“I love this land,” she began, “because I found you in it, because I feel——­”

She stopped.

“Yes, Domini?” he said.

“No, not now.  I can’t tell you.  There’s too much light.”

“Domini,” he repeated.

Then they were silent once more, thinking of how the darkness would come to them at Arba.

In the late afternoon they drew near to the Bordj, moving along a difficult route full of deep ruts and holes, and bordered on either side by bushes so tall that they looked almost like trees.  Here, tended by Arabs who stared gravely at the strangers in the palanquin, were grazing immense herds of camels.  Above the bushes to the horizon on either side of the way appeared the serpentine necks flexibly moving to and fro, now bending deliberately towards the dusty twigs, now stretched straight forward as if in patient search for some solace of the camel’s fate that lay in the remoteness of the desert.  Baby camels, many of them only a few days old, yet already vowed to the eternal pilgrimages of the wastes, with mild faces and long, disobedient-looking legs, ran from the caravan, nervously seeking their morose mothers, who cast upon them glances that seemed expressive of a disdainful pity.  In front, beyond a watercourse, now dried up, rose the low hill on which stood the Bordj, a huge, square building, with two square towers pierced with loopholes.  From a distance it resembled a fort threatening the desert in magnificent isolation.  Its towers were black against the clear lemon of the failing sunlight.  Pigeons, that looked also black, flew perpetually about them, and the telegraph posts, that bordered the way at regular intervals on the left, made a diminishing series of black vertical lines sharply cutting the yellow till they were lost to sight in the south.  To Domini these posts were like pointing fingers beckoning her onward to the farthest distances of the sun.  Drugged by the long journey over the flats, and the unceasing caress of the air, that was like an importunate lover ever unsatisfied, she watched from the height on which she was perched this evening scene of roaming, feeding animals, staring nomads, monotonous herbage and vague, surely-retreating mountains, with quiet, dreamy eyes.  Everything which she saw seemed to her beautiful, a little remote and a little fantastic.  The slow movement of the camels, the swifter movements of the circling pigeons about the square towers on the hill, the motionless, or gently-gliding, Arabs with their clubs held slantwise, the telegraph poles, one smaller than the other, diminishing till—­as if magically—­they disappeared in the lemon that was growing into gold, were woven together for her by the shuttle of the desert into a softly brilliant tapestry—­one of those tapestries that is like a legend struck to sleep as the Beauty in her palace.  As they began to mount the hill, and the radiance of the sky increased, this impression faded, for the life that centred round the Bordj was vivid, though sparse in comparison with the eddying life of towns, and had that air of peculiar concentration which may be noted in pictures representing a halt in the desert.