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 the same sense of primal solitude as the forest, but it is less silent; the sea tears among the rocks as if it would destroy the land, but when its rage is over the sea laughs, and leaps, and caresses, and the day after fawns upon the land, drawing itself up like a woman to her lover, as voluptuously.  Nowhere on earth only in the desert, is there silence; even in the tomb there are worms, but in some parts of the desert there are not even worms, the body dries into dust without decaying.  Owen imagined the resignation of the wanderer who finds no water at the spring, and lies down to die amid the mighty indifference of sterile Nature; and breaking the silence, somewhat