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He pursued his way down a sandy road through the orange-gardens, which looked black beneath the sunset of unusual splendour owing to the presence in the sky of ragged clouds. A fellah who passed remarked that rain was coming. "Art on the way to visit me?" A hand fell suddenly upon Iskender's shoulder. A tall black-clad form had overtaken him, unheard by reason of the muffling sand.

The ladies were delighted with the vast orange-gardens of Joppa, which Madame Phoebus said realized quite her idea of the Holy Land. "I was prepared for milk and honey," said Euphrosyne, "but this is too delightful," as she travelled through lanes of date-bearing palm-trees, and sniffed with her almond-shaped nostrils the all-pervading fragrance.

Far up the river the Loulia was moored, between Baroudi's orange-gardens and Armant, and each day he dropped down the Nile in his white boat to meet the European woman, bringing only one attendant with him, a huge Nubian called Aïyoub. The tourists who come to Luxor seldom go far from certain fixed points.

Before her, at a short distance, she saw a great green dusk of trees spreading from the river-bank inland, sharply defined, with no ragged edges a dusk that had been planned by man, not left to Nature's dealings. This was not a feathery dusk of palm-trees. She looked steadily, and knew. "Mahmoud Baroudi's orange-gardens!" she said to Ibrahim. "Suttinly!" he replied.

"I have orange-gardens there." "I wonder you can manage to look after it all sugar, cotton, quarries, house property, works, factories. Phew! It almost makes one's head spin. And you see into everything yourself!" "Where the master's eye does not look, the servant's is turned away. Do you not find it so in the Fayyūm?" "I shall know in two or three days." Nigel suddenly looked round at his wife.

After an hour's journey, having left the orange-gardens far behind, they forsook the highway and followed a bridle-path through fields. Big scarlet tulips shone among the green cornstems.

"We best make haste, sir," said Abdullah, pointing eastward. The sky inland was black as ink and formless; the sand looked white as sun-bleached bone by contrast; the dark green wave of the orange-gardens appeared pale; a palm-tree in the distance stood up wan against the impending cloud. Presently a flash of lightning made them quicken step; big drops of water fell like bullets round them.

To the eye of the traveller with a mind for the picturesque, there were parts of this central region of France whose smiling undulations, delicious water-scenes, deep glens extending into amphitheatres, and slopes hung with woods of chestnut, all seemed to make a lovelier picture than the cheerful beauty of prosperous Normandy, or the olive-groves and orange-gardens of Provence.

Through the orange-gardens, out on to the plain, he sped like the wind, until his steed gave signs of fainting and he had to stop. Looking back along the way he had come, he could not see his companions and their string of mules, though the ground was open and the air quite clear. Evidently they had not yet left the gardens.

We went on for some distance through a great many orange-gardens, till we came to a lane thickly hedged in on both sides, which was entered by a gate, and there, after the body of our army had passed through, some few men, including myself, waited in ambush for the Indians, having a reserve placed a short distance down the lane in case of a combat.