“Batouch,” she said, “you are the smartest”—­she used the word chic—­“Arab here.  Do you know what is the fashion in London when a lady rides out with the attendant who guards her—­the really smart thing to do?”

She was playing on his vanity.  He responded with a ready smile.

“No, Madame.”

“The attendant rides at a short distance behind her, so that no one can come up near her without his knowledge.”

Batouch fell back, and Domini cantered on, congratulating herself on the success of her expedient.

She passed through the village, full of strolling white figures, lights and the sound of music, and was soon at the end of the long, straight road that was significant to her as no other road had ever been.  Each time she saw it, stretching on till it was lost in the serried masses of the palms, her imagination was stirred by a longing to wander through barbaric lands, by a nomad feeling that was almost irresistible.  This road was a track of fate to her.  When she was on it she had a strange sensation as if she changed, developed, drew near to some ideal.  It influenced her as one person may influence another.  Now for the first time she was on it in the night, riding on the crowded shadows of its palms.  She drew rein and went more slowly.  She had a desire to be noiseless.

In the obscurity the thickets of the palms looked more exotic than in the light of day.  There was no motion in them.  Each tree stood like a delicately carven thing, silhouetted against the remote purple of the void.  In the profound firmament the stars burned with a tremulous ardour they never show in northern skies.  The mystery of this African night rose not from vaporous veils and the long movement of winds, but was breathed out by clearness, brightness, stillness.  It was the deepest of all mystery—­the mystery of vastness and of peace.

No one was on the road.  The sound of the horse’s feet were sharply distinct in the night.  On all sides, but far off, the guard dogs were barking by the hidden homes of men.  The air was warm as in a hothouse, but light and faintly impregnated with perfume shed surely by the mystical garments of night as she glided on with Domini towards the desert.  From the blackness of the palms there came sometimes thin notes of the birds of night, the whizzing noise of insects, the glassy pipe of a frog in the reeds by a pool behind a hot brown wall.

She rode through one of the villages of old Beni-Mora, silent, unlighted, with empty streets and closed cafes maures, touched her horse with the whip, and cantered on at a quicker pace.  As she drew near to the desert her desire to be in it increased.  There was some coarse grass here.  The palm trees grew less thickly.  She heard more clearly the barking of the Kabyle dogs, and knew that tents were not far off.  Now, between the trunks of the trees, she saw the twinkling of distant fires, and the sound of running water fell on her ears, mingling with the persistent noise of the insects, and the faint cries of the birds and frogs.  In front, where the road came out from the shadows of the last trees, lay a vast dimness, not wholly unlike another starless sky, stretched beneath the starry sky in which the moon had not yet risen.  She set her horse at a gallop and came into the desert, rushing through the dark.