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Updated: May 25, 2025
The faint buzz of the flies sounded in her ears and seemed more silent than even the silence to which it drew attention. Never before, not in Count Anteoni's garden, had she felt more utterly withdrawn from the world. The feathery tops of the palms were like the heads of sentinels guarding her from contact with all that she had known. And beyond them lay the desert, the empty, sunlit waste.
She did not pursue the subject, but stroked her horse's neck and turned her eyes towards the dark green line on the horizon. Now that she was really out in the desert she felt almost bewildered by it, and as if she understood it far less than when she looked at it from Count Anteoni's garden.
Often at dawn or sundown, when, perhaps in the distance of the sands, or near at hand beneath the shade of the palms of some oasis by a waterspring, she watched the desert men in their patched rags, with their lean, bronzed faces and eagle eyes turned towards Mecca, bowing their heads in prayer to the soil that the sun made hot, she remembered Count Anteoni's words, "I like to see men praying in the desert," and she understood with all her heart and soul why.
When she had finished it she gazed straight before her at the cloth, and strove to resume her thoughts of the priest's life in Beni-Mora. But she could not. It seemed to her as if she were back again in Count Anteoni's garden.
She mentioned the fact of Count Anteoni's having made the garden, and spoke of him, sketching lightly his whimsicality, his affection for the Arabs, his love of solitude, and of African life. She also mentioned that he was by birth a Roman. "But scarcely of the black world I should imagine," she added. Androvsky said nothing. "You should go and see the garden," she continued.
For the moment a sense of confusion and of pain beset her, and she was scarcely aware with whom she was, or where. The sensation passed and she recovered herself and met Count Anteoni's eyes quietly. "Yes," she answered; "all that has happened to me here in Africa was written in the sand and in fire." "You are thinking of the sun." "Yes." "I where are you living?"
"Boris" she spoke in a more eager voice, clasping his hand strongly "you remember the fumoir in Count Anteoni's garden. The place where it stood was the very heart of the garden." "Yes." "We understood each other there." He pressed her hand without speaking. "Amara seems to me the heart of the Garden of Allah. Perhaps perhaps we shall " She paused. Her eyes were fixed upon his face.
She remembered the entrancing quiet of Count Anteoni's garden, how as she entered it she seemed to be entering an earthly Paradise, a place prepared by God for one who was weary as she was weary, for one who longed to be renewed as she longed to be renewed.
Domini said, "It is strange; ever since I have been here I have felt as if everything that has happened had been arranged beforehand, as if it had to happen, and I feel that, too, about the future." "Count Anteoni's fatalism!" exclaimed the priest. "It is the guiding spirit of this land. And you, too, are going to be led by it. Take care!
But it passed almost as it came, like a false thing slinking from the sunlight, and Domini bowed her head in the obscurity of Count Anteoni's thinking-place and returned to her true self.
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