Lost to all sense of reasoning through her overpowering rage, she flung herself upon the divan and sat looking out to the desert through the cleft in the mountains, planning her revenge upon them all.
The Red Desert, the Empty Desert, the forcing-ground of hate, revenge, despair, the burial place of love and hope and life.
The great waste places of the Arabian Peninsula, swept by the tribes of Ad, Tasim and Jadis, devastated by the hordes which inundated it in the early days when the Holy Fathers, in penance, built the very building in which the desert-born girl sat; ruled by African kings, allied to the Roman and Byzantine Empires, coveted, conquered, beaten, yet as ready to-day to rise in revolt against oppression and to hurl itself against the enemy as it was ready to fling itself victoriously against the mighty Roman generals.
Immense tracts of sand across which, pursuing or pursued, passed those countless legions, leaving, save for the footprints of Solomon’s mighty Yeminite Queen and Mohammed, the greatest Prophet the world has known since the advent of the gentle Nazarene, but little mark upon the path of time; desolate plains under which those who, through the centuries, have laid its fair cities waste, sleep in death amongst the ruins and treasures and secrets of cities, kingdoms and dynasties of which the names alone remain; silent, mysterious oceans of sand above which, wheeling, calling, sailing on outstretched wing at dawn, at noon, at dusk, drift the vultures from north to south, from east to west, as they have drifted and called since the day every grain of the sands was numbered.
Revengeful, relentless, restless, the Great Desert knows no peace nor rest nor shade. It sweeps flat that which it piled high but yesterday, and upon its surface, stretching like an Eastern carpet, blows its sands to the height of hills, to sweep them flat again. It kills with thirst, it slays with hunger and exhaustion; it leaves but little trace of those who dare to pass its desolate boundaries. Bones of fugitives, of the hapless, the luckless, bones of birds and beasts, covered feet deep with sand at dawn, uncovered by the dread shelook to dance to the blowing of its scorching breath at noon, mark out a path across its desolation under the star-strewn, peaceful sky. High-born and low-caste, criminal and holy man, friend and enemy, there is nothing to tell who they were in life nor in what manner death came to them. Vultures follow jackal and hyena; settle for a while and rise again to drift from north to south, from east to west; the wind of chance wafts the tattered, blood-stained kerchief across the desert to the feet of the holy man who has watched it, the only thing to move, dancing this way and that across the plain towards him; he ties it as a pennant to his staff and continues, with a prayer for the soul of the dead, upon his pilgrimage; the Bedouin, starving upon a handful of stringy sihanee dates and a cup of brackish water, searches amongst the bones and offers the desert victim’s purse and amulets and weapons in exchange or sale to those he may encounter upon his journey to the nearest oasis.
A fitting place indeed in which to hide all trace of the Arabian’s vengeance upon the white people. Let them fly for their lives, they would but leave their bodies to the vultures and the wind and the starving Bedouin, when her men had done with them.
Her men!
Since the sinking of the last moon her spies had brought reports of discontent amongst them. They had become restless and rebellious under the inactivity she imposed upon them during her fleeting but violent obsession for the white man.
Within the hour she would once more lead them across the sands under the light of the dying night and the coming dawn. With her they should hunt the fugitives down, and with spear or rifle wipe out the cause of their unrest and anger.