“Over the minarets it is like a great wound,” he answered.

“No wonder men are careless of human life in such a land as this.  All the wildness of the world seems to be concentrated here.  Amara is like the desert city of some tremendous dream.  It looks wicked and unearthly, but how superb!”

“Look at those cupolas!” he said.  “Are there really Oriental palaces here?  Has Batouch told us the truth for once?”

“Or less than the truth?  I could believe anything of Amara at this moment.  What hundreds of camels!  They remind me of Arba, our first halting-place.”  She looked at him and he at her.

“How long ago that seems!” she said.

“A thousand years ago.”

They both had a memory of a great silence, in the midst of this growing tumult in which the sky seemed now to take its part, calling with the voices of its fierce colours, with the voices of the fires that burdened it in the west.

“Silence joined us, Domini,” Androvsky said.

“Yes.  Perhaps silence is the most beautiful voice in the world.”

Far off, along the great white road, they saw two horsemen galloping to meet them from the city, one dressed in brilliant saffron yellow, the other in the palest blue, both crowned with large and snowy turbans.

“Who can they be?” said Domini, as they drew near.  “They look like two princes of the Sahara.”

Then she broke into a merry laugh.

“Batouch! and Ali!” she exclaimed.

The servants galloped up then, without slackening speed deftly wheeled their horses in a narrow circle, and were beside them, going with them, one on the right hand, the other on the left.

“Bravo!” Domini cried, delighted at this feat of horsemanship.  “But what have you been doing?  You are transformed!”

“Madame, we have been to the Bain Maure,” replied Batouch, calmly, swelling out his broad chest under his yellow jacket laced with gold.  “We have had our heads shaved till they are smooth and beautiful as polished ivory.  We have been to the perfumer”—­he leaned confidentially towards her, exhaling a pungent odour of amber—­“to the tailor, to the baboosh bazaar!”—­he kicked out a foot cased in a slipper that was bright almost as a gold piece—­“to him who sells the cherchia.”  He shook his head till the spangled muslin that flowed about it trembled.  “Is it not right that your servants should do you honour in the city?”

“Perfectly right,” she answered with a careful seriousness.  “I am proud of you both.”

“And Monsieur?” asked Ali, speaking in his turn.

Androvsky withdrew his eyes from the city, which was now near at hand.

“Splendid!” he said, but as if attending to the Arabs with difficulty.  “You are splendid.”