“Yes, Madame,” he said.

“I suppose it is because I am new to Africa.  This is my first visit here.  I am not like you.  I can’t speak Arabic.”

She suddenly wondered whether the desert was new to him as to her.  She had assumed that it was.  Yet as he spoke Arabic it was almost certain that he had been much in Africa.

“I do not speak it well,” he answered.

And he looked away towards the dense thickets of the palms.  The track narrowed till the trees on either side cast patterns of moving shade across it and the silent mystery was deepened.  As far as the eye could see the feathery, tufted foliage swayed in the little wind.  The desert had vanished, but sent in after them the message of its soul, the marvellous breath which Domini had drunk into her lungs so long before she saw it.  That breath was like a presence.  It dwells in all oases.  The high earth walls concealed the gardens.  Domini longed to look over and see what they contained, whether there were any dwellings in these dim and silent recesses, any pools of water, flowers or grassy lawns.

Her horse neighed.

“Something is coming,” she said.

They turned a corner and were suddenly in a village.  A mob of half-naked children scattered from their horses’ feet.  Rows of seated men in white and earth-coloured robes stared upon them from beneath the shadow of tall, windowless earth houses.  White dogs rushed to and fro upon the flat roofs, thrusting forward venomous heads, showing their teeth and barking furiously.  Hens fluttered in agitation from one side to the other.  A grey mule, tethered to a palm-wood door and loaded with brushwood, lashed out with its hoofs at a negro, who at once began to batter it passionately with a pole, and a long line of sneering camels confronted them, treading stealthily, and turning their serpentine necks from side to side as they came onwards with a soft and weary inflexibility.  In the distance there was a vision of a glaring market-place crowded with moving forms and humming with noises.

The change from mysterious peace to this vivid and concentrated life was startling.

With difficulty they avoided the onset of the camels by pulling their horses into the midst of the dreamers against the walls, who rolled and scrambled into places of safety, then stood up and surrounded them, staring with an almost terrible interest upon them, and surveying their horses with the eyes of connoisseurs.  The children danced up and began to ask for alms, and an immense man, with a broken nose and brown teeth like tusks, laid a gigantic hand on Domini’s bridle and said, in atrocious French: 

“I am the guide, I am the guide.  Look at my certificates.  Take no one else.  The people here are robbers.  I am the only honest man.  I will show Madame everything.  I will take Madame to the inn.  Look—­my certificates!  Read them!  Read what the English lord says of me.  I alone am honest here.  I am honest Mustapha!  I am honest Mustapha!”