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Updated: May 20, 2025
"I am not one of them," Androvsky said abruptly. "I have never felt so strong physically as since I have lived in the sand." The priest still looked at him closely, but said nothing further on the subject of health. Indeed, almost immediately his attention was distracted by the apparition of Ouardi bearing dishes from the cook's tent.
It was a squat, square tower, strongly constructed, with loopholes in the four sides, and now that she was by it she saw built out at the back of it a low house with small shuttered windows and a narrow courtyard for mules. No doubt Androvsky was right and French soldiers had once been here to work the optic telegraph.
She felt suddenly weary, as one being hypnotised feels weary when the body and spirit begin to yield to the spell of the operator. Androvsky remained standing. His eyes were fixed on the ground, and she thought his face looked almost phantom-like, as if the blood had sunk away from it, leaving it white beneath the brown tint set there by the sun. He stayed quite still.
Simply, she had forgotten, for the first time perhaps in her life, an ordinary act of courtesy, as an old person sometimes forgets you are there and withdraws into himself. Androvsky had said nothing, had not tried to attract her attention to himself. She had heard his steps die away on the verandah.
"Perhaps we had better stay here," she said to Androvsky. Her voice, too, was low and tired. In her heart something seemed to say, "Do not strive any more. In the garden it was finished. Already you are face to face with the end."
Yet at moments she felt as if he had penetrated more profoundly into the dark and winding valleys of experience than all the men of her acquaintance. "Monsieur Androvsky," she said, looking at the slow waters of the stream slipping by towards the hidden gardens, "is the desert new to you?" She longed to know. "Yes, Madame."
As he gazed at her the priest had a strange thought of how Christ's face must have looked when he said, "Lazarus, come forth!" Androvsky stood by her, but the priest did not look at him. The wind roared round the church, the narrow windows rattled, and the clouds of sand driven against them made a pattering as of fingers tapping frantically upon the glass.
"It was written in the sand and in fire: 'The fate of every man have we bound about his neck." In the dawn when, turning towards the rising sun, he prayed, he remembered Domini and her words: "Pray in the desert for us." And in the Garden of Allah he prayed to Allah for her, and for Androvsky.
There are moments when Open the gate, Smain!" His ardour was infectious and Domini felt stirred by it to a sudden sense of the joy of life. She looked at Androvsky, to include him in the rigour of gaiety which swept from the Count to her, and found him staring apprehensively at the Count, who was now loosening the string of the bag. Smain had reached the gate.
It made Domini smile in sympathy, but De Trevignac and Androvsky looked at each other for a moment, the one with a sort of earnest inquiry, the other with hostility, or what seemed hostility, across the circle of lamplight that lay between them. "A tower rising in the desert emphasises the desolation. I suppose that was it," Androvsky said, as the laugh died down into Batouch's throaty chuckle.
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