“Why, yes,” he added in a low, muttering voice full of a sort of terrified surprise, “it is so.  You are right.  Why, yes, it is calm here.”

He spoke like a man who had been suddenly convinced, beyond power of further unbelief, of something he had never suspected, never dreamed of.  And the conviction seemed to be bitter to him, even alarming.

“But away out there must be the real home of peace, I think,” Domini said.

“Where?” said the man, quickly.

She pointed towards the south.

“In the depths of the desert,” she said.  “Far away from civilisation, far away from modern men and modern women, and all the noisy trifles we are accustomed to.”

He looked towards the south eagerly.  In everything he did there was a flamelike intensity, as if he could not perform an ordinary action, or turn his eyes upon any object, without calling up in his mind, or heart, a violence of thought or of feeling.

“You think it—­you think there would be peace out there, far away in the desert?” he said, and his face relaxed slightly, as if in obedience to some thought not wholly sad.

“It may be fanciful,” she replied.  “But I think there must.  Surely Nature has not a lying face.”

He was still gazing towards the south, from which the night was slowly emerging, a traveller through a mist of blue.  He seemed to be held fascinated by the desert which was fading away gently, like a mystery which had drawn near to the light of revelation, but which was now slipping back into an underworld of magic.  He bent forward as one who watches a departure in which he longs to share, and Domini felt sure that he had forgotten her.  She felt, too, that this man was gripped by the desert influence more fiercely even than she was, and that he must have a stronger imagination, a greater force of projection even than she had.  Where she bore a taper he lifted a blazing torch.

A roar of drums rose up immediately beneath them.  From the negro village emerged a ragged procession of thick-lipped men, and singing, capering women tricked out in scarlet and yellow shawls, headed by a male dancer clad in the skins of jackals, and decorated with mirrors, camels’ skulls and chains of animals’ teeth.  He shouted and leaped, rolled his bulging eyes, and protruded a fluttering tongue.  The dust curled up round his stamping, naked feet.

“Yah-ah-la!  Yah-ah-la!”

The howling chorus came up to the tower, with a clash of enormous castanets, and of poles beaten rhythmically together.

“Yi-yi-yi-yi!” went the shrill voices of the women.

The cloud of dust increased, enveloping the lower part of the procession, till the black heads and waving arms emerged as if from a maelstrom.  The thunder of the drums was like the thunder of a cataract in which the singers, disappearing towards the village, seemed to be swept away.

The man at Domini’s side raised himself up with a jerk, and all the former fierce timidity and consciousness came back to his face.  He turned round, pulled open the door behind him, and took off his hat.