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Glancing down at the carpet sand she imagined the figure of the sand-diviner crouching there and recalled his prophecy, and directly she did this she knew that she had believed in it. She had believed that one day she would ride, out into the desert in a storm, and that with her, enclosed in the curtains of a palanquin, there would be a companion.
In it she saw the priest with a fanatical look of warning in his eyes, Count Anteoni beneath the trees of his garden, the perfume-seller in his dark bazaar, Irena with her long throat exposed and her thin arms drooping, the sand-diviner spreading forth his hands, Androvsky galloping upon a horse as if pursued. This last vision returned again and again.
She knew that he was alluding to the vision of the sand-diviner, and said so. "Did you believe at the time that what he said would come true?" she asked. "How could I? Am I a child?" He spoke with gentle irony, but she felt he was playing with her. "Cannot a man believe such things?" He did not answer her, but said: "My fate has come to pass. Do you not care to know what it is?"
For the desert is the garden of Allah." He made her no answer. At last in their journeying they came to the sacred city of Amara, and camped in the white sands beyond it. This was the place described by the sand-diviner, and here Domini knew that her love was to be crowned, that she would become a mother.
As it reached the end of the platform Domini saw an emaciated figure standing there alone, a thin face with glittering eyes turned towards her with a glaring scrutiny. It was the sand-diviner. He smiled at her, and his smile contracted the wound upon his face, making it look wicked and grotesque like the face of a demon. She sank down on the seat.
All that the priest had said rose up in her mind, all that Count Anteoni had hinted and that had been visible in the face of the sand-diviner. This man had followed her into the night as a guardian. Did she need someone, something, to guard her from him? A faint horror was still upon her.
The camel turned its head towards him, showing its teeth, and snarling with a sort of dreary passion. "A-ah!" shouted the driver. "A-ah! A-ah!" The camel began to get up. As it did so, from the shrouded group of desert men one started forward to the palanquin, throwing off his burnous and gesticulating with thin naked arms, as if about to commit some violent act. It was the sand-diviner.
She looked across the sands and saw fires in the city, and suddenly she said to herself, "This is the vision of the sand-diviner realised in my life. He saw me as I am now, in this place." And she remembered the scene in the garden, the crouching figure, the extended arms, the thin fingers tracing swift patterns in the sand, the murmuring voice.
She was vaguely aware that he was abusing Batouch, saying that he was a liar, inclined to theft, a keef smoker, and in a general way steeped to the lips in crime. But the moon was rising, the distant music was becoming more distinct. She could not listen to Hadj. As they turned into the street of the sand-diviner the first ray of the moon fell on the white road.
Well, one day she went to what they call a sand-diviner. She didn't pretend anything. She told me she wanted to go, and I was ready. I was always ready that she should have any little pleasure. I couldn't leave the café, so she went off alone to a room he had by the Garden of the Gazelles, at the end of the dancing-street." "I know over the place where they smoke the kief."
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