There was a faint sound as of irritation in his voice.

“Perhaps we shall know in a minute,” Domini answered.  They cantered on.  Their horses’ hoofs rang with a hard sound on the stony ground.

“It’s inhospitable here,” Androvsky said.  She looked at him in surprise.

“I never knew you to take a dislike to any halting-place before,” she said.  “What’s the matter, Boris?”

He smiled at her, but almost immediately his face was clouded by the shadow of a gloom that seemed to respond to the gloom of the sky.  And he fixed his eyes again upon the tower.

“I like a far horizon,” he answered.  “And there’s no sun to-day.”

“I suppose even in the desert we cannot have it always,” she said.  And in her voice, too, there was a touch of melancholy, as if she had caught his mood.  A minute later she added: 

“I feel exactly as if I were on a hill top and were coming to a view of the sea.”

Almost as she spoke they cantered in among the tents of the attendants, and reined in their horses at the edge of a slope that was almost a precipice.  Then they sat still in their saddles, gazing.

They had been living for weeks in the midst of vastness, and had become accustomed to see stretched out around them immense tracts of land melting away into far blue distances, but this view from Mogar made them catch their breath and stiffed their pulses.

It was gigantic.  There was even something unnatural in its appearance of immensity, as if it were, perhaps, deceptive, and existed in their vision of it only.  So, surely, might look a plain to one who had taken haschish, which enlarges, makes monstrous and threateningly terrific.  Domini had a feeling that no human eyes could really see such infinite tracts of land and water as those she seemed to be seeing at this moment.  For there was water here, in the midst of the desert.  Infinite expanses of sea met infinite plains of snow.  Or so it seemed to both of them.  And the sea was grey and calm as a winter sea, breathing its plaint along a winter land.  From it, here and there, rose islets whose low cliffs were a deep red like the red of sandstone, a sad colour that suggests tragedy, islets that looked desolate, and as if no life had ever been upon them, or could be.  Back from the snowy plains stretched sand dunes of the palest primrose colour, sand dunes innumerable, myriads and myriads of them, rising and falling, rising and falling, till they were lost in the grey distance of this silent world.  In the foreground, at their horses’ feet, wound from the hill summit a broad track faintly marked in the deep sand, and flanked by huge dunes shaped, by the action of the winds, into grotesque semblances of monsters, leviathans, beasts with prodigious humps, sphinxes, whales.  This track was presently lost in the blanched plains.  Far away, immeasurably far, sea and snow blended and faded into the cloudy grey.  Above the near dunes two desert eagles were slowly wheeling in a weary flight, occasionally sinking towards the sand, then rising again towards the clouds.  And the track was strewn with the bleached bones of camels that had perished, or that had been slaughtered, on some long desert march.