hen the whistling of the wind is as the
shouting of men and the thunder of your horse's hoofs as the rolling of
many drums, calling you through the power of past centuries and the
ecstasy of the solitude in your heart, out to the mystery of the plains.

Mystery, fascination, spell, lure, call of the desert. All fine words,
but hopeless to explain that which has lured more than one white woman
out into the golden wilderness to the wrecking of her soul; and which
has nothing whatever to do with the pseudo-psychic waves which trick us
into such pitiable hysteria and hallucination.

But there is no mystery about that which called Damaris. It was the
joy of youth, the salt of novelty, the exhilarating sympathy between
horse and rider; she shouted as she seemingly rode straight into the
massed colouring of the sunrise; she lifted her face to the golden
banners flung across the sky and turned in the saddle and looked back
at the hem of Night's garments disappearing down in the west.

She was still a child, for those auxiliaries, Love and Life, had not
yet lain hand upon her; they had but pulled aside the veil from before
her eyes for one brief second, and she, dazzled by the glimpse, had
pulled it back hastily. Neither was there anything to tell her that,
upon a not very far distant day, the veil would be torn from her,
leaving her to be well-nigh blinded by the radiance of the greatest
light in the world.

And she rode carelessly, without a thought to the passing of time or to
the ever-increasing speed of el-Sooltan, who was all out in an
endeavour to find his stable, also his companions, from whom he had
been parted for many weary weeks.

That they happened to be in the Oasis of Khargegh, some few hundred
miles down the Nile, he was not to know; he only knew that the desert
was his home and that in it and of it was his happiness to be found;
and it was only when Damaris turned to look at the ruins of the City of
On from a far distance that she discovered that they had disappeared in
a mist which was merely the combination of the distance and the waters
of the oasis evaporating in the morning sun.

She tried to pull the stallion, gently at first, and then with all her
might, but to no purpose; for nothing but the voice of his master or
his own particular _sayis_ could stop el-Sooltan once he had got the
light bit between his teeth; and of the death from thirst which awaited
him and his rider upon this particular vent