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Updated: May 26, 2025
She thought of the gorge of El-Akbara, the cold, the darkness, and then the sun and the blue country. They had framed his face. She thought of the silent night when the voice of the African hautboy had died away. His step had broken its silence.
After a pause, and with an uncertain accent, he added: "Pardon, Madame for yesterday." There was a sudden simplicity, almost like that of a child, in the sound of his voice as he said that. Domini knew at once that he alluded to the incident at the station of El-Akbara, that he was trying to make amends. The way he did it touched her curiously.
Domini was very tired, and she began to feel angry with him, contemptuous too. The Arab could not find the money, and the little horn now piped its warning of departure. It was absolutely necessary for her to get in at once if she did not mean to stay at El-Akbara.
In the gorge of El-Akbara, ere he prayed, Batouch had spoken of it as a vast realm of forgetfulness, where the load of memory slips from the weary shoulders and vanishes into the soft gulf of the sands. But was it everything then? And if it was so much to her already, in a night and a day, what would it be when she knew it, what would it be to her after many nights and many days?
Without being aware of it she breathed out a great sigh, feeling the necessity of liberating her joy of spirit, of letting the body, however inadequately and absurdly, make some demonstration in response to the secret stirring of the soul. The man in the far corner of the carriage turned and looked at her. When she heard this movement Domini remembered her irritation against him at El-Akbara.
Strangers who had never spoken to each other. And the evening came, and the train stole into the gorge of El-Akbara, and still she kept her eyes closed. Only when the desert was finally left behind, divided from them by the great wall of rock, did she look up and speak to Androvsky. "We met here, Boris," she said. "Yes," he answered, "at the gate of the desert. I shall never be here again."
This was all that Domini noticed before the spell of change and the abrupt glory was broken, and she knew that she was staring into the face of the man who had behaved so rudely at the station of El-Akbara. The knowledge gave her a definite shock, and she thought that her expression must have changed abruptly, for a dull flush rose on the stranger's thin cheeks and mounted to his rugged forehead.
A guard came up, told her the place was El-Akbara, and that the train would stay there ten minutes to wait for the train from Beni-Mora. She decided to get out and stretch her cramped limbs. On the platform she found Suzanne, looking like a person who had just been slapped. One side of the maid's face was flushed and covered with a faint tracery of tiny lines. The other was greyish white.
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