This thwarting of my desire, this baffling of my purpose—was the one thing needed to set my blood on fire. On the instant I turned and ran down the hill toward the water-side, all thought of Monacan courts-of-law completely forgotten. At the precise moment when the stately judge-advocate in his purple and green laetitia or official robe opened the Monacan Court, the little Kawa was slipping over the Southern horizon toward the African mountain wall beyond which lie the limitless sands of the Sahara.
“Meet me in the desert,” she had said. No desert on earth could be big enough to hide her. My emotions were up, and in full cry!
Chapter III
Into the Great Unknown
Chapter III
Africa! Far away I sighted the purple shadow of the land of mystery, the low-lying coast-line and interior wall of mountains behind which lay the vastness of Sahara.
We struck the coast at Djidjelli, further East than we had anticipated. Captain Triplett, my navigator, said that compasses always acted queerly in these waters which he ascribed to the influence of occult desert powers, outraged divinities and the like.
“It’s them genuses,” he said, “they raise hell with yer.”
Be that as it may we had to veer sharply in order to make Algiers on the third day after clearing from and out of Monte Carlo. The harbor showed no trace of the Undine and according to the port-authorities she had not touched there, nor was there any record of the Wimpole party at the leading hotels or travel bureaus. They were gone, swallowed up in the immense folds of the silent, brooding Southland.
“Meet me in the desert!” Lady Sarah’s parting cry rang in my ears. In it I detected the first note of appeal suggesting her growing need of me, a need of which she was perhaps still unconscious, but which might grow to who knows what. Why was I so certain she referred to Sahara, the Great Desert? I can not say, but it seemed inevitable that she would choose the largest; it was in keeping with the majestic, monumental nature of the woman. Whatever the reason I was positive that somewhere in those uncharted wastes I should find her. Facing them, as I stood on the quarter-deck with Whinney, my acting-first-officer, I pressed Lady Wimpole’s letter in my breast pocket and whispered softly “I come, my lady of the desert, I come.”
“How?” said Whinney.