She looked at him steadily, but without curiosity.
“I feel that you are happy now.”
“Yes, I am happy. The world I used to know, my world and yours, would laugh at me, would say that I was crazy, that it was a whim, that I wished for a new sensation. Simply it had to be. For years I have been tending towards it—who knows why? Who knows what obscure influences have been at work in me, whether there is not perhaps far back, some faint strain of Arab blood mingled with the Sicilian blood in my veins? I cannot understand why. What I can understand is that at last I have fulfilled my destiny! After years of unrest I am suddenly and completely at peace. It is a magical sensation. I have been wandering all my life and have come upon the open door of my home.”
He spoke very quietly, but she heard the joy in his voice.
“I remember you saying, ‘I like to see men praying in the desert.’”
“Yes. When I looked at them I was longing to be one of them. For years from my garden wall I watched them with a passion of envy, with bitterness, almost with hatred sometimes. They had something I had not, something that set them above me, something that made their lives plain through any complication, and that gave to death a meaning like the meaning at the close of a great story that is going to have a sequel. They had faith. And it was difficult not to hate them. But now I am one of them. I can pray in the desert.”
“That was why you left Beni-Mora.”
“Yes. I had long been wishing to become a Mohammedan. I came here to be with the marabout, to enter more fully into certain questions, to see if I had any lingering doubts.”
“And you have none?”
“None.”