“One should never live in a garden, Madame.”

“I will try to take your word for it, but the task will be difficult.”

“Yes?  More difficult, perhaps, when you see what lies beside my thoughts of truth.”

As he spoke they came out from the tunnel and were seized by the fierce hands of the sun.  It was within half an hour of noon, and the radiance was blinding.  Domini put up her parasol sharply, like one startled.  She stopped.

“But how tremendous!” she exclaimed.

Count Anteoni laughed again, and drew down the brim of his grey hat over his eyes.  The hand with which he did it was almost as burnt as an Arab’s.

“You are afraid of it?”

“No, no.  But it startled me.  We don’t know the sun really in Europe.”

“No.  Not even in Southern Italy, not even in Sicily.  It is fierce there in summer, but it seems further away.  Here it insists on the most intense intimacy.  If you can bear it we might sit down for a moment?”

“Please.”

All along the edge of the garden, from the villa to the boundary of Count Anteoni’s domain, ran a straight high wall made of earth bricks hardened by the sun and topped by a coping of palm wood painted white.  This wall was some eight feet high on the side next to the desert, but the garden was raised in such a way that the inner side was merely a low parapet running along the sand path.  In this parapet were cut small seats, like window-seats, in which one could rest and look full upon the desert as from a little cliff.  Domini sat down on one of them, and the Count stood by her, resting one foot on the top of the wall and leaning his right arm on his knee.

“There is the world on which I look for my hiding-place,” he said.  “A vast world, isn’t it?”

Domini nodded without speaking.

Immediately beneath them, in the narrow shadow of the wall, was a path of earth and stones which turned off at the right at the end of the garden into the oasis.  Beyond lay the vast river bed, a chaos of hot boulders bounded by ragged low earth cliffs, interspersed here and there with small pools of gleaming water.  These cliffs were yellow.  From their edge stretched the desert, as Eternity stretches from the edge of Time.  Only to the left was the immeasurable expanse intruded upon by a long spur of mountains, which ran out boldly for some distance and then stopped abruptly, conquered and abashed by the imperious flats.  Beneath the mountains were low, tent-like, cinnamon-coloured undulations, which reminded Domini of those made by a shaken-out sheet, one smaller than the other till they melted into the level.  The summits of the most distant mountains, which leaned away as if in fear of the desert, were dark and mistily purple.  Their flanks were iron grey at this hour, flecked in the hollows with the faint mauve and pink which became carnation colour when the sun set.