green abundance of
growing things, trailed away into the aridity of the desert, and at
night, from the door of the tent, Mrs. Armine could look out upon the
pale and vague desolation of the illimitable sands stretching away into
the illimitable darkness. Just at first the vision fascinated her, and
she lent an ear to the call of the East, but very soon she was
distressed by the sight of the still and unpeopled country, which
suggested to her the nameless solitudes into which many women are driven
out when the time of their triumph is over. She did not speak of this to
Nigel, but, pretending that the wind at night from the desert chilled
her even between the canvas walls of the tent, she had the tent turned
round with its orifice towards the oasis. And she strove to ignore the
desert.

Nevertheless, despite what was indeed almost a horror of its spaces, she
now found that she felt more strongly their fascination, which seemed
calling her, but to danger or sorrow rather than to any pleasure or
permanent satisfaction. She often felt an uneasy desire to be more
intimate with the thing which she feared, and which woke up in her a
prophetic dread of the future when the Indian summer would have faded
for ever. And when one day Nigel suggested that he should take two or
three days' holiday, and that they should remove the camp into the wilds
at the north-eastern end of the sacred lake of Kurun, where Ibrahim and
Hamza said he could get some first-rate duck-shooting, and Ruby could
come to close quarters with the reality of the Libyan desert, she
assented almost eagerly. Any movement, any change, was welcome to her;
and--she had to be more intimate with the thing which she feared.

So one morning the riding camels kneeled down, the tents collapsed, were
rolled up and sent forward, and they started to go still farther into
the wilds.

They made a detour in the oasis to give their Bedouins time to pitch
their camp in the sands, and Ibrahim an hour or two to prepare
everything for their arrival. It was already afternoon when they were on
the track that leads to the lake, leaving the groves of palms behind
them and the low houses of the fellahin, moving slowly towards the
sand-hills that appeared far off, where huddled the patched and
discoloured tents of the gipsies and the almost naked fishermen who are
the only dwellers in this strange and blanched desolation, where the
sands and the salty waters meet in a wilderness of tamar