As Mrs. Armine looked at these people Nigel came up.

“They are going to Mecca,” he said.  “You see those bundles?  The poor things will be away for months, and that is all they are taking.”

The blind man shouted his hymn.  Fixing his small and vicious eyes upon Mrs. Armine, the man with the beard joined in.  A horn sounded.  Nigel got into the carriage, and the train moved slowly out of the station.  Mrs. Armine stared at the man with the beard, who kept his eyes upon her, always roaring his hymn, until he was out of sight.  His expression was actively wicked.  Yet he was starting at great expense with infinite hardships before him, to visit and pray at the Holy Places.  She remembered how Baroudi had stared at her while he sang.

“What strange people they are!” said Nigel.

“Yes, they are very strange.”

“One can never really know them.  There is an eternal barrier between us, the great stone wall of their faith.  To-day all the world seems going on pilgrimage.  We too, Ruby!”

Even at Sennoures, when they got down, the station was crowded, and the air was alive with hymns.  Ibrahim met them, and Hamza was outside the fence with the donkey for Mrs. Armine.  He was joining in the singing, and his long eyes held a flame.  But when he saw Mrs. Armine, his voice ceased, and he looked at her in silence.  As she greeted him, she felt an odd mingled sensation of fear and of relief.  He was a link between her and Baroudi, yet he looked a fatal figure, and she could never rid herself of the idea that some harm, or threatening of great danger, would come to her through him.

As they left the station and rode towards the palm-trees, the noise of the hymns grew less, but even when they came in sight of the tents the voices of the pilgrims were still faintly audible, stealing among the wrinkled trunks, through the rich, rankly growing herbage, over the running waters, to make a faint music of religion about their nomad’s home.

But after sunset the voices died away.  The train had carried the pilgrims towards Cairo, and, trooping among the palm-trees, or along the alleys of Sennoures, the crowd dispersed to their homes.

And a silence fell over this opulent land, which already Mrs. Armine hated.

She hated it as a woman hates the place which in her life is substituted for the place where is the man who has grasped her and holds her fast, whatever the dividing distance between them.

That night, as she sat in the tent, she saw before her the orange garden that bordered the Nile, the wild geraniums making a hedge about the pavilion of bamboo, she heard the loud voice of the fellah by the shaduf.  Was it raised in protest or warning?  Did she care?  Could she care?  Could any voice stop her from following the voice that called her on?  And what was it in Baroudi that made his summons to her so intense, so arbitrary?  What was it in him that governed her so completely?  Now that he was far away she could ask herself a question that she could not ask when she was near him.