Burning Sands

by Arthur E. P. Brome Weigall

He seized her hand in his, and pressed it fervently to his lips. Then, as though overcome with emotion, he whispered, “God bless you, little woman,” and, turning, walked slowly out of the room.

[CHAPTER XXXIII—THE RETURN]

Daniel’s work at El Hamrân was soon accomplished. When he returned there with the police, he was not empowered to use the aid of the law further than to restore order, to release the camels which had been seized, and to liberate Ibrahîm from his illegal semi-captivity. The officer in command of the troopers, however, was aware that the messengers who had been dispatched at top speed to Cairo would bring back instructions to him to act in accordance with the Englishman’s dispositions; and thus Ibrahîm had been recognized already as Sheikh by the time that the official confirmation of his appointment arrived, and when the men who had made the journey to El Khargeh returned home, the abortive revolt was a thing of the past.

Daniel, however, was unable to reconcile the two parties, and the feud thereafter continued its tedious course, though now in a more underground manner. He was disappointed in the failure of his attempts at conciliation, and was disgusted at the bickerings and the petty insults exchanged between the one faction and the other. The tranquillity of the desert had been rudely disturbed.

It was, thus, with a feeling of relief that he packed up his belongings once more, and turned his face towards Cairo. It was now the middle of April, and he crossed the desert in a blaze of burning sunshine, but his mind was so much occupied with his thoughts that he took little notice of his surroundings. The shimmer of heat rising from the sand, the haze of the distances, and the red dusk of the warm evenings, seemed but to carry his sad heart into the region of speculation; and, at nights, the stars and the crescent of the new moon lifted him into a sphere in which his brain worked with terrible clarity.

He saw his life spread out before his inward consciousness like a tale written in a fair hand upon an open scroll, wherein his mistakes and his shortcomings were inscribed in bolder letters, very apparent to the eye. It seemed to him that his attitude towards Muriel, towards humanity, had been illiberal, too one-sided. There had been need of so much greater tolerance: he had been too inclined to be impulsive, to jump to a conclusion.

In teaching Muriel the lesson that the love between a man and a woman should be a thing of frankness and permanence, not snatched at in secret, nor lightly conceived, he had learned as much as he had taught. He had found in her all manner of qualities to which he had paid insufficient regard—dignity, control, bravery in face of danger, and courage to act according to the dictates of her heart.

He saw now that while she had walked the pathways of that world which he had despised, he had taken refuge, like a coward, in the desert; yet she, in spite of the pitfalls and the sloughs which he had shunned, was not at heart contaminated. She had honestly believed that he had wished her to come to him in the desert, and she had obeyed him. A less impulsive man would have treated her mistake gently, and with more understanding, as being something for which her lax education and not her brave heart was to blame.

In an agony of mind he asked himself whether he had really lost her. He would go to her; he would make her look right into his mind, so that she should see how greatly he had need of her. But would she have pity on him?

Would she have pity on him?... Suddenly an essential aspect of the relationship of man and woman flashed before him. Man, mighty man, was but a lonely, blundering wanderer, a weak thing, a dweller in the desert, seeking where to lay his head. With all his strength, with all his masterful handling of events, man was yet a vagabond in the world, until he had found his mate; and woman, in spite of the greater sway of her thoughtless instincts, held for him the keys, as it were, of his heart’s home. From the summit of her weakness she could look down upon his strength, and could smile at his struggle to surmount the obstacles which he had placed in his own path. In the loneliness of his soul she could look down and pity him, and take him to her breast, and heal his wounds.