To the left of them the solitary tower commanded this terrific vision of desolation, seemed to watch it steadily, yet furtively, with its tiny loophole eyes.

“We have come into winter,” Domini murmured.

She looked at the white of the camels’ bones, of the plains, at the grey white of the sky, at the yellow pallor of the dunes.

“How wonderful!  How terrible!” she said.

She drew her horse to one side, a little nearer to Androvsky’s.

“Does the Russian in you greet this land?” she asked him.

He did not reply.  He seemed to be held in thrall by the sad immensity before them.

“I realise here what it must be to die in the desert, to be killed by it—­by hunger, by thirst in it,” she said presently, speaking, as if to herself, and looking out over the mirage sea, the mirage snow.  “This is the first time I have really felt the terror of the desert.”

Her horse drooped its head till its nose nearly touched the earth, and shook itself in a long shiver.  She shivered too, as if constrained to echo an animal’s distress.

“Things have died here,” Androvsky said, speaking at last in a low voice and pointing with his long-lashed whip towards the camels’ skeletons.  “Come, Domini, the horses are tired.”

He cast another glance at the tower, and they dismounted by their tent, which was pitched at the very edge of the steep slope that sank down to the beast-like shapes of the near dunes.

An hour later Domini said to Androvsky: 

“You won’t go after gazelle this evening surely?”

They had been having coffee in the tent and had just finished.  Androvsky got up from his chair and went to the tent door.  The grey of the sky was pierced by a gleaming shaft from the sun.

“Do you mind if I go?” he said, turning towards her after a glance to the desert.

“No, but aren’t you tired?”

He shook his head.

“I couldn’t ride, and now I can ride.  I couldn’t shoot, and I’m just beginning—­”

“Go,” she said quickly.  “Besides, we want gazelle for dinner, Batouch says, though I don’t suppose we should starve without it.”  She came to the tent door and stood beside him, and he put his arm around her.

“If I were alone here, Boris,” she said, leaning against his shoulder, “I believe I should feel horribly sad to-day.”

“Shall I stay?”

He pressed her against him.

“No.  I shall know you are coming back.  Oh, how extraordinary it is to think we lived so many years without knowing of each other’s existence, that we lived alone.  Were you ever happy?”

He hesitated before he replied.

“I sometimes thought I was.”

“But do you think now you ever really were?”

“I don’t know—­perhaps in a lonely sort of way.”

“You can never be happy in that way now?”

He said nothing, but, after a moment, he kissed her long and hard, and as if he wanted to draw her being into his through the door of his lips.