“But would you go if she wrote to you?” “Oh, if she wrote—­that would be different, but she never will.  There is no doubt, Harding, love is a sort of madness, and it takes every man; none can look into his life without finding that at some time or another he was mad; the only thing is that it has taken me rather badly, and cure seems farther off than ever.  Why is it, Harding, that a man should love one woman so much more than another?  It certainly isn’t because she has got a prettier face, or a more perfect figure, or a more sensual temperament; for there is no end to pretty faces, perfect figures, and sensual temperaments.  Evelyn was pretty well furnished with these things.  I am prepared to admit that she was, but of course there are more beautiful women and more sensual women, more charming women, cleverer women—­I suppose there are—­yet no one ever charmed me, enchanted me—­that is the word—­like this woman, and I can find no reason for the enchantment in her or in myself, only this, that she represents more of the divine essence out of which all things have come than any other woman.”

“The divine essence?”

“Well, one has to use these words in order to be understood; but you know what I mean, Harding, the mystery lying behind all phenomena, the Breath, esoteric philosophers would say, out of which all things came, which drew the stars in the beginning out of chaos, creating myriads of things or the appearance of different things, for there is only one thing.  That is how the mystics talk—­isn’t it?  You know more about them than I do.  If to every man some woman represented more of this impulse than any other woman, he would be unable to separate himself from her; she would always be a light in his life which he would follow, a light in the mind—­that is what Evelyn is to me; I never understood it before, it is only lately—­”

“The desert has turned you into a poet, I see, into a mystic.”

“Hardly that; but in the desert there are long hours and nothing—­ only thought; one has to think, if one isn’t a bedouin, just to save oneself from going mad:  the empty spaces, the solitude, the sun!  One of these days when you have finished your books, I should like to write one with you; my impressions of the desert as I rode from oasis to oasis, seeking Tahar—­”

“Who was he?”

“He was the man who had the eagles.  Haven’t I told you already how—?”

“Yes, yes, Asher, but tell me did you meet Tahar, and did you see gazelles hunted?”

“Yes, and larger deer.  My first idea was hawking and we went to a lake.  One of these days I must tell you about that lake, about its wild fowl, about the buried city and the heron which was killed.  We found it among Roman inscriptions.  But to tell of these things—­my goodness, Harding, it would take hours!”

“Don’t try, Asher.  Tell me about the gazelles.”

“How we went from oasis to oasis in quest of this man who always eluded us, meeting him at last in Beclere’s oasis.  But you haven’t heard about Beclere’s, the proprietor, you might say, of one oasis; he discovered a Roman well, and added thousands of acres; but if I began to tell about Beclere’s we should be here till midnight.”