At first she could see nothing but a fierce yellow glare.  She turned the screw and gradually the desert came to her, startlingly distinct.  The boulders of the river bed were enormous.  She could see the veins of colour in them, a lizard running over one of them and disappearing into a dark crevice, then the white tower and the Arabs beneath it.  One was an old man yawning; the other a boy.  He rubbed the tip of his brown nose, and she saw the henna stains upon his nails.  She lifted the glasses slowly and with precaution.  The tower ran away.  She came to the low cliff, to the brown huts and the palms, passed them one by one, and reached the last, which was separated from its companions.  Under it stood a tall Arab in a garment like a white night-shirt.

“He looks as if he had only one eye!” she exclaimed.

“The palm-tree man—­yes.”

She travelled cautiously away from him, keeping the glasses level.

“Ah!” she said on an indrawn breath.

As she spoke the thin, nasal cry of a distant voice broke upon her ears, prolonging a strange call.

“The Mueddin,” said Count Anteoni.

And he repeated in a low tone the words of the angel to the prophet:  “Oh thou that art covered arise . . . and magnify thy Lord; and purify thy clothes, and depart from uncleanness.”

The call died away and was renewed three times.  The old man and the boy beneath the tower turned their faces towards Mecca, fell upon their knees and bowed their heads to the hot stones.  The tall Arab under the palm sank down swiftly.  Domini kept the glasses at her eyes.  Through them, as in a sort of exaggerated vision, very far off, yet intensely distinct, she saw the man with whom she had travelled in the train.  He went to and fro, to and fro on the burning ground till the fourth call of the Mueddin died away.  Then, as he approached the isolated palm tree and saw the Arab beneath it fall to the earth and bow his long body in prayer, he paused and stood still as if in contemplation.  The glasses were so powerful that it was possible to see the expressions on faces even at that distance.  The expression on the traveller’s face was, or seemed to be, at first one of profound attention.  But this changed swiftly as he watched the bowing figure, and was succeeded by a look of uneasiness, then of fierce disgust, then—­surely—­of fear or horror.  He turned sharply away like a driven man, and hurried off along the cliff edge in a striding walk, quickening his steps each moment till his departure became a flight.  He disappeared behind a projection of earth where the path sank to the river bed.

Domini laid the glasses down on the wall and looked at Count Anteoni.

“You say an atheist in the desert is unimaginable?

“Isn’t it true?”

“Has an atheist a hatred, a horror of prayer?”

“Chi lo sa?  The devil shrank away from the lifted Cross.”

“Because he knew how much that was true it symbolised.”