“You won’t be nervous alone there, will you?” he asked her, and she shook her head. “If you feel lonely or frightened, you’ve only got to slip round to my tower and shout to me, or come up the stairs and wake me up.”
To Muriel there seemed to be a wonderful intimacy in his words, and she pictured herself creeping up the dark staircase in the night, and standing by her lover’s bedside under the stars, whispering to him that she could not sleep.
Hussein was not long in carrying out his instructions, and soon he came back to announce that the bath was ready. Therewith, Daniel took Muriel to this room, which looked exceedingly clean and comfortable in the lamplight. Towels and jugs of hot and cold water stood upon the grass-matted floor beside the bath-tub; the camp-bed had been made up in one corner; and Muriel’s dressing-case stood upon a chair near a table above which a looking-glass was hung. In place of a door a grass mat was suspended across the entrance; and the unglazed window, looking westwards on to the open desert, was fitted with rough wooden shutters now standing open to the warm night.
Daniel was loathe to leave her even for this little while, and he stood with his arm about her while she unfastened her dressing-case. He helped her to lay out her brushes and toilet utensils; and there was a peculiar and very tender sense of intimate companionship as she handed him her slippers to place beside the bed and her nightdress to lay upon the pillow. He made no attempt to go when she began to take the hairpins from her hair; and, when it fell about her shoulders, he took her in his arms once more, calling her by so many loving names that her brain seemed to be singing with them, and she could feel her riotous heart beating as it were in her throat.
At last he left her, and went to his own improvised dressing-room, to put on more presentable clothes; but when he was ready, and she had not yet made her reappearance, he went back to her doorway and spoke to her through the screen of the grass-matting.
She told him he might enter, and he found her sitting before the mirror fastening up her hair. She was dressed now in a kind of kimono; and he seized her bare white arms, which were raised above her head, kissing them fervently.
When at length her toilet was finished, he led her back to the living-room, where soon the evening meal was served at a small table upon which two candles burned at either side of a bowl of wild flowers hastily picked in the fields, where, at this time of the year, they grow in great abundance; and never in all their lives had either of them felt so completely happy. Through the open window the stars glinted in the wonderful sky, like amazing jewels sprinkled upon velvet; and the dimly lit room, with its series of shadowy domes, seemed to be a magical banquet-hall, its walls of alabaster and its flooring of marble. It was somewhat bare of furniture, for many things had been left behind at the Pyramids; but its very bareness enhanced its Oriental effect and added to its enchantment.
Hussein had prepared a very excellent meal, not sparing the store-cupboard; and he had opened a particularly large fiasco of Italian red-wine to grace the occasion. He had donned a clean white garment, held in at the waist by a crimson sash; and as he noiselessly entered or left the room he seemed to Muriel to have taken to himself the nature of a geni out of a tale of the Arabian Nights.
When at last the meal was finished, and cleared away, and she and Daniel were seated in the deck chairs at the open window to drink their coffee, Muriel felt that the whole world of actuality had slid from her, leaving her enthroned with her lover in a palace of glorious dream; and when, out of the darkness of the palm-groves below, there came to their ears the distant and wandering sound of a flute, played by some unseen goatherd passing homewards with his flock, the magic of the desert was almost overpowering in the measure of its enchantment. She was bewildered and intoxicated by it; and in Daniel’s eyes she found, too, a light of love such as she had never seen there before.
The hours passed unnoticed, for time had ceased to be; and it was already late when at last Daniel arose, and stood looking down at her with a smile upon his face. “Well,” he said, with a sigh, “I didn’t think anything would induce me to return to Cairo so soon; but now.... When shall we start?”