With obvious reluctance he obeyed her.  She saw him pull up his horse at a distance where he had her just in sight.  Then she turned so that she could not see him and looked towards the desert and the east.  The revolver seemed unnaturally heavy in her hand.  She glanced at it for a moment and listened with intensity for the beat of horse’s hoofs, and her wakeful imagination created a sound that was non-existent in her ears.  With it she heard a gallop that was spectral as the gallop of the black horses which carried Mephistopheles and Faust to the abyss.  It died away almost at once, and she knew it for an imagination.  To-night she was peopling the desert with phantoms.  Even the fires of the nomads were as the fires that flicker in an abode of witches, the shadows that passed before them were as goblins that had come up out of the sand to hold revel in the moonlight.  Were they, too, waiting for a signal from the sky?

At the thought of the moon she drew up the reins that had been lying loosely on her horse’s neck and rode some paces forward and away from the fires, still holding the revolver in her hand.  Of what use would it be against the spectres of the Sahara?  The Jew would face it without fear.  Why not the horseman of Batouch?  She dropped it into the pocket of the saddle.

Far away in the east the darkness of the sky was slowly fading into a luminous mystery that rose from the underworld, a mystery that at first was faint and tremulous, pale with a pallor of silver and primrose, but that deepened slowly into a live and ardent gold against which a group of three palm trees detached themselves from the desert like messengers sent forth by it to give a salutation to the moon.  They were jet black against the gold, distinct though very distant.  The night, and the vast plain from which they rose, lent them a significance that was unearthly.  Their long, thin stems and drooping, feathery leaves were living and pathetic as the night thoughts of a woman who has suffered, but who turns, with a gesture of longing that will not be denied, to the luminance that dwells at the heart of the world.  And those black palms against the gold, that stillness of darkness and light in immensity, banished Domini’s faint sense of horror.  The spectres faded away.  She fixed her eyes on the palms.

Now all the notes of the living things that do not sleep by night, but make music by reedy pools, in underwood, among the blades of grass and along the banks of streams, were audible to her again, filling her mind with the mystery of existence.  The glassy note of the frogs was like a falling of something small and pointed upon a sheet of crystal.  The whirs of the insects suggested a ceaselessly active mentality.  The faint cries of the birds dropped down like jewels slipping from the trees.  And suddenly she felt that she was as nothing in the vastness and the complication of the night.  Even the passion that she knew lay, like a dark and silent flood, within her soul, a flood that, once released from its boundaries, had surely the power to rush irresistibly forward to submerge old landmarks and change the face of a world—­even that seemed to lose its depth for a moment, to be shallow as the first ripple of a tide upon the sand.  And she forgot that the first ripple has all the ocean behind it.