smells from the city already reached their nostrils, the chattering desert merchants discussing coming gains, the wealthy and richly-dressed Arabs, mounted on fine horses, and staring with eyes that glittered up the broad track in search of welcoming friends, were sympathetic to her mood.  Amara was sucking them all in together from the solitary places as quiet waters are sucked into the turmoils of a mill-race.  Although still out in the sands they were already in the midst of a noise of life flowing to meet the roar of life that rose up at the feet of the minarets, which now looked tall and majestic in the growing beauty of the sunset.

They passed the caravans one by one, and came on to the crest of the long sand slope just as the sky above the city was flushing with a bright geranium red.  The track from here was level to the city wall, and was no longer soft with sand.  A broad, hard road rang beneath their horses’ hoofs, startling them with a music that was like a voice of civilised life.  Before them, under the red sky, they saw a dark blue of distant houses, towers, and great round cupolas glittering like gold.  Forests of palm trees lay behind, the giant date palms for which Amara was famous.  To the left stretched the sands dotted with gleaming Arab villages, to the right again the sands covered with hundreds of tents among which quantities of figures moved lively like ants, black on the yellow, arched by the sky that was alive with lurid colour, red fading into gold, gold into primrose, primrose into green, green into the blue that still told of the fading day.  And to this multi-coloured sky, from the barbaric city and the immense sands in which it was set, rose a great chorus of life; voices of men and beasts, cries of naked children playing Cora on the sand-hills, of mothers to straying infants, shrill laughter of unveiled girls wantonly gay, the calls of men, the barking of multitudes of dogs,—­the guard dogs of the nomads that are never silent night or day,—­the roaring of hundreds of camels now being unloaded for the night, the gibbering of the mad beggars who roam perpetually on the outskirts of the encampments like wolves seeking what they may devour, the braying of donkeys, the whinnying of horses.  And beneath these voices of living things, foundation of their uprising vitality, pulsed barbarous music, the throbbing tomtoms that are for ever heard in the lands of the sun, fetish music that suggests fatalism, and the grand monotony of the enormous spaces, and the crude passion that repeats itself, and the untiring, sultry loves and the untired, sultry languors of the children of the sun.

The silence of the sands, which Domini and Androvsky had known and loved, was merged in the tumult of the sands.  The one had been mystical, laying the soul to rest.  The other was provocative, calling the soul to wake.  At this moment the sands themselves seemed to stir with life and to cry aloud with voices.

“The very sky is barbarous to-night!” Domini exclaimed.  “Did you ever see such colour, Boris?”