e was different from any other
man she had met; and that, though she had known him only a few days,
from the first he had seemed more a friend than Si Maieddine, or any one
else whom she knew much better than Stephen.

As they travelled, she had many thoughts which pleased her--thoughts
which could have come to her nowhere else except in the desert, and
often she talked to herself, because M'Barka could not understand her
feelings, and she did not wish to make Maieddine understand.

"Burning, burning," was the adjective which she repeated oftenest, in an
almost awestruck whisper, as her eyes travelled over immense spaces; for
she thought that the desert might have dropped out of the sun. The
colour of sand and sky was colour on fire, blazing. The whole Sahara
throbbed with the unimaginable fire of creative cosmic force, deep,
vital orange, needed by the primitive peoples of the earth who had not
risen high enough yet to deserve or desire the finer vibrations.

As she leaned out of the bassour, the heat of the sun pressed on her
lightly veiled head, like the golden lid of a golden box. She could feel
it as an actual weight; and invisible behind it a living power which
could crush her in an instant, as the paw of a lion might crush a flower
petal.

Africa itself was this savage power, fierce as fire, ever smouldering,
sometimes flaming with the revolt of Islam against other creeds; but the
heart of the fire was the desert. Only the shady seguias in the oasis
towns cooled it, like children's fingers on a madman's forehead; or the
sound of a boy's flute in a river bed, playing the music of Pan,
changeless, monotonous yet thrilling, as the music of earth and all
Nature.

There were tracts in the desert which colour-blind people might have
hated; but Victoria grew to think the dreariest stretches beautiful; and
even the occasional plagues of flies which irritated M'Barka beyond
endurance, only made Victoria laugh.

Sometimes came caravans, in this billowing immensity between the M'Zab
and Ouargla--city of Solomon, whither the Queen of Sheba rode on her
mehari: caravans blazing red and yellow, which swept like slow lines of
flame across the desert, going east towards the sunrise, or west where
the sunset spreads over the sky like a purple fan opening, or the tail
of a celestial peacock.

What Victoria had once imagined the desert to be of vast emptiness, and
what she found it to be of teeming life, was like the differe