he tom-tom and raita.

Victoria's gaze waded through the shadows that flow over the desert at
evening, deep and blue and transparent as water. She searched the
distances for the lives that must be going on somewhere, perhaps not far
away, though she would never meet them. They, and she, were floating
spars in a great ocean; and it made the ocean more wonderful to know
that the spars were there, each drifting according to its fate.

The girl drew into her lungs the strong air of the desert, born of the
winds which bring life or death to its children.

The scent of the wild thyme, which she could never again disentangle
from thoughts of the Sahara, was very sweet, even insistent. She knew
that it was loved by nomad women; and she let pictures rise before her
mind of gorgeous dark girls on camels, in plumed red bassourahs, going
from one desert city to another, to dance--cities teeming with life,
which she would never see among these spaces that seemed empty as the
world before creation. She imagined the ghosts of these desert beauties
crowding round her in the dusk, bringing their fragrance with them, the
wild thyme they had loved in life, crushed in their bosoms; pathetic
ghosts, who had not learned to rise beyond what they had once desired,
therefore compelled to haunt the desert, the only world which they had
known. In the wind that came sighing to her ears from the dark ravines
of the terrible chebka, she seemed to hear battle-songs and groans of
desert men who had fought and died ages ago, whose bones had crumbled
under her feet, perhaps, and whose descendants had not changed one whit
in religion, custom, or thought, or even in dress.

Victoria was glad that Maieddine had let her have these desert thoughts
alone, for they made her feel at home in the strange world her fancy
peopled; but the touch of the thyme-scented ghosts was cold. It was good
to turn back at last towards the tents, and see how the camp-fire
crimsoned the star-dusk.

"Thou wert happy alone?" Maieddine questioned her jealously.

"I was not alone."

He understood. "I know. The desert voices spoke to thee, of the desert
mystery which they alone can tell; voices we can hear only by listening
closely."

"That was the thought in my mind. How odd thou shouldst put it into
words."

"Dost thou think it odd? But I am a man of the desert. I held back, for
thee to go alone and hear the voices, knowing they would teach thee to
understand me and my pe