After thanking them cordially for drinking his health, De Trevignac said:
“I was nearly experiencing the certainty of death. But was it Mogar that turned you to such thoughts, Madame?”
“I think so. There is something sad, even portentous about it.”
She looked towards the tent door, imagining the immense desolation that was hidden in the darkness outside, the white plains, the mirage sea, the sand dunes like monsters, the bleached bones of the dead camels with the eagles hovering above them.
“Don’t you think so, Boris? Don’t you think it looks like a place in which—like a tragic place, a place in which tragedies ought to occur?”
“It is not places that make tragedies,” he said, “or at least they make tragedies far more seldom than the people in them.”
He stopped, seemed to make an effort to throw off his taciturnity, and suddenly to be able to throw it off, at least partially. For he continued speaking with greater naturalness and ease, even with a certain dominating force.
“If people would use their wills they need not be influenced by place, they need not be governed by a thousand things, by memories, by fears, by fancies—yes, even by fancies that are the merest shadows, but out of which they make phantoms. Half the terrors and miseries of life lie only in the minds of men. They even cause the very tragedies they would avoid by expecting them.”
He said the last words with a sort of strong contempt—then, more quietly, he added:
“You, Domini, why should you feel the uncertainty of life, especially at Mogar? You need not. You can choose not to. Life is the same in its chances here as everywhere?”