Domini shook her head. She was straining her ears to hear the melody as long as possible.
“It is a desert song of the freed negroes of Touggourt—‘No one but God and I knows what is in my heart.’”
Domini lowered her parasol to conceal her face. In the distance she could still hear the song, but it was dying away.
“Oh! what is going to happen to me here?” she thought.
Count Anteoni was looking away from her now across the desert. A strange impulse rose up in her. She could not resist it. She put down her parasol, exposing herself to the blinding sunlight, knelt down on the hot sand, leaned her arms on the white parapet, put her chin in the upturned palms of her hands and stared into the desert almost fiercely.
“No one but God and I knows what is in my heart,” she thought. “But that’s not true, that’s not true. For I don’t know.”
The last echo of the Arab’s song fainted on the blazing air. Surely it had changed now. Surely, as he turned into the shadows of the palms, he was singing, “No one but God knows what is in my heart.” Yes, he was singing that. “No one but God—no one but God.”
Count Anteoni looked down at her. She did not notice it, and he kept his eyes on her for a moment. Then he turned to the desert again.
By degrees, as she watched, Domini became aware of many things indicative of life, and of many lives in the tremendous expanse that at first had seemed empty of all save sun and mystery. She saw low, scattered tents, far-off columns of smoke rising. She saw a bird pass across the blue and vanish towards the mountains. Black shapes appeared among the tiny mounds of earth, crowned with dusty grass and dwarf tamarisk bushes. She saw them move, like objects in a dream, slowly through the shimmering gold. They were feeding camels, guarded by nomads whom she could not see.
At first she persistently explored the distances, carried forcibly by an elan of her whole nature to the remotest points her eyes could reach. Then she withdrew her gaze gradually, reluctantly, from the hidden summoning lands, whose verges she had with difficulty gained, and looked, at first with apprehension, upon the nearer regions. But her apprehension died when she found that the desert transmutes what is close as well as what is remote, suffuses even that which the hand could almost touch with wonder, beauty, and the deepest, most strange significance.