They rode side by side along the dusty track through a barren waste that made the eyes ache. A heavy stillness hung over the land, making the loneliness seem more immense. They scarcely spoke at all, and it came to Sylvia that they were stranger to each other now than they had been on that day at the very beginning of their acquaintance when he had first brought her to Blue Hill Farm. She felt herself to be even more of an alien in this land of cruel desolation than when first she had set foot in it. It was like a vast prison, she thought drearily, while the grim, unfriendly kopjes were the sentinels that guarded her, and the far blue mountains were a granite wall that none might pass.
The sun was low in the sky when they reached the watercourse. It was quite dry with white stones that looked like the skeletons of the ages scattered along its bed.
"Shall we rest for a few minutes?" said Burke. But she shook her head. "No—no! Not here. It is getting late."
So they crossed the spruit and went on.
The sun went down in an opalescent glow of mauve and pink and pearl that spread far over the veldt, and she felt that the beauty of it was almost more than she could bear. It hid so much that was terrible and cruel.
They came at length, when the light was nearly gone, to a branching track that led to the Merstons' farm.
Burke broke his silence again. "I must go over and see Merston in the morning."
She felt the warm colour flood her face. How much had the Merstons heard? She murmured something in response, but she did not offer to accompany him.
A deep orange moon came up over the eastern hills and lighted the last few miles of their journey, casting a strange amber radiance around them, flinging mysterious shadows about the kopjes, shedding an unearthly splendour upon the endless veldt. It spread like an illimitable ocean in soundless billows out of which weird rocks stood up—a dream-world of fantastic possibilities, but petrified into stillness by the spell of its solitudes—a world that once surely had thrilled with magic and now was dead.
As they rode past the last kopje—her kopje that she had never yet climbed, they seemed to her to enter the innermost loneliness of all, to reach the very heart of the desert.