It was good to be up and doing; it was good to be setting out upon this adventure, the ambiguousness of which seemed every moment to be growing less disconcerting; it was good to be in this great playground where the rules of her life’s schoolroom were mainly in abeyance. Up here in these splendid spaces it would not matter if she pulled her skirt off, or let her hair down, or turned a cartwheel, or stood on her head. Already she was whistling loudly, and throwing fragments of stone into the valley before her, in the manner of a child upon the seashore; and all her love-sick sorrows of yesterday seemed to have vanished in the exaltation of youth and youth’s well-being.
She watched the servants, in the distance at the other side of the valley, spreading the picnic luncheon on a white tablecloth laid upon a shaded patch of sand; and when at length the meal appeared to be ready, she took a flying leap down from the rock where she had been sitting, and landed sprawling upon the sand-drift below. The sensation pleased her, and, clambering up the rocks once more, she repeated the jump, this time arriving with a considerable thud upon her back, and sliding down the drift with her legs in the air.
She hopped across the valley, rubbing herself, and was presently joined by the Bindanes.
“I feel about twelve years old,” she told them; and indeed at the moment she did not look much more than that age. “The desert is having an extraordinary effect on me.”
“But we’re only ten or twelve miles into it so far,” said the practical Kate. “You wait another week....”
“If I go on at this rate,” Muriel laughed, “I’ll be in arms by the time we reach the Oases.”
“I wonder whose,” muttered Kate, with a smile; but her friend’s face at once became serious. It was a jarring note, and it nearly ruined the joviality of the picnic.
The afternoon ride carried them another fifteen miles; and towards sunset they came to a halt in the midst of a wide flat plain of sand, across which a winding ribbon of stunted tamarisks and sparse vegetation marked the bed of a primeval river now reduced to a mere subterranean infiltration. In the far distance on all sides the low hills hemmed them in, like a rugged wall encircling a sacred and enchanted area.
The tents were pitched amongst the low-growing bushes in the dry, shingly bed of the stream; and the hobbled camels were turned loose to crop such twigs and grasses as they found edible. Muriel, meanwhile, wandered away into the open desert; and presently, like warm sand, and resting her chin on her hands, watched the sun go down behind the purple hills.
For some time the excitements of the day, and the physical exhilaration produced by her long ride in the sun and wind, held her from thought. But at length the dreamlike silence of the wilderness, the amazing sense of isolation from the outside world, began to release her mind from the captivity of the flesh, so that becoming one with the immensity of nature, her spirit drifted out into the sunset with the freedom of light or air.