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She remembered what Batouch had said. There was pluck in this man, pluck that surged up in the blundering awkwardness, the hesitation, the incompetence and rudeness of him like a black rock out of the sea. She did not answer. They rode on, always slowly.
"Batouch!" Androvsky said. But he could not go on. He could not say anything about the two tents to a servant. "Where where is Madame?" he said almost stammering. "Out there, Monsieur." With a sweeping arm the poet pointed towards a hump of sand crowned by a few palms. Domini was sitting there, surrounded by Arab children, to whom she was giving sweets out of a box.
He bowed to him in the coffee-room of the hotel, but never spoke to him. Batouch had told her about the episode with Bous-Bous. And she had seen Bous-Bous endeavour to renew the intimacy and repulsed with determination. Androvsky must dislike the priesthood. He might fancy that she, a believing Catholic, had a number of disagreeable suppositions ran through her mind.
"Perhaps," he said to her, as Batouch and he were starting, "perhaps it will make me more completely human; perhaps there is something still to be done that even you, Domini, have not accomplished." She knew he was alluding to her words before dinner.
Was it not that vague terror which, shaking the restlessness, had sent her to the white house by the triple palm tree, had brought her now to the desert? she asked herself, while she listened, and the hidden horseman of whom Batouch had spoken became in her imagination one with the legendary victims of fate; with the Jew by the cross roads, the mariner beating ever about the rock-bound shores of the world, the climber in the witches' Sabbath, the phantom Arab in the sand.
Batouch shouted. His voice came like a stone from a catapult. The merchant turned calmly and without haste, showing an aquiline face covered with wrinkles, tufted with white hairs, lit by eyes that shone with the cruel expressiveness of a falcon's. After a short colloquy in Arabic he raised himself from his haunches, and came to the front of the room, where there was a small wooden counter.
She was keenly anxious to play the good fairy simply, unostentatiously, to these exhausted men who had come to Mogar out of the jaws of Death, to see their weary faces shine under the influence of repose and good cheer. But the tower looked desolate. The camp was gayer, cosier. Suddenly she resolved to invite them all to dine in the camp that night. Marelle returned with Batouch.
The camp started an hour before they did. Only Batouch remained behind to show them the way to Ain-la-Hammam, where they would pass the following night. When Batouch brought the horses he said: "Does Madame know the meaning of Ain-la-Hammam?" "No," said Domini. "What is it?" "Source des tourterelles," replied Batouch. "I was there once with an English traveller."
He began to speak in Arabic to Hadj, but she stopped him with an imperious gesture, gave Hadj his fee, and in a moment was in the saddle and cantering away into the dark. She heard the gallop of Batouch's horse coming up behind her and turned her head. "Batouch," she said, "you are the smartest" she used the word chic "Arab here.
"Why, Batouch-ben-Brahim?" "He cannot rest. To Madame the desert gives its calm, but to Monsieur " He did not finish his sentence. In front Domini and Androvsky had put their horses to a gallop. The sand flew up in a thin cloud around them. "Nom d'un chien!" said Batouch, who, in unpoetical moments, occasionally indulged in the expletives of the French infidels who were his country's rulers.
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