ch crusted a moonless sky, the vast stretches of
billowing sand glimmered faintly golden as a phosphorescent sea. And
among the dimly gleaming waves of that endless waste the motor tossed,
rocking on the rough track like a small boat in mid-ocean.

Nowhere was there any sound except the throbbing of their machinery, and
a fairy fiddling of unseen crickets, which seemed to make the silence
more intense, under the great sparkling dome that hung over the gold.

"Now I am in the place where she wished to be: the golden silence,"
Stephen said to himself. And he found himself listening, as if for the
call Victoria had promised to give if she needed him.

XXIII

On the top of a pale golden hill, partly sand, partly rock, rises a
white wall with square, squat towers which look north and south, east
and west. The wall and the towers together are like an ivory crown set
on the hill's brow, and from a distance the effect is very barbaric,
very impressive, for all the country round about is wild and desolate.
Along the southern horizon the desert goes billowing in waves of gold,
and rose, and violet, that fade into the fainter violet of the sky; and
nearer there are the strange little mountains which guard the oasis of
Bou-Saada, like a wall reared to hide a treasure from some dreaded
enemy; and even the sand is heaped in fantastic shapes, resembling a
troop of tawny beasts crouched to drink from deep pools of purple
shadow. Northward, the crumpled waste rolls away like prairie land or
ocean, faint green over yellow brown, as if grass seed had been
sprinkled sparsely on a stormy sea and by some miracle had sprouted. And
in brown wastes, bright emerald patches gleam, vivid and fierce as
serpents' eyes, ringed round with silver. Far away to the east floats
the mirage of a lake, calm as a blue lagoon. Westward, where desert
merges into sky, are high tablelands, and flat-topped mountains with
carved sides, desert architecture, such as might have suggested Egyptian
temples and colossal sphinxes.

Along the rough desert track beneath the hill, where bald stones break
through sandy earth, camels come and go, passing from south to north,
from north to south, marching slowly with rhythmic gait, as if to the
sound of music which only they can hear, glancing from side to side with
unutterable superciliousness, looking wistfully here and there at some
miniature oasis thrown like a dark prayer-carpet on the yellow sand. Two
or thre