and stared out of his window, crossing his legs.  He wore large boots with square toes, clumsy and unfashionable, but comfortable and good for walking in.  His clothes had obviously been made by a French tailor.  The stuff of them was grey and woolly, and they were cut tighter to the figure than English clothes generally are.  He had on a black silk necktie, and a soft brown travelling hat dented in the middle.  By the way in which he looked out of the window, Domini judged that he, too, was seeing the desert for the first time.  There was something almost passionately attentive in his attitude, something of strained eagerness in that part of his face which she could see from where she was sitting.  His cheek was not pale, as she had thought at first, but brown, obviously burnt by the sun of Africa.  But she felt that underneath the sunburn there was pallor.  She fancied he might be a painter, and was noting all the extraordinary colour effects with the definiteness of a man who meant, perhaps, to reproduce them on canvas.

The light, which had now the peculiar, almost supernatural softness and limpidity of light falling at evening from a declining sun in a hot country, came full upon him, and brightened his hair.  Domini saw that it was brown with some chestnut in it, thick, and cut extremely short, as if his head had recently been shaved.  She felt convinced that he was not French.  He might be an Austrian, perhaps, or a Russian from the south of Russia.  He remained motionless in that attitude of profound observation.  It suggested great force not merely of body, but also of mind, an almost abnormal concentration upon the thing observed.  This was a man who could surely shut out the whole world to look at a grain of sand, if he thought it beautiful or interesting.

They were near Beni-Mora now.  Its palms appeared far off, and in the midst of them a snow-white tower.  The Sahara lay beyond and around it, rolling away from the foot of low, brown hills, that looked as if they had been covered with a soft powder of bronze.  A long spur of rose-coloured mountains stretched away towards the south.  The sun was very near his setting.  Small, red clouds floated in the western quarter of the sky, and the far desert was becoming mysteriously dim and blue, like a remote sea.  Here and there thin wreaths of smoke ascended from it, and lights glittered in it, like earth-bound stars.

Domini had never before understood how strangely, how strenuously, colour can at moments appeal to the imagination.  In this pageant of the East she saw arise the naked soul of Africa; no faded, gentle thing, fearful of being seen, fearful of being known and understood; but a phenomenon vital, bold and gorgeous, like the sound of a trumpet pealing a great reveille.  As she looked on this flaming land laid fearlessly bare before her, disdaining the clothing of grass, plant and flower, of stream and tree, displaying itself with an almost brazen insouciance, confident