Journeying towards these terrible fastnesses were caravans on which Domini looked with a heavy and lethargic interest.  Many Kabyles, fairer than she was, moved slowly on foot towards their rock villages.

Over the withered earth they went towards the distant mountains and the clouds.  The sun was hidden.  The wind continued to rise.  Sand found its way in through the carriage windows.  The mountains, as Domini saw them more clearly, looked more gloomy, more unearthly.  There was something unnatural in their hard outlines, in the rigid mystery of their innumerable clefts.  That all these people should be journeying towards them was pathetic, and grieved the imagination.

The wind seemed so cold, now the sun was hidden, that she had drawn both the windows up and thrown a rug over her.  She put her feet up on the opposite seat, and half closed her eyes.  But she still turned them towards the glass on her left, and watched.  It seemed to her quite impossible that this shaking and slowly moving train had any destination.  The desolation of the country had become so absolute that she could not conceive of anything but still greater desolation lying beyond.  She had no feeling that she was merely traversing a tract of sterility.  Her sensation was that she had passed the boundary of the world God had created, and come into some other place, upon which He had never looked and of which He had no knowledge.

Abruptly she felt as if her father had entered into some such region when he forced his way out of his religion.  And in this region he had died.  She had stood on the verge of it by his deathbed.  Now she was in it.

There were no Arabs journeying now.  No tents huddled among the low bushes.  The last sign of vegetation was obliterated.  The earth rose and fell in a series of humps and depressions, interspersed with piles of rock.  Every shade of yellow and of brown mingled and flowed away towards the foot of the mountains.  Here and there dry water-courses showed their teeth.  Their crumbling banks were like the rind of an orange.  Little birds, the hue of the earth, with tufted crests, tripped jauntily among the stones, fluttered for a few yards and alighted, with an air of strained alertness, as if their minute bodies were full of trembling wires.  They were the only living things Domini could see.

She thought again of her father.  In some such region as this his soul must surely be wandering, far away from God.

She let down the glass.

The wind was really cold and blowing gustily.  She drank it in as if she were tasting a new wine, and she was conscious at once that she had never before breathed such air.  There was a wonderful, a startling flavour in it, the flavour of gigantic spaces and of rolling leagues of emptiness.  Neither among mountains nor upon the sea had she ever found an atmosphere so fiercely pure, clean and lively with unutterable freedom.  She leaned out to it, shutting her eyes.  And now that she saw nothing her palate savoured it more intensely.  The thought of her father fled from her.  All detailed thoughts, all the minutia of the mind were swept away.  She was bracing herself to an encounter with something gigantic, something unshackled, the being from whose lips this wonderful breath flowed.