She rode with him on three occasions, twice in the oasis through the brown villages, once out into the desert on the caravan road that Batouch had told her led at last to Tombouctou.  They did not travel far along it, but Domini knew at once that this route held more fascination for her than the route to Sidi-Zerzour.  There was far more sand in this region of the desert.  The little humps crowned with the scrub the camels feed on were fewer, so that the flatness of the ground was more definite.  Here and there large dunes of golden-coloured sand rose, some straight as city walls, some curved like seats in an amphitheatre, others indented, crenellated like battlements, undulating in beastlike shapes.  The distant panorama of desert was unbroken by any visible oasis and powerfully suggested Eternity to Domini.

“When I go out into the desert for my long journey I shall go by this road,” she said to Androvsky.

“You are going on a journey?” he said, looking at her as if startled.

“Some day.”

“All alone?”

“I suppose I must take a caravan, two or three Arabs, some horses, a tent or two.  It’s easy to manage.  Batouch will arrange it for me.”

Androvsky still looked startled, and half angry, she thought.

They had pulled up their horses among the sand dunes.  It was near sunset, and the breath of evening was in the sir, making its coolness even more ethereal, more thinly pure than in the daytime.  The atmosphere was so clear that when they glanced back they could see the flag fluttering upon the white of the great hotel of Beni-Mora, many kilometres away among the palms; so still that they could hear the bark of a Kabyle off near a nomad’s tent pitched in the green land by the water-springs of old Beni-Mora.  When they looked in front of them they seemed to see thousands of leagues of flatness, stretching on and on till the pale yellowish brown of it grew darker, merged into a strange blueness, like the blue of a hot mist above a southern lake, then into violet, then into—­the thing they could not see, the summoning thing whose voice Domini’s imagination heard, like a remote and thrilling echo, whenever she was in the desert.

“I did not know you were going on a journey, Madame,” Androvsky said.

“Don’t you remember?” she rejoined laughingly, “that I told you on the tower I thought peace must dwell out there.  Well, some day I shall set out to find it.”

“That seems a long time ago, Madame,” he muttered.

Sometimes, when speaking to her, he dropped his voice till she could scarcely hear him, and sounded like a man communing with himself.

A red light from the sinking sun fell upon the dunes.  As they rode back over them their horses seemed to be wading through a silent sea of blood.  The sky in the west looked like an enormous conflagration, in which tortured things were struggling and lifting twisted arms.