She made a signal with her hand. Two Albanians below saluted her.
“Shall we go at once? Or would you rather stay here a little longer?”
“Let us go. I was only looking at the water.”
He turned and sent a long glance to Stamboul.
“Your city!” he said.
“I shall take you.”
For the first time that day he looked at her intimately, and his look said:
“Why do you trouble about me?”
They went down, got into the caique, and were taken by the turmoil of the Golden Horn. Among the innumerable caiques, the steamboats, the craft of all kinds, they went out into the strong sunshine, guarded on the one hand by the crowding, discolored houses of Galata rising to Pera, on the other hand by the wooden dwellings and the enormous mosques of Stamboul. The voices of life pursued them over the water and they sat in silence side by side. Dion made no social attempt to entertain his companion. Had she not just said to him that long ago they had gone beyond all the silly little things that worry the fools? In the midst of the fierce activity and the riot of noise which marks out the Golden Horn from all other water-ways, they traveled towards emptiness, silence, the desolation on the hill near the sacred place of the Turks, where each new Sultan is girded with the sword of Osman, and where the standard-bearer of the Prophet sleeps in the tomb that was seen in a vision.
In the strong heat of noon they left the caique and walked slowly towards the hill which rises to the north-east, where the dark towers of the cypresses watch over the innumerable graves. Mrs. Clarke had put up a sun umbrella. Her face was protected by a thin white veil. She wore a linen dress, pale gray in color, with white lines on it, and long loose gloves of suede. She looked extraordinarily thin. Her unshining, curiously colorless hair was partly covered by a small hat of burnt straw, turned sharply and decisively up on the left side and trimmed with a broad riband of old gold. Dion remembered that he had thought of her once as a vision seen in water. Now he was with her in the staring definite clearness of a land dried by the heats of summer and giving to them its dust. And she was at home in this aridity. In the dust he was aware of the definiteness of her. Since the blackness had overtaken him people had meant to him less than shadows gliding on a wall mean to a joyous man. Often he had observed them, even sharply and with a sort of obstinate persistence; he had been trying to force them to become real to him. Invariably he had failed in his effort. Mrs. Clarke was real to him as she walked in silence beside him, between the handsome railed-in mausoleums which line the empty roads from the water’s edge almost to the mosque of the Conqueror. A banal phrase came to his lips, “You are in your element here.” But he held it back, remembering that they walked in the midst of dust.