the brown banks and the brown walls above which the palm trees peered.  His aching limbs relaxed.  His hands hung loose between his knees.  And Domini half closed her eyes.  A curious peace descended upon her.  Lapped in the heat and silence for the moment she wanted nothing.  The faint buzz of the flies sounded in her ears and seemed more silent than even the silence to which it drew attention.  Never before, not in Count Anteoni’s garden, had she felt more utterly withdrawn from the world.  The feathery tops of the palms were like the heads of sentinels guarding her from contact with all that she had known.  And beyond them lay the desert, the empty, sunlit waste.  She shut her eyes, and murmured to herself, “I am in far away.  I am in far away.”  And the flies said it in her ears monotonously.  And the lizards whispered it as they slipped in and out of the little dark holes in the walls.  She heard Androvsky stir, and she moved her lips slowly.  And the flies and the lizards continued the refrain.  But she said now, “We are in far away.”

Honest Mustapha strode forward.  He had a Bashi-Bazouk tread to wake up a world. Dejeuner was ready.  Domini sighed.  They took their places under the fig tree on either side of the deal table covered with a rough white cloth, and Mustapha, with tremendous gestures, and gigantic postures suggesting the untamed descendant of legions of freeborn, sun-suckled men, served them with red fish, omelette, gazelle steaks, cheese, oranges and dates, with white wine and Vals water.

Androvsky scarcely spoke.  Now that he was sitting at a meal with Domini he was obviously embarrassed.  All his movements were self-conscious.  He seemed afraid to eat and refused the gazelle.  Mustapha broke out into turbulent surprise and prolonged explanations of the delicious flavour of this desert food.  But Androvsky still refused, looking desperately disconcerted.

“It really is delicious,” said Domini, who was eating it.  “But perhaps you don’t care about meat.”

She spoke quite carelessly and was surprised to see him look at her as if with sudden suspicion and immediately help himself to the gazelle.

This man was perpetually giving a touch of the whip to her curiosity to keep it alert.  Yet she felt oddly at ease with him.  He seemed somehow part of her impression of the desert, and now, as they sat under the fig tree between the high earth walls, and at their al fresco meal in unbroken silence—­for since her last remark Androvsky had kept his eyes down and had not uttered a word—­she tried to imagine the desert without him.