She wondered where they were, in what part of the oasis, whether they had yet gained the beginning of the great route which had always fascinated her, and which was now the road to the goal of all her earthly desires.  But there was nothing to tell her.  She travelled in a world of dimness and the roar of wind, and in this obscurity and uproar, combined with perpetual though slight motion, she lost all count of time.  She had no idea how long it was since she had come out of the church door with Androvsky.  At first she thought it was only a few minutes, and that the camels must be just coming to the statue of the Cardinal.  Then she thought that it might be an hour, even more; that Count Anteoni’s garden was long since left behind, and that they were passing, perhaps, along the narrow streets of the village of old Beni-Mora, and nearing the edge of the oasis.  But even in this confusion of mind she felt that something would tell her when the last palms had vanished in the sand mist and the caravan came out into the desert.  The sound of the wind would surely be different when they met it on the immense flats, where there was nothing to break its fury.  Or even if it were not different, she felt that she would know, that the desert would surely speak to her in the moment when, at last, it took her to itself.  It could not be that they would be taken by the desert and she not know it.  But she wanted Androvsky to know it too.  For she felt that the moment when the desert took them, man and wife, would be a great moment in their lives, greater even than that in which they met as they came into the blue country.  And she set herself to listen, with a passionate expectation, with an attention so close and determined that it thrilled her body, and even affected her muscles.

What she was listening for was a rising of the wind, a crescendo of its voice.  She was anticipating a triumphant cry from the Sahara, unlimited power made audible in a sound like the blowing of the clarion of the sands.

Androvsky’s hand was still on hers, but now it did not move as if obeying the pulsations of his heart.  It held hers closely, warmly, and sent his strength to her, and presently, for an instant, taking her mind from the desert, she lost herself in the mystery and the wonder of human companionship.  She realised that the touch of Androvsky’s hand on hers altered for her herself, and the whole universe as it was presented to her, as she observed and felt it.  Nothing remained as it was when he did not touch her.  There was something stupefying in the thought, something almost terrible.  The wonder that is alive in the tiny things of love, and that makes tremendously important their presence in, or absence from, a woman’s life, took hold on her completely for the first time, and set her forever in a changed world, a world in which a great knowledge ruled instead of a great ignorance.  With the consciousness of exactly what Androvsky’s touch meant to her