“No wonder men are careless of human life in such a land as this. All the wildness of the world seems to be concentrated here. Amara is like the desert city of some tremendous dream. It looks wicked and unearthly, but how superb!”
“Look at those cupolas!” he said. “Are there really Oriental palaces here? Has Batouch told us the truth for once?”
“Or less than the truth? I could believe anything of Amara at this moment. What hundreds of camels! They remind me of Arba, our first halting-place.” She looked at him and he at her.
“How long ago that seems!” she said.
“A thousand years ago.”
They both had a memory of a great silence, in the midst of this growing tumult in which the sky seemed now to take its part, calling with the voices of its fierce colours, with the voices of the fires that burdened it in the west.
“Silence joined us, Domini,” Androvsky said.
“Yes. Perhaps silence is the most beautiful voice in the world.”
Far off, along the great white road, they saw two horsemen galloping to meet them from the city, one dressed in brilliant saffron yellow, the other in the palest blue, both crowned with large and snowy turbans.
“Who can they be?” said Domini, as they drew near. “They look like two princes of the Sahara.”