“You speak as if you didn’t believe what you are saying.”

She laughed.

“If I were ever inclined to tell you a lie,” she said, “I should not dare to.  Your mind penetrates mine too deeply.”

“You could not tell me a lie.”

“Do you hear the dogs barking?” she said, after a moment.  “They are among those tents that are like flies on the sands around the city.  That is the tribe of the Ouled Nails I suppose.  Batouch says they camp here.  What multitudes of tents!  Those are the suburbs of Amara.  I would rather live in them than in the suburbs of London.  Oh, how far away we are, as if we were at the end of the world!”

Either her last words, or her previous change of manner to a lighter cheerfulness, almost a briskness, seemed to rouse Androvsky to a greater confidence, even to anticipation of possible pleasure.

“Yes.  After all it is only the desert men who are here.  Amara is their Metropolis, and in it we shall only see their life.”

His horse plunged.  He had touched it sharply with his heel.

“I believe you hate the thought of civilisation,” she exclaimed.

“And you?”

“I never think of it.  I feel almost as if I had never known it, and could never know it.”

“Why should you?  You love the wilds.”

“They make my whole nature leap.  Even when I was a child it was so.  I remember once reading Maud.  In it I came upon a passage—­I can’t remember it well, but it was about the red man—­”

She thought for a moment, looking towards the city.

“I don’t know how it is quite,” she murmured. “’When the red man laughs by his cedar tree, and the red man’s babe leaps beyond the sea’—­something like that.  But I know that it made my heart beat, and that I felt as if I had wings and were spreading them to fly away to the most remote places of the earth.  And now I have spread my wings, and—­it’s glorious.  Come, Boris!”

They put their horses to a canter, and soon drew near to the caravans.  They had sent Batouch and Ali, who generally accompanied them, on with the rest of the camp.  Both had many friends in Amara, and were eager to be there.  It was obvious that they and all the attendants, servants and camel-men, thought of it as the provincial Frenchman thinks of Paris, as a place of all worldly wonders and delights.  Batouch was to meet them at the entrance to the city, and when they had seen the marvels of its market-place was to conduct them to the tents which would be pitched on the sand-hills outside.

Their horses pulled as if they, too, longed for a spell of city life after the life of the wastes, and Domini’s excitement grew.  She felt vivid animal spirits boiling up within her, the sane and healthy sense that welcomes a big manifestation of the ceaseless enterprise and keen activity of a brotherhood of men.  The loaded camels, the half-naked running drivers, the dogs sensitively sniffing, as if enticing