Once more the Diviner stirred.  For some minutes his fingers were busy in the sand.  But now they moved more slowly and no words came from his lips.  Domini and the Count bent low to watch what he was doing.  The look of torture upon his face increased.  It was terrible, and made upon Domini an indelible impression, for she could not help connecting it with his vision of her future, and it suggested to her formless phantoms of despair.  She looked into the sand, as if she, too, would be able to see what he saw and had not told, looked till she began to feel almost hypnotised.  The Diviner’s hands trembled now as they made the patterns, and his breast heaved under his white robe.  Presently he traced in the sand a triangle and began to speak.

The Count bent down till his ear was almost at the Diviner’s lips, and Domini held her breath.  That caravan lost in the desolation of the desert, in the storm and the darkness—­where was it?  What had been its fate?  Sweat ran down over the Diviner’s face, and dropped upon his robe, upon his hands, upon the sand, making dark spots.  And the voice whispered on huskily till she was in a fever of impatience.  She saw upon the face of the Count the Diviner’s tortured look reflected.  Was it not also on her face?  A link surely bound them all together in this tiny room, close circled by the tall trees and the intense silence.  She looked at the triangle in the sand.  It was very distinct, more distinct than the other patterns had been.  What did it represent?  She searched her mind, thinking of the desert, of her life there, of man’s life in the desert.  Was it not tent-shaped?  She saw it as a tent, as her tent pitched somewhere in the waste far from the habitations of men.  Now the trembling hands were still, the voice was still, but the sweat did not cease from dropping down upon the sand.

“Tell me!” she murmured to the Count.

He obeyed, seeming now to speak with an effort.

“It is far away in the desert——­”

He paused.

“Yes?  Yes?”

“Very far away in a sandy place.  There are immense dunes, immense white dunes of sand on every side, like mountains.  Near at hand there is a gleam of many fires.  They are lit in the market-place of a desert city.  Among the dunes, with camels picketed behind it, there is a tent——­”

She pointed to the triangle traced upon the sand.

“I knew it,” she whispered.  “It is my tent.”

“He sees you there, as he saw you in the palanquin.  But now it is night and you are quite alone.  You are not asleep.  Something keeps you awake.  You are excited.  You go out of the tent upon the dunes and look towards the fires of the city.  He hears the jackals howling all around you, and sees the skeletons of dead camels white under the moon.”

She shuddered in spite of herself.

“There is something tremendous in your soul.  He says it is as if all the date palms of the desert bore their fruit together, and in all the dry places, where men and camels have died of thirst in bygone years, running springs burst forth, and as if the sand were covered with millions of golden flowers big as the flower of the aloe.”