“Source des tourterelles,” repeated Domini. “Is it beautiful, Batouch? It sounds as if it ought to be beautiful.”
She scarcely knew why, but she had a longing that Ain-la-Hammam might be tender, calm, a place to soothe the spirit, a place in which Androvsky might be influenced to listen to what she had to tell him without revolt, without despair. Once he had spoken about the influence of place, about rising superior to it. But she believed in it, and she waited, almost anxiously, for the reply of Batouch. As usual it was enigmatic.
“Madame will see,” he answered. “Madame will see. But the Englishman——”
“Yes?”
“The Englishman was ravished. ‘This,’ he said to me, ‘this, Batouch, is a little Paradise!’ And there was no moon then. To-night there will be a moon.”
“Paradise!” exclaimed Androvsky.
He sprang upon his horse and pulled up the reins. Domini said no more. They had started late. It was night when they reached Ain-la-Hammam. As they drew near Domini looked before her eagerly through the pale gloom that hung over the sand. She saw no village, only a very small grove of palms and near it the outline of a bordj. The place was set in a cup of the Sahara. All around it rose low hummocks of sand. On two or three of them were isolated clumps of palms. Here the eyes roamed over no vast distances. There was little suggestion of space. She drew up her horse on one of the hummocks and gazed down. She heard doves murmuring in their soft voices among the trees. The tents were pitched near the bordj.
“What does Madame think?” asked Batouch. “Does Madame agree with the Englishman?”
“It is a strange little place,” she answered.
She listened to the voices of the doves. A dog barked by the bordj.