She did not answer.  The far-off villages gleamed mysteriously on their little mountains, like unreal things that might fade away as castles fade in the fire.  The sky above the minarets was changing in colour slowly.  Its blue was being invaded by a green that was a sister colour.  A curious light, that seemed to rise from below rather than to descend from above, was transmuting the whiteness of the sands.  A lemon yellow crept through them, but they still looked cold and strange, and immeasurably vast.  Domini fancied that the silence of the desert deepened so that, in it, they might hear the voices of Amara more distinctly.

“You know,” she said, “when one looks out over the desert from a height, as we did from the tower of Beni-Mora, it seems to call one.  There’s a voice in the blue distance that seems to say, ’Come to me!  I am here—­hidden in my retreat, beyond the blue, and beyond the mirage, and beyond the farthest verge!’”

“Yes, I know.”

“I have always felt, when we travelled in the desert, that the calling thing, the soul of the desert, retreated as I advanced, and still summoned me onward but always from an infinite distance.”

“And I too, Domini.”

“Now I don’t feel that.  I feel as if now we were coming near to the voice, as if we should reach it at Amara, as if there it would tell us its secret.”

“Imagination!” he said.

But he spoke seriously, almost mystically.  His voice was at odds with the word it said.  She noticed that and was sure that he was secretly sharing her sensation.  She even suspected that he had perhaps felt it first.

“Let us ride on,” he said.  “Do you see the change in the light?  Do you see the green in the sky?  It is cooler, too.  This is the wind of evening.”

Their hands fell apart and they rode slowly on, up the long slope of the sands.

Presently they saw that they had come out of the trackless waste and that though still a long way from the city they were riding on a desert road which had been trodden by multitudes of feet.  There were many footprints here.  On either side were low banks of sand, beaten into a rough symmetry by implements of men, and shallow trenches through which no water ran.  In front of them they saw the numerous caravans, now more distinct, converging from left and right slowly to this great isle of the desert which stretched in a straight line to the minarets.

“We are on a highway,” Domini said.

Androvsky sighed.

“I feel already as if we were in the midst of a crowd,” he answered.

“Our love for peace oughtn’t to make us hate our fellowmen!” she said.  “Come, Boris, let us chase away our selfish mood!”

She spoke in a more cheerful voice and drew her rein a little tighter.  Her horse quickened its pace.

“And think how our stay at Amara will make us love the solitudes when we return to them again.  Contrast is the salt of life.”