“What is his name?” she asked.

“Aloui.”

“Aloui.”

She repeated the word slowly.  There was a reluctant and yet fascinated sound in her voice.

“There is melody in the name,” he said.

“Yes.  Has he—­has he ever looked in the sand for you?”

“Once—­a long time ago.”

“May I—­dare I ask if he found truth there?”

“He found nothing for all the years that have passed since then.”

“Nothing!”

There was a sound of relief in her voice.

“For those years.”

She glanced at him and saw that once again his face had lit up into ardour.

“He found what is still to come?” she said.

And he repeated: 

“He found what is still to come.”

Then they walked on in silence till they saw the purple blossoms of the bougainvillea clinging to the white walls of the fumoir.  Domini stopped on the narrow path.

“Is he in there?” she asked almost in a whisper.

“No doubt.”

“Larbi was playing the first day I came here.”

“Yes.”

“I wish he was playing now.”

The silence seemed to her unnaturally intense.

“Even his love must have repose.”

She went on a step or two till, but still from a distance, she could look over the low plaster wall beneath the nearest window space into the little room.

“Yes, there he is,” she whispered.

The Diviner was crouching on the floor with his back towards them and his head bent down.  Only his shoulders could be seen, covered with a white gandoura.  They moved perpetually but slightly.

“What is he doing?”

“Speaking with his ancestor.”

“His ancestor?”

“The sand.  Aloui!”

He called softly.  The figure rose, without sound and instantly, and the face of the Diviner smiled at them through the purple flowers.  Again Domini had the sensation that her body was a glass box in which her thoughts, feelings and desires were ranged for this man’s inspection; but she walked resolutely through the narrow doorway and sat down on one of the divans.  Count Anteoni followed.

She now saw that in the centre of the room, on the ground, there was a symmetrical pyramid of sand, and that the Diviner was gently folding together a bag in his long and flexible fingers.

“You see!” said the Count.

She nodded, without speaking.  The little sand heap held her eyes.  She strove to think it absurd and the man who had shaken it out a charlatan of the desert, but she was really gripped by an odd feeling of awe, as if she were secretly expectant of some magical demonstration.

The Diviner squatted down once more on his haunches, stretched out his fingers above the sand heap, looked at her and smiled.

“La vie de Madame—­I see it in the sable—­la vie de Madame dans le grand desert du Sahara.”