It was noon in the desert.
The voice of the Mueddin died away on the minaret, and the golden silence that comes out of the heart of the sun sank down once more softly over everything. Nature seemed unnaturally still in the heat.
The slight winds were not at play, and the palms of Beni-Mora stood motionless as palm trees in a dream. The day was like a dream, intense and passionate, yet touched with something unearthly, something almost spiritual. In the cloudless blue of the sky there seemed a magical depth, regions of colour infinitely prolonged. In the vision of the distances, where desert blent with sky, earth surely curving up to meet the downward curving heaven, the dimness was like a voice whispering strange petitions. The ranges of mountains slept in the burning sand, and the light slept in their clefts like the languid in cool places. For there was a glorious languor even in the light, as if the sun were faintly oppressed by the marvel of his power. The clearness of the atmosphere in the remote desert was not obscured, but was impregnated with the mystery that is the wonder child of shadows.
The far-off gold that kept it seemed to contain a secret darkness. In the oasis of Beni-Mora men, who had slowly roused themselves to pray, sank down to sleep again in the warm twilight of shrouded gardens or the warm night of windowless rooms.
In the garden of Count Anteoni Larbi's flute was silent.
"It is like noon in a mirage," Domini said softly.
Count Anteoni nodded.
"I feel as if I were looking at myself a long way off," she added. "As if I saw myself as I saw the grey sea and the islands on the way to Sidi-Zerzour. What magic there is here. And I can't get accustomed to it. Each day I wonder at it more and find it more inexplicable. It almost frightens me."
"You could be frightened?"
"Not easily by outside things--it least I hope not."
"But what then?"
"I scarcely know. Sometimes I think all the outside things, which do what are called the violent deeds in life, are tame, and timid, and ridiculously impotent in comparison with the things we can't see, which do the deeds we can't describe."
"In the mirage of this land you begin to see the exterior life as a mirage? You are learning, you are learning."
There was a creeping sound of something that was almost impish in his voice.
"Are you a secret agent?" Domini asked him.
"Of whom, Madame?"
She was silent. She seemed to be considering. He watched her with curiosity in his bright eyes.
"Of the desert," she answered at length, quite seriously.
"A secret agent has always a definite object. What is mine?"
"How can I know? How can I tell what the desert desires?"
"Already you personify it!"
The network of wrinkles showed itself in his brown face as he smiled, surely with triumph.
"I think I did that from the first," she answered gravely. "I know I did."
"And what sort of personage does the desert seem to you?"
"You ask me a great many questions to-day."
"Mirage questions, perhaps. Forgive me. Let us listen to the question --or is it the demand?--of the desert in this noontide hour, the greatest hour of all the twenty-four in such a land as this."
They were silent again, watching the noon, listening to it, feeling it, as they had been silent when the Mueddin's nasal voice rose in the call to prayer.
Count Anteoni stood in the sunshine by the low white parapet of the garden. Domini sat on a low chair in the shadow cast by a great jamelon tree. At her feet was a bush of vivid scarlet geraniums, against which her white linen dress looked curiously blanched. There was a half-drowsy, yet imaginative light in her gipsy eyes, and her motionless figure, her quiet hands, covered with white gloves, lying loosely in her lap, looked attentive and yet languid, as if some spell began to bind her but had not completed its work of stilling all the pulses of life that throbbed within her. And in truth there was a spell upon her, the spell of the golden noon. By turns she gave herself to it consciously, then consciously strove to deny herself to its subtle summons. And each time she tried to withdraw it seemed to her that the spell was a little stronger, her power a little weaker.
Then her lips curved in a smile that was neither joyous nor sad, that was perhaps rather part perplexed and part expectant.
After a minute of this silence Count Anteoni drew back from the sun and sat down in a chair beside Domini. He took out his watch.
"Twenty-five minutes," he said, "and my guests will be here."
"Guests!" she said with an accent of surprise.
"I invited the priest to make an even number."
"Oh!"
"You don't dislike him?"
"I like him. I respect him."
"But I'm afraid you aren't pleased?"
Domini looked him straight in the face.
"Why did you invite Father Roubier?" she said.
"Isn't four better than three?"
"You don't want to tell me."
"I am a little malicious. You have divined it, so why should I not acknowledge it? I asked Father Roubier because I wished to see the man of prayer with the man who fled from prayer."
"Mussulman prayer," she said quickly.
"Prayer," he said.
His voice was peculiarly harsh at that moment. It grated like an instrument on a rough surface. Domini knew that secretly he was standing up for the Arab faith, that her last words had seemed to strike against the religion of the people whom he loved with an odd, concealed passion whose fire she began to feel at moments as she grew to know him better.
It was plain from their manner to each other that their former slight acquaintance had moved towards something like a pleasant friendship.
Domini looked as if she were no longer a wonder-stricken sight-seer in this marvellous garden of the sun, but as if she had become familiar with it. Yet her wonder was not gone. It was only different. There was less sheer amazement, more affection in it. As she had said, she had not become accustomed to the magic of Africa. Its strangeness, its contrasts still startled and moved her. But she began to feel as if she belonged to Beni-Mora, as if Beni-Mora would perhaps miss her a little if she went away.
