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Updated: July 7, 2025
Count Anteoni expressed it for her. "The Steppes and the Desert are akin, you know," he said. "Despite the opposition of frost and fire." "Just what I was thinking!" she exclaimed. "That must be why " She stopped short. "Yes?" said the Count. Both Father Roubier and Androvsky looked at her with expectancy.
She began to speak to Count Anteoni about some absurdity of Batouch, forcing her mind into a light and frivolous mood, and he echoed her tone with a clever obedience for which secretly she blessed him. In a moment they were laughing together with apparent merriment, and Father Roubier smiled innocently at their light-heartedness, believing in it sincerely.
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.
As he spoke Domini saw before her in the moonlight De Trevignac. He cast a glance of horror at the tent, bent over her, made the sign of the Cross, and vanished. In his place stood Father Roubier, his eyes shining, his hand upraised, warning her against Androvsky. Then he, too, vanished, and she seemed to see Count Anteoni dressed as an Arab and muttering words of the Koran. "Domini!"
At another moment it stirred her, and she was a woman on the edge of mysterious possibilities. There must be many individualities among the desert spirits of whom Count Anteoni had spoken. Now one was with her and whispered to her, now another. She fancied the light touch of their hands on hers, pulling gently at her, as a child pulls you to take you to see a treasure.
In the oasis of Beni-Mora men, who had slowly roused themselves to pray, sank down to sleep again in the warm twilight of shrouded gardens or the warm night of windowless rooms. In the garden of Count Anteoni Larbi's flute was silent. "It is like noon in a mirage," Domini said softly. Count Anteoni nodded. "I feel as if I were looking at myself a long way off," she added.
And with Count Anteoni and the priest she set another figure, that of the sand-diviner, whose tortured face had suggested a man looking on a fate that was terrible. Had not he, too, warned her? Had not the warning been threefold, been given to her by the world, the Church, and the under-world the world beneath the veil? She met Androvsky's eyes. He was getting up to leave the room.
He and the priest they would surely be antagonists. Had he not turned aside to avoid the priest in the tunnel? Probably he was one of those many men who actively hate the priesthood, to whom the soutane is anathema. Could he find pleasant companionship with such a man as Count Anteoni, an original man, no doubt, but also a cultivated and easy man of the world?
In a postscript was an address which would always find her. Count Anteoni read this letter two or three times carefully, with a grave face. "Why did she not put Domini Androvsky?" he said to himself. He locked the letter in a drawer. All that night he was haunted by thoughts of the garden.
You have come to a land of fire, and I think you are made of fire." The warnings of Anteoni and the priest made an impression on Domini. She was conscious of how the outside world would be likely to regard her acquaintance with Androvsky.
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