ch
sometimes lurked among them. He would have liked to go with her, but the
unfailing tact of the Arab told him that she wished to be alone with her
thoughts, and he could only hope that they might be of him.

Here, it was no longer beautiful desert. They had passed the charming
region of dayas, and were entering the grim world through which, long
ago, the ever harried M'Zabites had fled to find a refuge beyond the
reach of greedy pursuers. Nevertheless the enchantment of the Sahara, in
all its phases, had taken hold of Victoria. She did not now feel that
the desert was a place where a tired soul might find oblivion, though
once she had imagined that it would be a land of forgetfulness. Arabs
say, in talking idly to Europeans, that men forget their past in the
desert, but she doubted if they really forgot, in these vast spaces
where there was so much time to think. She herself began to feel that
the illimitable skies, where flamed sunsets and sunrises whose miracles
no eye saw, might teach her mysteries she had snatched at and lost, in
dreams. The immensity of the desert sent her soul straining towards the
immensity of the Beyond; and almost, in flashes elusive as the light on
a bird's wing, she understood what eternity might mean. She felt that
the last days of her childhood had been left behind, on the threshold of
these mysterious spaces, this vastness into which she had plunged, as
into an ocean. Yet she did not regret the loss, if it were a loss.
Never, she thought, whatever might happen, would she wish not to have
known this experience, not to have entered upon this great adventure,
whose end Maieddine still hid behind a veil of secrecy.

It was true, as she had told him, that she was not impatient, though she
would have liked to count the days like the beads of a rosary. She
looked forward to each one, as to the discovery of a beautiful thing new
to the world and to her; for though the spaces surrounding her were wide
beyond thinking, they were not empty. As ships, great and small, sail
the sea, so sailed the caravans of the nomad tribes in the desert which
surges on unchecked to Egypt: nomads who come and go, north and south,
east and west, under the burning sun and the throbbing stars, as Allah
has written their comings and goings in His book: men in white,
journeying with their women, their children, and their trains of beasts,
singing as they pass, and at night under the black tents resting to the
music of t