that never ceases, of heat that seldom dies, in a land where there is no
autumn and seldom a flitting cold.

Down on the road near the village there were people; old men playing
the "lady's game" with stones set in squares of sand, women peeping from
flat roofs and doorways, children driving goats. A man, like a fair and
beautiful Christ, with long hair and a curling beard, beat on the ground
with a staff and howled some tuneless notes. He was dressed in red and
green. No one heeded him. A distant sound of the beating of drums rose
in the air, mingled with piercing cries uttered by a nasal voice. And
as if below it, like the orchestral accompaniment of a dramatic
solo, hummed many blending noises; faint calls of labourers in the
palm-gardens and of women at the wells; chatter of children in dusky
courts sheltered with reeds and pale-stemmed grasses; dim pipings of
homeward-coming shepherds drowned, with their pattering charges, in the
golden vapours of the west; soft twitterings of birds beyond brown walls
in green seclusions; dull barking of guard dogs; mutter of camel drivers
to their velvet-footed beasts.

The caravan which Domini had seen descending into the gorge reappeared,
moving deliberately along the desert road towards the south. A
watch-tower peeped above the palms. Doves were circling round it. Many
of them were white. They flew like ivory things above this tower of
glowing bronze, which slept at the foot of the pink rocks. On the left
rose a mass of blood-red earth and stone. Slanting rays of the sun
struck it, and it glowed mysteriously like a mighty jewel.

As Domini leaned out of the window, and the salt crystals sparkled to
her eyes, and the palms swayed languidly above the waters, and the rose
and mauve of the hills, the red and orange of the earth, streamed by