“This afternoon in the desert, when we were in the sand looking at Beni-Mora, you began to tell me something and then you stopped. And you said, ‘I can’t tell you. There’s too much light.’ Now the sun has gone.”
“Yes. But—but I want to listen to you. I want——”
She stopped. In the distance, by the great fire where the Arabs were assembled, there rose a sound of music which arrested her attention. Ali was singing, holding in his hand a brand from the fire like a torch. She had heard him sing before, and had loved the timbre of his voice, but only now did she realise when she had first heard him and who he was. It was he who, hidden from her, had sung the song of the freed negroes of Touggourt in the gardens of Count Anteoni that day when she had been angry with Androvsky and had afterwards been reconciled with him. And she knew now it was he, because, once more hidden from her—for against the curtain of darkness she only saw the flame from the torch he held and moved rhythmically to the burden of his song—he was singing it again. Androvsky, when she ceased to speak, suddenly put his arms round her, as if he were afraid of her escaping from him in her silence, and they stood thus at the tent door listening:
“The gazelle dies in the water,
The fish dies in the air,
And I die in the dunes of the desert sand
For my love that is deep and sad.”
The chorus of hidden men by the fire rose in a low murmur that was like the whisper of the desert in the night. Then the contralto voice of Ali came to Domini and Androvsky again, but very faintly, from the distance where the flaming torch was moving:
“No one but God and I
Knows what is in my heart.”
When the voice died away for a moment Domini whispered the refrain. Then she said:
“But is it true? Can it be true for us to-night?”
Androvsky did not reply.
“I don’t think it is true,” she added. “You know—don’t you?”