“I hardly know, but everything looked sad and strange; I began to think about the uncertainties of life.”

Domini and De Trevignac were sipping their champagne.  Ouardi came behind Androvsky to fill his glass.

“Non! non!” he said, putting his hand over it and shaking his head.

De Trevignac started.

Ouardi looked at Domini and made a distressed grimace, pointing with a brown finger at the glass.

“Oh, Boris! you must drink champagne to-night!” she exclaimed.

“I would rather not,” he answered.  “I am not accustomed to it.”

“But to drink our guest’s health after his escape from death!”

Androvsky took his hand from the glass and Ouardi filled it with wine.

Then Domini raised her glass and drank to De Trevignac.  Androvsky followed her example, but without geniality, and when he put his lips to the wine he scarcely tasted it.  Then he put the glass down and told Ouardi to give him red wine.  And during the rest of the evening he drank no more champagne.  He also ate very little, much less than usual, for in the desert they both had the appetites of hunters.

After thanking them cordially for drinking his health, De Trevignac said: 

“I was nearly experiencing the certainty of death.  But was it Mogar that turned you to such thoughts, Madame?”

“I think so.  There is something sad, even portentous about it.”

She looked towards the tent door, imagining the immense desolation that was hidden in the darkness outside, the white plains, the mirage sea, the sand dunes like monsters, the bleached bones of the dead camels with the eagles hovering above them.

“Don’t you think so, Boris?  Don’t you think it looks like a place in which—­like a tragic place, a place in which tragedies ought to occur?”

“It is not places that make tragedies,” he said, “or at least they make tragedies far more seldom than the people in them.”

He stopped, seemed to make an effort to throw off his taciturnity, and suddenly to be able to throw it off, at least partially.  For he continued speaking with greater naturalness and ease, even with a certain dominating force.

“If people would use their wills they need not be influenced by place, they need not be governed by a thousand things, by memories, by fears, by fancies—­yes, even by fancies that are the merest shadows, but out of which they make phantoms.  Half the terrors and miseries of life lie only in the minds of men.  They even cause the very tragedies they would avoid by expecting them.”

He said the last words with a sort of strong contempt—­then, more quietly, he added: 

“You, Domini, why should you feel the uncertainty of life, especially at Mogar?  You need not.  You can choose not to.  Life is the same in its chances here as everywhere?”

“But you,” she answered—­“did you not feel a tragic influence when we arrived here?  Do you remember how you looked at the tower?”