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But when the moon came the thinnest of silver half-hoops, very faint in the reflected rose from the west there was no sound except the song of the wood-larks. They persevered, although the sun was gone. Soon they, too, were hushed, and Hazel was folded in silence. She waited a long while. The chapel and the minister's house sank into the deepening night as into water.
Not far from where the track crossed a lonely road was a gipsy encampment; that swarthy people are ever about when anything is going on, and the reapers were busy in the corn. The dead dry thorns of the hedge answered very well to boil their pot with. Their tents, formed by thrusting the ends of long bent rods like half-hoops into the turf, looked dark like the canvas of a barge.
On one side of the grate, which was made of some half-hoops of iron fastened into the rock, there was a very aged man, childish and blind with years, who was crouching towards the fire, and talking and chuckling to himself. A girl, about a year older than Stephen, sat in a rocking-chair, and swung to and fro as she knitted away fast and diligently at a thick grey stocking.
It had been a morning of intense heat; the desert held not one breath of air. The spell of Egypt, which is its light, had vanished; the vast emptiness was as colourless as Scotland in an east wind. Piled up on his camel, Michael had ridden under a raised shelter, such as is used by caravan travellers on long journeys. It was made of bamboos, bent into half-hoops and covered with a light canvas.
The tent was similar to those which gipsies use not with a central pole, but stretched over half-hoops which were stuck in the ground. It was wide enough for three boys to lie comfortably in their sleeping-bags side by side. Gregory was to sleep in the caravan with the girls; Kink was to go to Woodstock. Meanwhile, with all of them, except Mary and Gregory, who had done well with Mrs.
The placing of these rustic half-hoops was a delicate matter, since it was necessary to arrange them so that plenty of air might circulate through the space they enclosed; otherwise the worms would refuse to spin. Twigs or slender pieces of brush were set along the shelves in such a way that when bent the shelf above held them in place and made of them a series of miniature bridges, or arches.
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