As they came towards the old wall which partially surrounds Amara, and which rises from a deep natural moat of sand, they saw that the ground immediately before the city which, from a distance, had looked almost fiat, was in reality broken up into a series of wavelike dunes, some small with depressions like deep crevices between them, others large with summits like plateaux.  These dunes were of a sharp lemon yellow in the evening light, a yellow that was cold in its clearness, almost setting the teeth on edge.  They went away into great rolling slopes of sand on which the camps of the nomads and the Ouled Nails were pitched, some near to, some distant from, the city, but they themselves were solitary.  No tents were pitched close to the city, under the shadow of its wall.  As Androvsky spoke, Domini exclaimed: 

“Boris—–­look!  That is the most extraordinary thing I have ever seen!”

She put her hand on his arm.  He obeyed her eyes and looked to his right, to the small lemon-yellow dunes that were close to them.  At perhaps a hundred yards from the road was a dune that ran parallel with it.  The fire of the sinking sun caught its smooth crest, and above this crest, moving languidly towards the city, were visible the heads and busts of three women, the lower halves of whose bodies were concealed by the sand of the farther side of the dune.  They were dancing-girls.  On their heads, piled high with gorgeous handkerchiefs, were golden crowns which glittered in the sun-rays, and tufts of scarlet feathers.  Their oval faces, covered with paint, were partially concealed by long strings of gold coins, which flowed from their crowns down over their large breasts and disappeared towards their waists, which were hidden by the sand.  Their dresses were of scarlet, apple-green and purple silks, partially covered by floating shawls of spangled muslin.  Beneath their crowns and handkerchiefs burgeoned forth plaits of false hair decorated with coral and silver ornaments.  Their hands, which they held high, gesticulating above the crest of the dune, were painted blood red.

These busts and heads glided slowly along in the setting sun, and presently sank down and vanished into some depression of the dunes.  For an instant one blood-red hand was visible alone, waving a signal above the sand to someone unseen.  Its fingers fluttered like the wings of a startled bird.  Then it, too, vanished, and the sharply-cold lemon yellow of the dunes stretched in vivid loneliness beneath the evening sky.

To both of them this brief vision of women in the sand brought home the solitude of the desert and the barbarity of the life it held, the ascetism of this supreme manifestation of Nature and the animal passion which fructifies in its heart.

“Do you know what that made me think of, Boris?” Domini said, as the red hand with its swiftly-moving fingers disappeared.  “You’ll smile, perhaps, and I scarcely know why.  It made me think of the Devil in a monastery.”