“How wonderful! How terrible!” she said.
She drew her horse to one side, a little nearer to Androvsky’s.
“Does the Russian in you greet this land?” she asked him.
He did not reply. He seemed to be held in thrall by the sad immensity before them.
“I realise here what it must be to die in the desert, to be killed by it—by hunger, by thirst in it,” she said presently, speaking, as if to herself, and looking out over the mirage sea, the mirage snow. “This is the first time I have really felt the terror of the desert.”
Her horse drooped its head till its nose nearly touched the earth, and shook itself in a long shiver. She shivered too, as if constrained to echo an animal’s distress.
“Things have died here,” Androvsky said, speaking at last in a low voice and pointing with his long-lashed whip towards the camels’ skeletons. “Come, Domini, the horses are tired.”
He cast another glance at the tower, and they dismounted by their tent, which was pitched at the very edge of the steep slope that sank down to the beast-like shapes of the near dunes.
An hour later Domini said to Androvsky:
“You won’t go after gazelle this evening surely?”