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Updated: June 7, 2025
Let us listen to the question or is it the demand? of the desert in this noontide hour, the greatest hour of all the twenty-four in such a land as this." They were silent again, watching the noon, listening to it, feeling it, as they had been silent when the Mueddin's nasal voice rose in the call to prayer. Count Anteoni stood in the sunshine by the low white parapet of the garden.
"But that's where Count Anteoni went when he rode away from Beni-Mora that morning." "Yes, Madame." "Is it far from Amara?" "Two hours' ride across the desert." "But then Count Anteoni may be near us. After he left he wrote to me and gave me his address at the marabout's house." "If he is still with the marabout, Madame."
She asked him why. He answered that Androvsky seemed to him a man who was at odds with life, with himself, with his Creator, a man who was defying Allah in Allah's garden. When Anteoni had gone, Domini, in some perplexity of spirit, and moved by a longing for sympathy and help, visited the priest in his house near the church.
She did not look about her, did not see the sunlit reaches of the desert, or the walls of the houses of Beni-Mora, or the palm trees. Only when she had passed the hotel and the negro village and turned to the left, to the track at the edge of which the villa of Count Anteoni stood, did she lift her eyes from the ground. They rested on the white arcade framing the fierce blue of the cloudless sky.
Afterwards she explained to Anteoni that she felt as if another's fate was being read in it as well as her own, as if to listen any more might be to intrude upon another's secret. Upon the following day Anteoni left Beni-Mora to make a long desert journey to a sacred city called Amara. Domini went to his garden at dawn to see him off. Before departing he warned Domini to beware of Androvsky.
She almost held her breath as she and Androvsky came down the path and the fierce sunrays reached out to light up their faces. Count Anteoni stepped forward to greet them. "Monsieur Androvsky Count Anteoni," she said. The hands of the two men met. She saw that Androvsky's was lifted reluctantly. "Welcome to my garden," Count Anteoni said with his invariable easy courtesy.
He held it almost as a father or a guardian might have held it. "And this garden is yours day and night Smain knows." "Thank you," she said again. The shrill whinnying of a horse came to them from a distance. Their hands fell apart. Count Anteoni looked round him slowly at the great cocoanut tree, at the shaggy grass of the lawn, at the tall bamboos and the drooping mulberry trees.
While she stood there, half turning round, she heard the sound again and knew what caused it. A foot had shifted on the plaster floor. There was someone else then looking out over the desert. A sudden idea struck her. Probably it was Count Anteoni. He knew she was coming and might have decided to act once more as her cicerone.
The seller of perfumes had led her towards a dream. She was not combative, and she would be alone in the garden. As they walked towards it in the sun, through narrow ways where idle Arabs lounged with happy aimlessness, Batouch talked of Count Anteoni, the owner of the garden. Evidently the Count was the great personage of Beni-Mora.
As he spoke they came out from the tunnel and were seized by the fierce hands of the sun. It was within half an hour of noon, and the radiance was blinding. Domini put up her parasol sharply, like one startled. She stopped. "But how tremendous!" she exclaimed. Count Anteoni laughed again, and drew down the brim of his grey hat over his eyes.
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