He looked down at the white sand.
“Better!” he repeated. “Could we do that?”
She did not answer. The far-off villages gleamed mysteriously on their little mountains, like unreal things that might fade away as castles fade in the fire. The sky above the minarets was changing in colour slowly. Its blue was being invaded by a green that was a sister colour. A curious light, that seemed to rise from below rather than to descend from above, was transmuting the whiteness of the sands. A lemon yellow crept through them, but they still looked cold and strange, and immeasurably vast. Domini fancied that the silence of the desert deepened so that, in it, they might hear the voices of Amara more distinctly.
“You know,” she said, “when one looks out over the desert from a height, as we did from the tower of Beni-Mora, it seems to call one. There’s a voice in the blue distance that seems to say, ‘Come to me! I am here—hidden in my retreat, beyond the blue, and beyond the mirage, and beyond the farthest verge!’”
“Yes, I know.”
“I have always felt, when we travelled in the desert, that the calling thing, the soul of the desert, retreated as I advanced, and still summoned me onward but always from an infinite distance.”
“And I too, Domini.”
“Now I don’t feel that. I feel as if now we were coming near to the voice, as if we should reach it at Amara, as if there it would tell us its secret.”
“Imagination!” he said.
But he spoke seriously, almost mystically. His voice was at odds with the word it said. She noticed that and was sure that he was secretly sharing her sensation. She even suspected that he had perhaps felt it first.