
its intensity, fierce in its crudity, almost terrible in its blazing
splendour that was like the Splendour about the portals of the sun.
Domini and Androvsky rode towards Amara at a foot’s pace, looking
towards its distant towers. A quivering silence lay around them,
yet already they seemed to hear the cries of the voices of a great
multitude, to be aware of the movement of thronging crowds of men. This
was the first Sahara city they had drawn near to, and their minds were
full of memories of the stories of Batouch, told to them by the camp
fire at night in the uninhabited places which, till now, had been their
home: stories of the wealthy date merchants who trafficked here and
dwelt in Oriental palaces, poor in aspect as seen from the dark and
narrow streets, or zgags, in which they were situated, but within full
of the splendours of Eastern luxury; of the Jew moneylenders who lived
apart in their own quarter, rapacious as wolves, hoarding their
gains, and practising the rites of their ancient and--according to the
Arabs--detestable religion; of the marabouts, or sacred men, revered
by the Mohammedans, who rode on white horses through the public ways,
followed by adoring fanatics who sought to touch their garments and
amulets, and demanded importunately miraculous blessings at their
hands--the hedgehog’s foot to protect their women in the peril of
childbirth; the scroll, covered with verses of the Koran and enclosed
in a sheaf of leather, that banishes ill dreams at night and stays the
uncertain feet of the sleep-walker; the camel’s skull that brings fruit
to the palm trees; the red coral that stops the flow of blood from a
knife-wound--of the dancing-girls glittering in an armour of golden
pieces, their heads tied with purple and red and yellow handkerchiefs
of silk, crowned with great bars of solid gold and tufted with ostrich
feathers; of the dwarfs and jugglers who by night perform in the
marketplace, contending for custom with the sorceresses who tell the
fates from shells gathered by mirage seas; with the snake-charmers--who
are immune from the poison of serpents and the acrobats who come from
far-off Persia and Arabia to spread their carpets in the shadow of the
Agha’s dwelling and delight the eyes of negro and Kabyle, of Soudanese
and Touareg with their feats of strength; of the haschish smokers who,
assembled by night in an underground house whose ceiling and walls were
black as ebony, gave themselves up to day-dreams of shifting glory, in
which the things of earth and the joys and passions of men reappeared,
but transformed by the magic influence of the drug, made monstrous or
fairylike, intensified or turned to voluptuous languors, through which
the Ouled Nail floated like a syren, promising ecstasies unknown even in
Baghdad, where the pale Circassian lifts her lustrous eyes, in which the
palms were heavy with dates of solid gold, and the streams were gliding
silver.
Often they had smiled over Batouch’s opulent descriptions of the marvels
of Ain-Amara, which they suspected to be very far away from the reality,
and yet, nevertheless, when they saw the minarets soaring above the
sands to the brassy heaven, it seemed to them both as if, perhaps, they
might be true. The place looked intensely barbaric. The approach to it
was grandiose.
Wide as the sands had been, they seemed to widen out into a greater
immensity of arid pallor before the city gates as yet unseen. The
stretch of blue above looked vaster here, the horizons more remote, the
radiance of the sun more vivid, more inexorable. Nature surely expanded
as if in an effort to hold her arm against some tremendous spectacle set
in its bosom by the activity of men, who were strong and ardent as
the giants of old, who had powers and a passion for employing them
persistently not known in any other region of the earth. The immensity
of Mogar brought sadness to the mind. The immensity of Ain-Amara brought
excitement. Even at this distance from it, when its minarets were still
like shadowy fingers of an unlifted hand, Androvsky and Domini were
conscious of influences streaming forth from its battlements over the
sloping sands like a procession that welcomed them to a new phase of
desert life.
“And people talk of the monotony of the Sahara!” Domini said speaking
out of their mutual thought. “Everything is here, Boris; you’ve never
drawn near to London. Long before you reach the first suburbs you feel
London like a great influence brooding over the fields and the woods.
Here you feel Amara in the same way brooding over the sands. It’s as if
the sands were full of voices. Doesn’t it excite you?”
“Yes,” he said. “But”--and he turned in his saddle and looked back--“I
feel as if the solitudes were safer.”
“We can return to them.”
“Yes.”
“We are splendidly free. There’s nothing to prevent us leaving Amara
tomorrow.”
“Isn’t there?” he answered, fixing his eyes upon the minarets.
“What can there be?”
“Who knows?”
“What do you mean, Boris? Are you superstitious? But you reject the
influence of place. Don’t you remember--at Mogar?”
At the mention of the name his face clouded and she was sorry she had
spoken it. Since they had left the hill above the mirage sea they had
scarcely ever alluded to their night there. They had never once talked
of the dinner in camp with De Trevignac and his men, or renewed their
conversation in the tent on the subject of religion. But since that day,
since her words about Androvsky’s lack of perfect happiness even with
her far out in the freedom of the desert, Domini had been conscious
that, despite their great love for each other, their mutual passion for
the solitude in which it grew each day more deep and more engrossing,
wrapping their lives in fire and leading them on to the inner abodes of
sacred understanding, there was at moments a barrier between them.
At first she had striven not to recognise its existence. She had
striven to be blind. But she was essentially a brave woman and an almost
fanatical lover of truth for its own sake, thinking that what is called
an ugly truth is less ugly than the loveliest lie. To deny truth is to
play the coward. She could not long do that. And so she quickly learned
to face this truth with steady eyes and an unflinching heart.
At moments Androvsky retreated from her, his mind became remote--more,
his heart was far from her, and, in its distant place, was suffering. Of
that she was assured.
But she was assured, too, that she stood to him for perfection in human
companionship. A woman’s love is, perhaps, the only true divining rod.
Domini knew instinctively where lay the troubled waters, what troubled
them in their subterranean dwelling. She was certain that Androvsky was
at peace with her but not with himself. She had said to him in the tent
that she thought he sometimes felt far away from God. The conviction
grew in her that even the satisfaction of his great human love was not
enough for his nature. He demanded, sometimes imperiously, not only the
peace that can be understood gloriously, but also that other peace which
passeth understanding. And because he had it not he suffered.
In the Garden of Allah he felt a loneliness even though she was with
him, and he could not speak with her of this loneliness. That was the
barrier between them, she thought.
She prayed for him: in the tent by night, in the desert under the
burning sky by day. When the muezzin cried from the minaret of some
tiny village lost in the desolation of the wastes, turning to the north,
south, east and west, and the Mussulmans bowed their shaved heads,
facing towards Mecca, she prayed to the Catholics’ God, whom she felt to
be the God, too, of all the devout, of all the religions of the world,
and to the Mother of God, looking towards Africa. She prayed that this
man whom she loved, and who she believed was seeking, might find. And
she felt that there was a strength, a passion in her prayers, which
could not be rejected. She felt that some day Allah would show himself
in his garden to the wanderer there. She dared to feel that because she
dared to believe in the endless mercy of God. And when that moment came
she felt, too, that their love--hers and his--for each other would be
crowned. Beautiful and intense as it was it still lacked something. It
needed to be encircled by the protecting love of a God in whom they both
believed in the same way, and to whom they both were equally near.
While she felt close to this love and he far from it they were not quite
together.
There were moments in which she was troubled, even sad, but they passed.
For she had a great courage, a great confidence. The hope that dwells
like a flame in the purity of prayer comforted her.
“I love the solitudes,” he said. “I love to have you to myself.”
“If we lived always in the greatest city of the world it would make no
difference,” she said quietly. “You know that, Boris.”
He bent over from his saddle and clasped her hand in his, and they rode
thus up the great slope of the sands, with their horses close together.
The minarets of the city grew more distinct. They dominated the waste as
the thought of Allah dominates the Mohammedan world. Presently, far away
on the left, Domini and Androvsky saw hills of sand, clearly defined
like small mountains delicately shaped. On the summits of these hills
were Arab villages of the hue of bronze gleaming in the sun. No trees
stood near them. But beyond them, much farther off, was the long green
line of the palms of a large oasis. Between them and the riders moved
slowly towards the minarets dark things that looked like serpents
writhing through the sands. These were caravans coming into the city
from long journeys. Here and there, dotted about in the immensity, were
solitary horsemen, camels in twos and threes, small troops of
donkeys. And all the things that moved went towards the minarets as if
irresistibly drawn onwards by some strong influence that sucked them in
from the solitudes of the whirlpool of human life.
Again Domini thought of the approach to London, and of the dominion of
great cities, those octopus monsters created by men, whose tentacles
are strong to seize and stronger still to keep. She was infected by
Androvsky’s dread of a changed life, and through her excitement, that
pulsed with interest and curiosity, she felt a faint thrill of something
that was like fear.
“Boris,” she said, “I feel as if your thoughts were being conveyed to me
by your touch. Perhaps the solitudes are best.”
By a simultaneous impulse they pulled in their horses and listened.
Sounds came to them over the sands, thin and remote. They could not tell
what they were, but they knew that they heard something which suggested
the distant presence of life.
“What is it?” said Domini.
“I don’t know, but I hear something. It travels to us from the
minarets.”
They both leaned forward on their horses’ necks, holding each other’s
hand.
“I feel the tumult of men,” Androvsky said presently.
“And I. But it seems as if no men could have elected to build a city
here.”
“Here in the ‘Belly of the desert,’” he said, quoting the Arabs’ name
for Amara.
“Boris”--she spoke in a more eager voice, clasping his hand
strongly--“you remember the _fumoir_ in Count Anteoni’s garden. The
place where it stood was the very heart of the garden.”
“Yes.”
“We understood each other there.”
He pressed her hand without speaking.
“Amara seems to me the heart of the Garden of Allah. Perhaps--perhaps we
shall----”
She paused. Her eyes were fixed upon his face.
“What, Domini?” he asked.
He looked expectant, but anxious, and watched her, but with eyes that
seemed ready to look away from her at a word.
“Perhaps we shall understand each other even better there.”
He looked down at the white sand.
“Better!” he repeated. “Could we do that?”
She did not answer. The far-off villages gleamed mysteriously on their
little mountains, like unreal things that might fade away as castles
fade in the fire. The sky above the minarets was changing in colour
slowly. Its blue was being invaded by a green that was a sister colour.
A curious light, that seemed to rise from below rather than to descend
from above, was transmuting the whiteness of the sands. A lemon
yellow crept through them, but they still looked cold and strange,
and immeasurably vast. Domini fancied that the silence of the desert
deepened so that, in it, they might hear the voices of Amara more
distinctly.
“You know,” she said, “when one looks out over the desert from a height,
as we did from the tower of Beni-Mora, it seems to call one. There’s
a voice in the blue distance that seems to say, ‘Come to me! I am
here--hidden in my retreat, beyond the blue, and beyond the mirage, and
beyond the farthest verge!’”
“Yes, I know.”
“I have always felt, when we travelled in the desert, that the calling
thing, the soul of the desert, retreated as I advanced, and still
summoned me onward but always from an infinite distance.”
“And I too, Domini.”
“Now I don’t feel that. I feel as if now we were coming near to the
voice, as if we should reach it at Amara, as if there it would tell us
its secret.”
“Imagination!” he said.
But he spoke seriously, almost mystically. His voice was at odds with
the word it said. She noticed that and was sure that he was secretly
sharing her sensation. She even suspected that he had perhaps felt it
first.
“Let us ride on,” he said. “Do you see the change in the light? Do
you see the green in the sky? It is cooler, too. This is the wind of
evening.”
Their hands fell apart and they rode slowly on, up the long slope of the
sands.
Presently they saw that they had come out of the trackless waste and
that though still a long way from the city they were riding on a desert
road which had been trodden by multitudes of feet. There were many
footprints here. On either side were low banks of sand, beaten into a
rough symmetry by implements of men, and shallow trenches through which
no water ran. In front of them they saw the numerous caravans, now more
distinct, converging from left and right slowly to this great isle of
the desert which stretched in a straight line to the minarets.
“We are on a highway,” Domini said.
Androvsky sighed.
“I feel already as if we were in the midst of a crowd,” he answered.
“Our love for peace oughtn’t to make us hate our fellowmen!” she said.
“Come, Boris, let us chase away our selfish mood!”
She spoke in a more cheerful voice and drew her rein a little tighter.
Her horse quickened its pace.
“And think how our stay at Amara will make us love the solitudes when we
return to them again. Contrast is the salt of life.”
“You speak as if you didn’t believe what you are saying.”
She laughed.
“If I were ever inclined to tell you a lie,” she said, “I should not
dare to. Your mind penetrates mine too deeply.”
“You could not tell me a lie.”
“Do you hear the dogs barking?” she said, after a moment. “They are
among those tents that are like flies on the sands around the city. That
is the tribe of the Ouled Nails I suppose. Batouch says they camp here.
What multitudes of tents! Those are the suburbs of Amara. I would rather
live in them than in the suburbs of London. Oh, how far away we are, as
if we were at the end of the world!”
Either her last words, or her previous change of manner to a lighter
cheerfulness, almost a briskness, seemed to rouse Androvsky to a greater
confidence, even to anticipation of possible pleasure.
“Yes. After all it is only the desert men who are here. Amara is their
Metropolis, and in it we shall only see their life.”
His horse plunged. He had touched it sharply with his heel.
“I believe you hate the thought of civilisation,” she exclaimed.
“And you?”
“I never think of it. I feel almost as if I had never known it, and
could never know it.”
“Why should you? You love the wilds.”
“They make my whole nature leap. Even when I was a child it was so.
I remember once reading _Maud_. In it I came upon a passage--I can’t
remember it well, but it was about the red man--”
She thought for a moment, looking towards the city.
“I don’t know how it is quite,” she murmured. “‘When the red man
laughs by his cedar tree, and the red man’s babe leaps beyond the
sea’--something like that. But I know that it made my heart beat, and
that I felt as if I had wings and were spreading them to fly away to
the most remote places of the earth. And now I have spread my wings,
and--it’s glorious. Come, Boris!”
They put their horses to a canter, and soon drew near to the caravans.
They had sent Batouch and Ali, who generally accompanied them, on with
the rest of the camp. Both had many friends in Amara, and were eager to
be there. It was obvious that they and all the attendants, servants and
camel-men, thought of it as the provincial Frenchman thinks of Paris, as
a place of all worldly wonders and delights. Batouch was to meet them
at the entrance to the city, and when they had seen the marvels of its
market-place was to conduct them to the tents which would be pitched on
the sand-hills outside.
Their horses pulled as if they, too, longed for a spell of city life
after the life of the wastes, and Domini’s excitement grew. She felt
vivid animal spirits boiling up within her, the sane and healthy sense
that welcomes a big manifestation of the ceaseless enterprise and keen
activity of a brotherhood of men. The loaded camels, the half-naked
running drivers, the dogs sensitively sniffing, as if enticing smells
from the city already reached their nostrils, the chattering desert
merchants discussing coming gains, the wealthy and richly-dressed Arabs,
mounted on fine horses, and staring with eyes that glittered up the
broad track in search of welcoming friends, were sympathetic to her
mood. Amara was sucking them all in together from the solitary places as
quiet waters are sucked into the turmoils of a mill-race. Although
still out in the sands they were already in the midst of a noise of
life flowing to meet the roar of life that rose up at the feet of the
minarets, which now looked tall and majestic in the growing beauty of
the sunset.
They passed the caravans one by one, and came on to the crest of the
long sand slope just as the sky above the city was flushing with a
bright geranium red. The track from here was level to the city wall,
and was no longer soft with sand. A broad, hard road rang beneath their
horses’ hoofs, startling them with a music that was like a voice of
civilised life. Before them, under the red sky, they saw a dark blue of
distant houses, towers, and great round cupolas glittering like gold.
Forests of palm trees lay behind, the giant date palms for which Amara
was famous. To the left stretched the sands dotted with gleaming Arab
villages, to the right again the sands covered with hundreds of tents
among which quantities of figures moved lively like ants, black on the
yellow, arched by the sky that was alive with lurid colour, red fading
into gold, gold into primrose, primrose into green, green into the blue
that still told of the fading day. And to this multi-coloured sky, from
the barbaric city and the immense sands in which it was set, 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 from 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. 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 interest at the
first houses, one on each side of the way. And here again they were met
by the sharp contrast which was evidently to be the keynote of Amara.
The house on the left was European, built of white stone, clean,
attractive, but uninteresting, with stout white pillars of plaster
supporting an arcade that afforded shade from the sun, windows with
green blinds, and an open doorway showing a little hall, on the floor
of which lay a smart rug glowing with gay colours; that on the right,
before which the sand lay deep as if drifted there by some recent
wind of the waste, was African and barbarous, an immense and rambling
building of brown earth, brushwood and palm, windowless, with a
flat-terraced roof, upon which were piled many strange-looking objects
like things collapsed, red and dark green, with fringes and rosettes,
and tall sticks of palm pointing vaguely to the sky.
“Why, these are like our palanquin!” Domini said.
“They are the palanquins of the dancing-girls, Madame,” said Batouch.
“That is the café of the dancers, and that”--he pointed to the neat
house opposite--“is the house of Monsieur the Aumonier of Amara.”
“Aumonier,” said Androvsky, sharply. “Here!”
He paused, then added more quietly:
“What should he do here?”
“But, Monsieur, he is for the French officers.”
“There are French officers?”
“Yes, Monsieur, four or five, and the commandant. They live in the
palace with the cupolas.”
“I forgot,” Androvsky said to Domini. “We are not out of the sphere of
French influence. This place looks so remote and so barbarous that I
imagined it given over entirely to the desert men.”
“We need not see the French,” she said. “We shall be encamped outside in
the sand.”
“And we need not stay here long,” he said quickly.
“Boris,” she asked him, half in jest, half in earnest, “shall we buy a
desert island to live in?”
“Let us buy an oasis,” he said. “That would be the perf--the safest life
for us.”
“The safest?”
“The safest for our happiness. Domini, I have a horror of the world!” He
said the last words with a strong, almost fierce, emphasis.
“Had you it always, or only since we have been married?”
“I--perhaps it was born in me, perhaps it is part of me. Who knows?”
He had relapsed into a gravity that was heavy with gloom, and looked
about him with eyes that seemed to wish to reject all that offered
itself to their sight.
“I want the desert and you in it,” he said. “The lonely desert, with
you.”
“And nothing else?”
“I want that. I cannot have that taken from me.”
He looked about him quickly from side to side as they rode up the
street, as if he were a scout sent in advance of an army and suspected
ambushes. His manner reminded her of the way he had looked towards the
tower as they rode into Mogar. And he had connected that tower with the
French. She remembered his saying to her that it must have been built
for French soldiers. As they rode into Mogar he had dreaded something in
Mogar. The strange incident with De Trevignac had followed. She had put
it from her mind as a matter of small, or no, importance, had resolutely
forgotten it, had been able to forget it in their dream of desert life
and desert passion. But the entry into a city for the moment destroyed
the dreamlike atmosphere woven by the desert, recalled her town sense,
that quick-wittedness, that sharpness of apprehension and swiftness of
observation which are bred in those who have long been accustomed to
a life in the midst of crowds and movement, and changing scenes and
passing fashions. Suddenly she seemed to herself to be reading Androvsky
with an almost merciless penetration, which yet she could not check. He
had dreaded something in Mogar. He dreaded something here in Amara. An
unusual incident--for the coming of a stranger into their lives out of
their desolation of the sand was unusual--had followed close upon the
first dread. Would another such incident follow upon this second dread?
And of what was this dread born?
Batouch drew her attention to the fact that they were coming to the
marketplace, and to the curious crowds of people who were swarming out
of the tortuous, narrow streets into the main thoroughfare to watch them
pass, or to accompany them, running beside their horses. She divined
at once, by the passionate curiosity their entry aroused, that he had
misspent his leisure in spreading through the city lying reports of
their immense importance and fabulous riches.
“Batouch,” she said, “you have been talking about us.”
“No, Madame, I merely said that Madame is a great lady in her own land,
and that Monsieur--”
“I forbid you ever to speak about me, Batouch,” said Androvsky,
brusquely.
He seemed worried by the clamour of the increasing mob that surrounded
them. Children in long robes like night-gowns skipped before them,
calling out in shrill voices. Old beggars, with diseased eyes and
deformed limbs, laid filthy hands upon their bridles and demanded alms.
Impudent boys, like bronze statuettes suddenly endowed with a fury
of life, progressed backwards to keep them full in view, shouting
information at them and proclaiming their own transcendent virtues
as guides. Lithe desert men, almost naked, but with carefully-covered
heads, strode beside them, keeping pace with the horses, saying nothing,
but watching them with a bright intentness that seemed to hint at
unutterable designs. And towards them, through the air that seemed heavy
and almost suffocating now that they were among buildings, and through
clouds of buzzing flies, came the noise of the larger tumult of the
market-place.
Looking over the heads of the throng Domini saw the wide road opening
out into a great space, with the first palms of the oasis thronging
on the left, and a cluster of buildings, many with small cupolas, like
down-turned white cups, on the right. On the farther side of this space,
which was black with people clad for the most in dingy garments, was an
arcade jutting out from a number of hovel-like houses, and to the right
of them, where the market-place, making a wide sweep, continued up hill
and was hidden from her view, was the end of the great building whose
gilded cupolas they had seen as they rode in from the desert, rising
above the city with the minarets of its mosques.
The flies buzzed furiously about the horses’ heads and flanks, and the
people buzzed more furiously, like larger flies, about the riders. It
seemed to Domini as if the whole city was intent upon her and Androvsky,
was observing them, considering them, wondering about them, was full of
a thousand intentions all connected with them.
When they gained the market-place the noise and the watchful curiosity
made a violent crescendo. It happened to be market day and, although the
sun was setting, buying and selling were not yet over. On the hot earth
over which, whenever there is any wind from the desert, the white sand
grains sift and settle, were laid innumerable rugs of gaudy colours on
which were disposed all sorts of goods for sale; heavy ornaments for
women, piles of burnouses, haiks, gandouras, gaiters of bright red
leather, slippers, weapons--many jewelled and gilt, or rich with
patterns in silver--pyramids of the cords of camels’ hair that bind the
turbans of the desert men, handkerchiefs and cottons of all the colours
of the rainbow, cheap perfumes in azure flasks powdered with golden and
silver flowers and leaves, incense twigs, panniers of henna to dye the
finger-nails of the faithful, innumerable comestibles, vegetables, corn,
red butcher’s meat thickly covered with moving insects, pale yellow
cakes crisp and shining, morsels of liver spitted on skewers--which,
cooked with dust of keef, produce a dreamy drunkenness more overwhelming
even than that produced by haschish--musical instruments, derboukas,
guitars, long pipes, and strange fiddles with two strings, tomtoms,
skins of animals with heads and claws, live birds, tortoise backs, and
plaits of false hair.
The sellers squatted on the ground, their brown and hairy legs crossed,
calmly gazing before them, or, with frenzied voices and gestures,
driving bargains with the buyers, who moved to and fro, treading
carelessly among the merchandise. The tellers of fates glided through
the press, fingering the amulets that hung upon their hearts. Conjurors
proclaimed the merits of their miracles, bawling in the faces of the
curious. Dwarfs went to and fro, dressed in bright colours with green
and yellow turbans on their enormous heads, tapping with long staves,
and relating their deformities. Water-sellers sounded their gongs.
Before pyramids of oranges and dates, neatly arranged in patterns,
sat boys crying in shrill voices the luscious virtues of their fruits.
Idiots, with blear eyes and protending under-lips, gibbered and whined.
Dogs barked. Bakers hurried along with trays of loaves upon their heads.
From the low and smoky arcades to right and left came the reiterated
grunt of negroes pounding coffee. A fanatic was roaring out his prayers.
Arabs in scarlet and blue cloaks passed by to the Bain Maure, under
whose white and blue archway lounged the Kabyle masseurs with folded,
muscular arms. A marabout, black as a coal, rode on a white horse
towards the great mosque, followed by his servant on foot.
Native soldiers went by to the Kasba on the height, or strolled down
towards the Cafes Maures smoking cigarettes. Circles of grave men bent
over card games, dominoes and draughts--called by the Arabs the Ladies’
Game. Khodjas made their way with dignity towards the Bureau Arabe.
Veiled women, fat and lethargic, jingling with ornaments, waddled
through the arches of the arcades, carrying in their painted and
perspiring hands blocks of sweetmeats which drew the flies. Children
played in the dust by little heaps of refuse, which they stirred up into
clouds with their dancing, naked feet. In front, as if from the first
palms of the oasis, rose the roar of beaten drums from the negroes’
quarter, and from the hill-top at the feet of the minarets came the
fierce and piteous noise that is the _leit-motif_ of the desert, the
multitudinous complaining of camels dominating all other sounds.
As Domini and Androvsky rode into this whirlpool of humanity, above
which the sky was red like a great wound, it flowed and eddied round
them, making them its centre. The arrival of a stranger-woman was a
rare, if not an unparalleled, event in Amara, and Batouch had been very
busy in spreading the fame of his mistress.
“Madame should dismount,” said Batouch. “Ali will take the horses, and
I will escort Madame and Monsieur up the hill to the place of the
fountain. Shabah will be there to greet Madame.”
“What an uproar!” Domini exclaimed, half laughing, half confused. “Who
on earth is Shabah?”
“Shabah is the Caid of Amara,” replied Batouch with dignity. “The
greatest man of the city. He awaits Madame by the fountain.” Domini cast
a glance at Androvsky.
“Well?” she said.
He shrugged his shoulders like a man who thinks strife useless and the
moment come for giving in to Fate.
“The monster has opened his jaws for us,” he said, forcing a laugh.
“We had better walk in, I suppose. But--O Domini!--the silence of the
wastes!”
“We shall know it again. This is only for the moment. We shall have all
its joy again.”
“Who knows?” he said, as he had said when they were riding up the sand
slope. “Who knows?”
Then they got off their horses and were taken by the crowd.