“There are more?”
“I could count up to a dozen. Which are yours?”
“The men with the camels and the men under that tower.”
“There are four playing the jeu des dames in the shadow of the cliff opposite to us. There is one asleep under a red rock where the path ascends into the desert. And there are two more just at the edge of the little oasis—Filiash, as it is called. One is standing under a palm, and one is pacing up and down.”
“You must have splendid eyes.”
“They are trained to the desert. But there are probably a score of Arabs within sight whom I don’t see.”
“Oh! now I see the men at the edge of the oasis. How oddly that one is moving. He goes up and down like a sailor on the quarter-deck.”
“Yes, it is curious. And he is in the full blaze of the sun. That can’t be an Arab.”
He drew a silver whistle from his waistcoat pocket, put it to his lips and sounded a call. In a moment Smain same running lightly over the sand. Count Anteoni said something to him in Arabic. He disappeared, and speedily returned with a pair of field-glasses. While he was gone Domini watched the two doll-like figures on the cliff in silence. One was standing under a large isolated palm tree absolutely still, as Arabs often stand. The other, at a short distance from him and full in the sun, went to and fro, to and fro, always measuring the same space of desert, and turning and returning at two given points which never varied. He walked like a man hemmed in by walls, yet around him were the infinite spaces. The effect was singularly unpleasant upon Domini. All things in the desert, as she had already noticed, became almost terribly significant, and this peculiar activity seemed full of some extraordinary and even horrible meaning. She watched it with straining eyes.
Count Anteoni took the glasses from Smain and looked through them, adjusting them carefully to suit his sight.