第12章 CHAPTER III(2)

As Domini leaned out of the window, and the salt crystals sparkled to her eyes, and the palms swayed languidly above the waters, and the rose and mauve of the hills, the red and orange of the earth, streamed by in the flames of the sun before the passing train like a barbaric procession, to the sound of the hidden drums, the cry of the hidden priest, and all the whispering melodies of these strange and unknown lives, tears started into her eyes. The entrance into this land of flame and colour, through its narrow and terrific portal, stirred her almost beyond her present strength. The glory of this world mounted to her heart, oppressing it. The embrace of Nature was so violent that it crushed her. She felt like a little fly that had sought to wing its way to the sun and, at a million miles' distance from it, was being shrivelled by its heat. When all the voices of the village fainted away she was glad, although she strained her ears to hear their fading echoes. Suddenly she knew that she was very tired, so tired that emotions acted upon her as physical exertion acts upon an exhausted man. She sat down and shut her eyes. For a long time she stayed with her eyes shut, but she knew that on the windows strange lights were glittering, that the carriage was slowly filling with the ineffable splendours of the west. Long afterwards she often wondered whether she endowed the sunset of that day with supernatural glories because she was so tired. Perhaps the salt mountain of El-Alia did not really sparkle like the celestial mountains in the visions of the saints.

Perhaps the long chain of the Aures did not really look as if all its narrow clefts had been powdered with the soft and bloomy leaves of unearthly violets, and the desert was not cloudy in the distance towards the Zibans with the magical blue she thought she saw there, a blue neither of sky nor sea, but like the hue at the edge of a flame in the heart of a wood fire. She often wondered, but she never knew.

The sound of a movement made her look up. Her companion was changing his place and going to the other side of the compartment. He walked softly, no doubt with the desire not to disturb Domini. His back was towards her for an instant, and she noticed that he was a powerful man, though very thin, and that his gait was heavy. It made her think again of his labourer's hands, and she began to wonder idly what was his rank and what he did. He sat down in the far corner on the same side as herself and stared out of his window, crossing his legs. He wore large boots with square toes, clumsy and unfashionable, but comfortable and good for walking in. His clothes had obviously been made by a French tailor. The stuff of them was grey and woolly, and they were cut tighter to the figure than English clothes generally are. He had on a black silk necktie, and a soft brown travelling hat dented in the middle. By the way in which he looked out of the window, Domini judged that he, too, was seeing the desert for the first time.

There was something almost passionately attentive in his attitude, something of strained eagerness in that part of his face which she could see from where she was sitting. His cheek was not pale, as she had thought at first, but brown, obviously burnt by the sun of Africa.

But she felt that underneath the sunburn there was pallor. She fancied he might be a painter, and was noting all the extraordinary colour effects with the definiteness of a man who meant, perhaps, to reproduce them on canvas.

The light, which had now the peculiar, almost supernatural softness and limpidity of light falling at evening from a declining sun in a hot country, came full upon him, and brightened his hair. Domini saw that it was brown with some chestnut in it, thick, and cut extremely short, as if his head had recently been shaved. She felt convinced that he was not French. He might be an Austrian, perhaps, or a Russian from the south of Russia. He remained motionless in that attitude of profound observation. It suggested great force not merely of body, but also of mind, an almost abnormal concentration upon the thing observed. This was a man who could surely shut out the whole world to look at a grain of sand, if he thought it beautiful or interesting.

They were near Beni-Mora now. Its palms appeared far off, and in the midst of them a snow-white tower. The Sahara lay beyond and around it, rolling away from the foot of low, brown hills, that looked as if they had been covered with a soft powder of bronze. A long spur of rose- coloured mountains stretched away towards the south. The sun was very near his setting. Small, red clouds floated in the western quarter of the sky, and the far desert was becoming mysteriously dim and blue, like a remote sea. Here and there thin wreaths of smoke ascended from it, and lights glittered in it, like earth-bound stars.