As the cortege disappeared over the sands towards the city Domini burst into a little laugh, and drew Androvsky out to the tent door to see them go.

“Society in the sands!” she exclaimed gaily.  “Boris, this is a new experience.  Look at our guests making their way to their palaces!”

Slowly the potentates progressed across the white dunes towards the city.  Shabah wore a long red cloak.  His brother was in pink and gold, with white billowing trousers.  The Caid of the Nomads was in green.  They all moved with a large and conscious majesty, surrounded by their obsequious attendants.  Above them the purple sky showed a bright evening star.  Near it was visible the delicate silhouette of the young moon.  Scattered over the waste rose many koubbahs, grey in the white, with cupolas of gypse.  Hundreds of dogs were barking in the distance.  To the left, on the vast, rolling slopes of sand, glared the innumerable fires kindled before the tents of the Ouled Nails.  Before the sleeping tent rose the minarets and the gilded cupolas of the city which it dominated from its mountain of sand.  Behind it was the blanched immensity of the plain, of the lonely desert from which Domini and Androvsky had come to face this barbaric stir of life.  And the city was full of music, of tomtoms throbbing, of bugles blowing in the Kasba, of pipes shrieking from hidden dwellings, and of the faint but multitudinous voices of men, carried to them on their desolate and treeless height by the frail wind of night that seemed a white wind, twin-brother of the sands.

“Let us go a step or two towards the city, Boris,” Domini said, as their guests sank magnificently down into a fold of the dunes.

“Towards the city!” he answered.  “Why not—?” He glanced behind him to the vacant, noiseless sands.

She set her impulse against his for the first time.

“No, this is our town life, our Sahara season.  Let us give ourselves to it.  The loneliness will be its antidote some day.”

“Very well, Domini,” he answered.

They went a little way towards the city, and stood still in the sand at the edge of their height.

“Listen, Boris!  Isn’t it strange in the night all this barbaric music?  It excites me.”

“You are glad to be here.”

She heard the note of disappointment in his voice, but did not respond to it.

“And look at all those fires, hundreds of them in the sand!”

“Yes,” he said, “it is wonderful, but the solitudes are best.  This is not the heart of the desert, this is what the Arabs call it, ’The belly of the Desert.’  In the heart of the desert there is silence.”

She thought of the falling of the wind when the Sahara took them, and knew that her love of the silence was intense.  Nevertheless, to-night the other part of her was in the ascendant.  She wanted him to share it.  He did not.  Could she provoke him to share it?