For the moment the irony of her situation struck Domini so forcibly that she could say nothing. She only looked at Batouch in silence.
“What is it? But I know. Madame is sad at leaving the desert, at leaving Beni-Mora.”
“Yes, Batouch. I am sad at leaving Beni-Mora.”
“But Madame will return?”
“Who knows?”
“I know. The desert has a spell. He who has once seen the desert must see it again. The desert calls and its voice is always heard. Madame will hear it when she is far away, and some day she will feel, ‘I must come back to the land of the sun and to the beautiful land of forgetfulness.’”
“I shall see you at the station, Batouch,” Domini said quickly. “Good-bye till then.”
The train for Tunis started at sundown, in order that the travellers might avoid the intense heat of the day. All the afternoon they kept within doors. The Arabs were sleeping in dark rooms. The gardens were deserted. Domini could not sleep. She sat near the French window that opened on to the verandah and said a silent good-bye to life. For that was what she felt—that life was leaving her, life with its intensity, its fierce meaning. She had come out of a sort of death to find life in Beni-Mora, and now she felt that she was going back again to something that would be like death. After her strife there came a numbness of the spirit, a heavy dullness. Time passed and she sat there without moving. Sometimes she looked at the trunks lying on the floor ready for the journey, at the labels on which was written “Tunis via Constantine.” And then she tried to imagine what it would be like to travel in the train after her long travelling in the desert, and what it would be like to be in a city. But she could not. The heat was intense. Perhaps it affected her mind through her body. Faintly, far down in her mind and heart, she knew that she was wishing, even longing, to realise all that these last hours in Beni-Mora meant, to gather up in them all the threads of her life and her sensations there, to survey, as from a height, the panorama of the change that had come to her in Africa. But she was frustrated.
The hours fled, and she remained cold, listless. Often she was hardly thinking at all. When the Arab servant came in to tell her that it was time to start for the station she got up slowly and looked at him vaguely.
“Time to go already?” she asked.