The girl was alone, and she naturally felt alarmed. Royson was not far away, and he, like the rest, was held spellbound by some spectacle the nature of which she could not guess. Perhaps his thoughts were not far removed from Irene, because he turned and looked at her.
"Come quickly, Miss Fenshawe," he shouted. "Here is the most wonderful mirage!"
Was that it—a mirage? Why, then, this hubbub? She had grown so accustomed to the grim humor of the desert in depicting clear streams of running water, smooth, tree-bordered lakes, and other delightful objects of which the arid land dreamed in its sleep of death, that the excitement caused in the camp was wholly inexplicable.
"What are you doing there?" she cried sharply to the frightened servant. "Go and get another glass, and take care you do not fall next time."
If he heard he paid no heed. He continued to stare at the sky with wide-open eyes.
Conscious of a fresh thrill of fear, she ran towards Royson.
"What in the world—"
Then she saw, and was stricken dumb with the sight, for she was looking at a spectacle which the desert seldom provides even to those who pass their lives within its bounds. A thin haze had taken the place of the remarkable clearness of the morning hours. Away to the north it had deepened almost into a fog, a low-lying and luminous mist like the white pall which often shrouds the sea on a calm bright day in summer. The sky was losing its burnished copper hue and becoming blue again, and, on the false horizon supplied by the crest of the fog-bank, stood a brilliantly vivid panorama.
There were military tents, lines of picketed camels and horses, a great number of Arabs and blacks, and some fifty Italian soldiers, all magnified to gigantic proportions, but so clearly defined that the trappings of the animals, the military uniforms, and the gay-colored burnous of the Arabs were readily distinguishable.
It could be seen, too, that they were working. Mounds of rock and earth showed that considerable excavations had been made. While those gathered round the well were yet gazing at this bewildering and lifelike picture, the moving ghosts in the sky underwent a change which enhanced their realism. One squad of soldiers and natives marched off towards the tents while another took their places. Were it not for the grotesque size of men and animals and the eerie silence of their movements it was hard to believe that the eyes were not witnessing actualities. The thing was fantastic, awe-inspiring, stupendous in design, but faultlessly true in color and treatment. No artist could ever hope for such a canvas. Its texture was vapor, its background the empyrean, and nature's own palette supplied the colors.