The Garden of Allah

derness, the first brown villages glowing in the late radiance of the afternoon like carven things of bronze, the first oas

ange in all her world, she looked at it simply as a new sight presented, with the sun, the mighty rocks, the hard, blind villages, and the den

urious markings of a darker shade in the yellow, dark centres that looked black, and dark outer circles. The eyelashes were very long, the eyebrows thick and strongly curved. The forehead was high, and swelled out slightly above the temples. There

for a dull flush rose on the stranger's thin cheeks and mounted to his rugged forehead. He glanced out of the window and moved his hands uneasily. Domini noticed that they scarcely tallied with his face. Though scrupulously clean, they looked like the hands of a labourer, hard, broad, and brown. Even his wris

and of the Tell. But they die there frustrated. And the rains journey thither and fail, sinking into the absinthe-coloured pools of the gorge. And the snows and even the clouds stop, exhausted in their pilgrimage. The gorge is not their goal, but it is their grave, and the desert never sees their burial. So Domini's first sense of casting away the known remained, and even grew, but now strongly and quietly. It was well founded, she thought. For she looked out of the carriage window towards the barrier she was leaving, and saw that on this side, guarding the desert from the world that is not desert, it was pink in the evening light, deepening here and there to rose colour, wherea

dressed in red and green. No one heeded him. A distant sound of the beating of drums rose in the air, mingled with piercing cries uttered by a nasal voice. And as if below it, like the orchestral accompaniment of a dramatic solo, hummed many blending noises; faint calls of labourers in the palm-gardens and of women at the wells; chatte

ove the palms. Doves were circling round it. Many of them were white. They flew like ivory things above this tower of glowing bronze, which slept at the foo

Nature was so violent that it crushed her. She felt like a little fly that had sought to wing its way to the sun and, at a million miles' distance from it, was being shrivelled by its heat. When all the voices of the village fainted away she was glad, although she strained her ears to hear their fading echoes. Suddenly she knew that she was very tired, so tired that emotions acted upon her as physical exertion acts upon an exhausted man. She sat down and shut her eyes. For a long time she stayed with her eyes shut, but she knew that on the windows strange lights were glittering, that the carriage was slowly filling with the ineffable splendours of the w

ut of his window, crossing his legs. He wore large boots with square toes, clumsy and unfashionable, but comfortable and good for walking in. His clothes had obviously been made by a French tailor. The stuff of them was grey and woolly, and they were cut tighter to the figure than English clothes generally are. He had on a black silk necktie, and a soft brown travelling hat dented in the middle. By the way in which he looked out of the window, Domini judged that he, too, was seeing the desert for the fi

hick, and cut extremely short, as if his head had recently been shaved. She felt convinced that he was not French. He might be an Austrian, perhaps, or a Russian from the south of Russia. He remained motionless in that attitude of profound observatio

if they had been covered with a soft powder of bronze. A long spur of rose-coloured mountains stretched away towards the south. The sun was very near his setting. Small, red clouds floated in the western

n its spacious power, and in its golden pride, her heart leaped up as if in answer to a deliberate appeal. The fatigue in her died. She responded to this reveille like a young warrior who, so soon as he is wakened, stretches out his hand for his sword. The sunset flamed on her clear, white cheeks, giving them its hue of life. And her nature flamed to meet it. In the huge spaces of the Sahara her soul seemed to hear the footsteps of Freedom treading towards the south. And all her dull perplexities, all her bitterness of ennui, all her questionings and doubts, were s

inst him at El-Akbara. In this splendid moment the feeling seemed to her so paltry and contemptible that she had a lively impulse to make amends for the angry look she had cast at him. Possibly, had she been quite normal, she would have checked such an impulse. The voice of conventionality would have made itself heard. But Domini could act vigorously, and quite carelessl

nced up at the man's face she no longer felt it at all. For, despite the glory of the sunset on him, there seemed to be a cold shadow in his eyes. The faint lines near his mouth looked deeper than before, and now suggested most powerfully the dreariness, the harshness of long-continued suffering. The mouth itself was compressed and grim, and the man's whole expression was fierce and startling as the expression of a criminal bracing himself to endure inevitable detection. So crude and piercing indeed was this mask con

there was a black spot on the sun-humanity, God's mistake in the great plan of Creation. And the shadow cast by humanity tempered, even

ill the train ran into Beni-Mora, and the eager faces of countless Arabs stared in upon them