A warm, strong hand clasped hers. She opened her eyes. In the dim twilight of the palanquin she saw the darkness of Androvsky’s tall figure sitting in the crouched attitude rendered necessary by the peculiar seat, and swaying slightly to the movement of the camel. The light was so obscure that she could not see his eyes or clearly discern his features, but she felt that he was gazing at her shadowy figure, that his mind was passionately at work. Had he, too, been silently praising God for his happiness, and was he now wishing the body to join in the soul’s delight?
She left her hand in his passively. The sense of her womanhood, lost for a moment in the ecstasy of worship, had returned to her, but with a new and tremendous meaning which seemed to change her nature. Androvsky forcibly pressed her hand with his, let it go, then pressed it again, repeating the action with a regularity that seemed suggested by some guidance. She imagined him pressing her hand each time his heart pulsed. She did not want to return the pressure. As she felt his hand thus closing and unclosing over hers, she was conscious that she, who in their intercourse had played a dominant part, who had even deliberately brought about that intercourse by her action on the tower, now longed to be passive and, forgetting her own power and the strength and force of her nature, to lose herself in the greater strength and force of this man to whom she had given herself. Never before had she wished to be anything but strong. Nor did she desire weakness now, but only that his nature should rise above hers with eagle’s wings, that when she looked up she should see him, never when she looked down. She thought that to see him below her would kill her, and she opened her lips to say so. But something in the windy darkness kept her silent. The heavy curtains of the palanquin shook perpetually, and the tall wooden rods on which they were slung creaked, making a small, incessant noise like a complaining, which joined itself with the more distant but louder noise made by the leaves of the thousands of palm trees dashed furiously together. From behind came the groaning of one of the camels, borne on the gusts of the wind, and faint sounds of the calling voices of the Arabs who accompanied them. It was not a time to speak.
She wondered where they were, in what part of the oasis, whether they had yet gained the beginning of the great route which had always fascinated her, and which was now the road to the goal of all her earthly desires. But there was nothing to tell her. She travelled in a world of dimness and the roar of wind, and in this obscurity and uproar, combined with perpetual though slight motion, she lost all count of time. She had no idea how long it was since she had come out of the church door with Androvsky. At first she thought it was only a few minutes, and that the camels must be just coming to the statue of the Cardinal. Then she thought that it might be an hour, even more; that Count Anteoni’s garden was long since left behind, and that they were passing, perhaps, along the narrow streets of the village of old Beni-Mora, and nearing the edge of the oasis. But even in this confusion of mind she felt that something would tell her when the last palms had vanished in the sand mist and the caravan came out into the desert. The sound of the wind would surely be different when they met it on the immense flats, where there was nothing to break its fury. Or even if it were not different, she felt that she would know, that the desert would surely speak to her in the moment when, at last, it took her to itself. It could not be that they would be taken by the desert and she not know it. But she wanted Androvsky to know it too. For she felt that the moment when the desert took them, man and wife, would be a great moment in their lives, greater even than that in which they met as they came into the blue country. And she set herself to listen, with a passionate expectation, with an attention so close and determined that it thrilled her body, and even affected her muscles.
What she was listening for was a rising of the wind, a crescendo of its voice. She was anticipating a triumphant cry from the Sahara, unlimited power made audible in a sound like the blowing of the clarion of the sands.
Androvsky’s hand was still on hers, but now it did not move as if obeying the pulsations of his heart. It held hers closely, warmly, and sent his strength to her, and presently, for an instant, taking her mind from the desert, she lost herself in the mystery and the wonder of human companionship. She realised that the touch of Androvsky’s hand on hers altered for her herself, and the whole universe as it was presented to her, as she observed and felt it. Nothing remained as it was when he did not touch her. There was something stupefying in the thought, something almost terrible. The wonder that is alive in the tiny things of love, and that makes tremendously important their presence in, or absence from, a woman’s life, took hold on her completely for the first time, and set her forever in a changed world, a world in which a great knowledge ruled instead of a great ignorance. With the consciousness of exactly what Androvsky’s touch meant to her came a multiple consciousness of a thousand other things, all connected with him and her consecrated relation to him. She quivered with understanding. All the gates of her soul were being opened, and the white light of comprehension of those things which make life splendid and fruitful was pouring in upon her. Within the dim, contained space of the palanquin, that was slowly carried onward through the passion of the storm, there was an effulgence of unseen glory that grew in splendour moment by moment. A woman was being born of a woman, woman who knew herself of woman who did not know herself, woman who henceforth would divinely love her womanhood of woman who had often wondered why she had been created woman.
The words muttered by the man of the sand in Count Anteoni’s garden were coming true. In the church of Beni-Mora the life of Domini had begun more really than when her mother strove in the pains of childbirth and her first faint cry answered the voice of the world’s light when it spoke to her.
Slowly the caravan moved on. The camel-drivers sang low under the folds of their haiks those mysterious songs of the East that seem the songs of heat and solitude. Batouch, smothered in his burnous, his large head sunk upon his chest, slumbered like a potentate relieved from cares of State. Till Arba was reached his duty was accomplished. Ali, perched behind him on the camel, stared into the dimness with eyes steady and remote as those of a vulture of the desert. The houses of Beni-Mora faded in the mist of the sand, the statue of the Cardinal holding the double cross, the tower of the hotel, the shuddering trees of Count Anteoni’s garden. Along the white blue which was the road the camels painfully advanced, urged by the cries and the sticks of the running drivers. Presently the brown buildings of old Beni-Mora came partially into sight, peeping here and there through the flying sands and the frantic palm leaves. The desert was at hand.
Ali began to sing, breathing his song into the back of Batouch’s hood.
“The love of women is like the holiday song that the boy sings
gaily
In the sunny garden—
The love of women is like the little moon, the little happy moon
In the last night of Ramadan.
The love of women is like the great silence that steals at dusk
To kiss the scented blossoms of the orange tree.
Sit thee down beneath the orange tree, O loving man!
That thou mayst know the kiss that tells the love of women.
“Janat! Janat! Janat!”