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Terrifically greater, more overpowering than man, the desert was yet also somehow less than man, feebler, vaguer. Or else how could she have been grasped, moved, turned to curiosity, surmise, almost to a sort of dread all at the desert's expense by the distant moving figure seen through the glasses? Yes, as she looked at the little white table and thought of all this, Domini began to feel angry.
He had just run the car out upon the smooth, dark surface of one of the desert's famous dry lakes, where almost nothing grew. The ground was level and hard as a dance floor, so he turned from the road and drove at right angles to it across the crusted soil.
"The desert's the place for me to-night," he said. Stepping ashore, he turned to where the Duchess stood on the deck, gazing out into the night. "Well, give my love to the girls," he called, waving a hand upwards, as it were to the wide world, and disappeared into the alluring whiteness.
No more! O Vivia, Vivia!" With a groan of anguish, Pentaur looked upward, as if behind the desert's sky he might see again that youthful face, the face of that sweet Christian with whom he had been acquainted from childhood and whom he had last seen dying in Carthage's amphitheatre. Little did Timokles know how the memory of Vivia Perpetua's death hour had haunted Pentaur.
There, by the golden law of the desert's hospitality, he knows that he may eat in peace, that though his enemies come up to the very door, and his table be spread as it were in their presence, he need not flinch nor stint his heart of her security. That was the landscape the Psalmist saw, and it seemed to him to reflect the mingled wildness and beauty of his own life.
One finds a fascination in contrasting these two children of old Mother Earth, and thinks of Heine's lines: "A pine tree standeth lonely On a northern mountain's height; It sleeps, while around it is folded A mantle of snowy white. "It is dreaming of a palm tree In a far-off Orient land, Which lonely and silent waiteth In the desert's burning sand."
She gazed once more into the crowd that thronged about the Desert having received gifts at the Desert's hands, and in it she saw the stranger. He was kneeling, his hands were stretched out, his head was bowed, and he was praying. And, while he prayed, Liberty stood by him smiling, and her fiery cymbals were like the aureoles that illumine the beautiful faces of the saints.
De desert's ha'nted, it's ha'nted, sho; oh, Mars Tom, le''s git outen it; I'd ruther die den have de night ketch us in it ag'in en de ghos' er dat lake come a-mournin' aroun' us en we asleep en doan' know de danger we's in." "Ghost, you gander! It ain't anything but air and heat and thirstiness pasted together by a person's imagination. If I gimme the glass!"
But it seemed that all the fuss came about through the Queen of the Desert's objection to the unknown lady on her hack, an objection which was causing her to twist her long neck backwards in the diabolical hope that the loose-lipped mouth in the spite-contorted face might reach something to bite, be it foot or saddle, cloth or skirt.
But her smile could befuddle him no more. He took off his hat, with a certain cold elegance of grace. His face still wore that chiseled appearance of stone-like hardness. "Oh!" she cried, in her irrepressible happiness of heart. "You're home! You're safe! I'm glad!" It was nothing, her cry that he was safe. She had worried only for the desert's customary perils, but this he could not know.
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