The Garden Of Allah

R >> Robert Hichens >> The Garden Of Allah


He still looked steadily at the rings of smoke curling up into the
golden air. There was in his voice a sound of embarrassment. She guessed
that it came from the consciousness of the pain he must have caused
the good priest who had loved him when he ceased from practising the
religion in which he had been brought up. Even to her he never spoke
frankly on religious subjects, but she knew that he had been baptised a
Catholic and been educated for a time by priests. She knew, too, that
he was no longer a practising Catholic, and that, for some reason, he
dreaded any intimacy with priests. He never spoke against them. He had
scarcely ever spoken of them to her. But she remembered his words in the
garden, "I do not care for priests." She remembered, too, his action
in the tunnel on the day of his arrival in Beni-Mora. And the reticence
that they both preserved on the subject of religion, and its reason,
were the only causes of regret in this desert dream of hers. Even this
regret, too, often faded in hope. For in the desert, the Garden of
Allah, she had it borne in upon her that Androvsky would discover what
he must surely secretly be seeking--the truth that each man must find
for himself, truth for him of the eventual existence in which the
mysteries of this present existence will be made plain, and of the Power
that has fashioned all things.

And she was able to hope in silence, as women do for the men they love.

"Don't think I do not realise that you have worked," she went on after
a pause. "You told me how you always cultivated the land yourself, even
when you were still a boy, that you directed the Spanish labourers in
the vineyards, that--you have earned a long holiday. But should it last
for ever?"

"You are right. Well, let us take an oasis; let us become palm gardeners
like that Frenchman at Meskoutine."

"And build ourselves an African house, white, with a terrace roof."

"And sell our dates. We can give employment to the Arabs. We can choose
the poorest. We can improve their lives. After all, if we owe a debt to
anyone it is to them, to the desert. Let us pay our debt to the desert
men and live in the desert."

"It would be an ideal life," she said with her eyes shining on his.

"And a possible life. Let us live it. I could not bear to leave the
desert. Where should we go?"

"Where should we go!" she repeated.

She was still looking at him, but now the expression of her eyes had
quite changed. They had become grave, and examined him seriously with a
sort of deep inquiry. He sat upon the Arab rug, leaning his back against
the wall of the traveller's house.

"Why do you look at me like that, Domini?" he asked with a sudden
stirring of something that was like uneasiness.

"I! I was wondering what you would like, what other life would suit
you."

"Yes?" he said quickly. "Yes?"

"It's very strange, Boris, but I cannot connect you with anything but
the desert, or see you anywhere but in the desert. I cannot even imagine
you among your vines in Tunisia."

"They were not altogether mine," he corrected, still with a certain
excitement which he evidently endeavoured to repress. "I--I had the
right, the duty of cultivating the land."

"Well, however it was, you were always at work; you were responsible,
weren't you?"

"Yes."

"I can't see you even in the vineyards or the wheat-fields. Isn't it
strange?"

She was always looking at him with the same deep and wholly
unselfconscious inquiry.

"And as to London, Paris--"

Suddenly she burst into a little laugh and her gravity vanished.

"I think you would hate them," she said. "And they--they wouldn't like
you because they wouldn't understand you."

"Let us buy our oasis," he said abruptly. "Build our African house, sell
our dates and remain in the desert. I hear Batouch. It must be time to
ride on to Mogar. Batouch! Batouch!"

Batouch came from the courtyard of the house wiping the remains of a
cous-cous from his languid lips.

"Untie the horses," said Androvsky.

"But, Monsieur, it is still too hot to travel. Look! No one is stirring.
All the village is asleep."

He waved his enormous hand, with henna-tinted nails, towards the distant
town, carved surely out of one huge piece of bronze.

"Untie the horses. There are gazelle in the plain near Mogar. Didn't you
tell me?"

"Yes, Monsieur, but--"

"We'll get there early and go out after them at sunset. Now, Domini."

They rode away in the burning heat of the noon towards the southwest
across the vast plains of grey sand, followed at a short distance by
Batouch and Ali.

"Monsieur is mad to start in the noon," grumbled Batouch. "But Monsieur
is not like Madame. He may live in the desert till he is old and his
hair is grey as the sand, but he will never be an Arab in his heart."

"Why, Batouch-ben-Brahim?"

"He cannot rest. To Madame the desert gives its calm, but to Monsieur--"
He did not finish his sentence. In front Domini and Androvsky had put
their horses to a gallop. The sand flew up in a thin cloud around them.

"Nom d'un chien!" said Batouch, who, in unpoetical moments, occasionally
indulged in the expletives of the French infidels who were his country's
rulers. "What is there in the mind of Monsieur which makes him ride as
if he fled from an enemy?"

"I know not, but he goes like a hare before the sloughi, Batouch-ben
Brahim," answered Ali, gravely.

Then they sent their horses on in chase of the cloud of sand towards the
southwest.

About four in the afternoon they reached the camp at Mogar.

As they rode in slowly, for their horses were tired and streaming with
heat after their long canter across the sands, both Domini and Androvsky
were struck by the novelty of this halting-place, which was quite unlike
anything they had yet seen. The ground rose gently but continuously for
a considerable time before they saw in the distance the pitched tents
with the dark forms of the camels and mules. Here they were out of the
sands, and upon hard, sterile soil covered with small stones embedded
in the earth. Beyond the tents they could see nothing but the sky,
which was now covered with small, ribbed grey clouds, sad-coloured and
autumnal, and a lonely tower built of stone, which rose from the waste
at about two hundred yards from the tents to the east. Although they
could see so little, however, they were impressed with a sensation that
they were on the edge of some vast vision, of some grandiose effect of
Nature, that would bring to them a new and astonishing knowledge of the
desert. Perhaps it was the sight of the distant tower pointing to
the grey clouds that stirred in them this almost excited feeling of
expectation.

"It is like a watch-tower," Domini said, pointing with her whip. "But
who could live in such a place, far from any oasis?"

"And what can it overlook?" said Androvsky. "This is the nearest horizon
line we have seen since we came into the desert."

"Yes, but----"

She glanced at him as they put their horses into a gentle canter. Then
she added:

"You, too, feel that we are coming to something tremendous, don't you?"

Her horse whinnied shrilly. Domini stroked his foam-flecked neck with
her hand.

"Abou is as full of anticipation as we are," she said. Androvsky was
looking towards the tower.

"That was built for French soldiers," he said. A moment afterwards he
added:

"I wonder why Batouch chose this place for us to camp in?"

There was a faint sound as of irritation in his voice.

"Perhaps we shall know in a minute," Domini answered. They cantered on.
Their horses' hoofs rang with a hard sound on the stony ground.

"It's inhospitable here," Androvsky said. She looked at him in surprise.

"I never knew you to take a dislike to any halting-place before," she
said. "What's the matter, Boris?"

He smiled at her, but almost immediately his face was clouded by the
shadow of a gloom that seemed to respond to the gloom of the sky. And he
fixed his eyes again upon the tower.

"I like a far horizon," he answered. "And there's no sun to-day."

"I suppose even in the desert we cannot have it always," she said. And
in her voice, too, there was a touch of melancholy, as if she had caught
his mood. A minute later she added:

"I feel exactly as if I were on a hill top and were coming to a view of
the sea."

Almost as she spoke they cantered in among the tents of the attendants,
and reined in their horses at the edge of a slope that was almost a
precipice. Then they sat still in their saddles, gazing.

They had been living for weeks in the midst of vastness, and had become
accustomed to see stretched out around them immense tracts of land
melting away into far blue distances, but this view from Mogar made them
catch their breath and stiffed their pulses.

It was gigantic. There was even something unnatural in its appearance
of immensity, as if it were, perhaps, deceptive, and existed in their
vision of it only. So, surely, might look a plain to one who had taken
haschish, which enlarges, makes monstrous and threateningly terrific.
Domini had a feeling that no human eyes could really see such infinite
tracts of land and water as those she seemed to be seeing at this
moment. For there was water here, in the midst of the desert. Infinite
expanses of sea met infinite plains of snow. Or so it seemed to both
of them. And the sea was grey and calm as a winter sea, breathing its
plaint along a winter land. From it, here and there, rose islets whose
low cliffs were a deep red like the red of sandstone, a sad colour that
suggests tragedy, islets that looked desolate, and as if no life had
ever been upon them, or could be. Back from the snowy plains stretched
sand dunes of the palest primrose colour, sand dunes innumerable,
myriads and myriads of them, rising and falling, rising and falling,
till they were lost in the grey distance of this silent world. In the
foreground, at their horses' feet, wound from the hill summit a broad
track faintly marked in the deep sand, and flanked by huge dunes shaped,
by the action of the winds, into grotesque semblances of monsters,
leviathans, beasts with prodigious humps, sphinxes, whales. This track
was presently lost in the blanched plains. Far away, immeasurably far,
sea and snow blended and faded into the cloudy grey. Above the near
dunes two desert eagles were slowly wheeling in a weary flight,
occasionally sinking towards the sand, then rising again towards the
clouds. And the track was strewn with the bleached bones of camels that
had perished, or that had been slaughtered, on some long desert march.

To the left of them the solitary tower commanded this terrific vision
of desolation, seemed to watch it steadily, yet furtively, with its tiny
loophole eyes.

"We have come into winter," Domini murmured.

She looked at the white of the camels' bones, of the plains, at the grey
white of the sky, at the yellow pallor of the dunes.

"How wonderful! How terrible!" she said.

She drew her horse to one side, a little nearer to Androvsky's.

"Does the Russian in you greet this land?" she asked him.

He did not reply. He seemed to be held in thrall by the sad immensity
before them.

"I realise here what it must be to die in the desert, to be killed by
it--by hunger, by thirst in it," she said presently, speaking, as if to
herself, and looking out over the mirage sea, the mirage snow. "This is
the first time I have really felt the terror of the desert."

Her horse drooped its head till its nose nearly touched the earth, and
shook itself in a long shiver. She shivered too, as if constrained to
echo an animal's distress.

"Things have died here," Androvsky said, speaking at last in a low voice
and pointing with his long-lashed whip towards the camels' skeletons.
"Come, Domini, the horses are tired."

He cast another glance at the tower, and they dismounted by their tent,
which was pitched at the very edge of the steep slope that sank down to
the beast-like shapes of the near dunes.

An hour later Domini said to Androvsky:

"You won't go after gazelle this evening surely?"

They had been having coffee in the tent and had just finished. Androvsky
got up from his chair and went to the tent door. The grey of the sky was
pierced by a gleaming shaft from the sun.

"Do you mind if I go?" he said, turning towards her after a glance to
the desert.

"No, but aren't you tired?"

He shook his head.

"I couldn't ride, and now I can ride. I couldn't shoot, and I'm just
beginning--"

"Go," she said quickly. "Besides, we want gazelle for dinner, Batouch
says, though I don't suppose we should starve without it." She came to
the tent door and stood beside him, and he put his arm around her.

"If I were alone here, Boris," she said, leaning against his shoulder,
"I believe I should feel horribly sad to-day."

"Shall I stay?"

He pressed her against him.

"No. I shall know you are coming back. Oh, how extraordinary it is to
think we lived so many years without knowing of each other's existence,
that we lived alone. Were you ever happy?"

He hesitated before he replied.

"I sometimes thought I was."

"But do you think now you ever really were?"

"I don't know--perhaps in a lonely sort of way."

"You can never be happy in that way now?"

He said nothing, but, after a moment, he kissed her long and hard, and
as if he wanted to draw her being into his through the door of his lips.

"Good-bye," he said, releasing her. "I shall be back directly after
sundown."

"Yes. Don't wait for the dark down there. If you were lost in the
dunes!"

She pointed to the distant sand hills rising and falling monotonously to
the horizon.

"If you are not back in good time," she said, "I shall stand by the
tower and wave a brand from the fire."

"Why by the tower?"

"The ground is highest by the tower."

She watched him ride away on a mule, with two Arabs carrying guns. They
went towards the plains of saltpetre that looked like snow beside the
sea that was only a mirage. Then she turned back into the tent, took
up a volume of Fromentin's, and sat down in a folding-chair at the tent
door. She read a little, but it was difficult to read with the mirage
beneath her. Perpetually her eyes were attracted from the book to its
mystery and plaintive sadness, that was like the sadness of something
unearthly, of a spirit that did not move but that suffered. She did not
put away the book, but presently she laid it down on her knees, open,
and sat gazing. Androvsky had disappeared with the Arabs into some fold
of the sands. The sun-ray had vanished with him. Without Androvsky and
the sun--she still connected them together, and knew she would for ever.

The melancholy of this desert scene was increased for her till it became
oppressive and lay upon her like a heavy weight. She was not a woman
inclined to any morbid imaginings. Indeed, all that was morbid roused
in her an instinctive disgust. But the sudden greyness of the weather,
coming after weeks of ardent sunshine, and combined with the fantastic
desolation of the landscape, which was half real and half unreal, turned
her for the moment towards a dreariness of spirit that was rare in her.

She realised suddenly, as she looked and did not see Androvsky even as a
black and moving speck upon the plain; what the desert would seem to her
without him, even in sunshine, the awfulness of the desolation of it,
the horror of its distances. And realising this she also realised the
uncertainty of the human life in connection with any other human life.
To be dependent on another is to double the sum of the terrors of
uncertainty. She had done that.

If the immeasurable sands took Androvsky and never gave him back to her!
What would she do?

She gazed at the mirage sea with its dim red islands, and at the sad
white plains along its edge.

Winter--she would be plunged in eternal winter. And each human life
hangs on a thread. All deep love, all consuming passion, holds a great
fear within the circle of a great glory. To-day the fear within the
circle of her glory seemed to grow. But she suddenly realised that she
ought to dominate it, to confine it--as it were--to its original and
permanent proportions.

She got up, came out upon the edge of the hill, and walked along it
slowly towards the tower.

Outside, freed from the shadow of the tent, she felt less oppressed,
though still melancholy, and even slightly apprehensive, as if some
trouble were coming to her and were near at hand. Mentally she had made
the tower the limit of her walk, and therefore when she reached it she
stood still.

It was a squat, square tower, strongly constructed, with loopholes in
the four sides, and now that she was by it she saw built out at the back
of it a low house with small shuttered windows and a narrow courtyard
for mules. No doubt Androvsky was right and French soldiers had once
been here to work the optic telegraph. She thought of the recruits and
of Marseilles, of Notre Dame de la Garde, the Mother of God, looking
towards Africa. Such recruits came to live in such strange houses as
this tower lost in the desert and now abandoned. She glanced at the
shuttered windows and turned back towards the tent; but something in the
situation of the tower--perhaps the fact that it was set on the highest
point of the ground--attracted her, and she presently made Batouch bring
her out some rugs and ensconced herself under its shadow, facing the
mirage sea.

How long she sat there she did not know. Mirage hypnotises the
imaginative and suggests to them dreams strange and ethereal, sad
sometimes, as itself. How long she might have sat there dreaming,
but for an interruption, she knew still less. It was towards evening,
however, but before evening had fallen, that a weary and travel-stained
party of three French soldiers, Zouaves, and an officer rode slowly up
the sandy track from the dunes. They were mounted on mules, and carried
their small baggage with them on two led mules. When they reached the
top of the hill they turned to the right and came towards the tower. The
officer was a little in advance of his men. He was a smart-looking, fair
man of perhaps thirty-two, with blonde moustaches, blue eyes with blonde
lashes, and hair very much the colour of the sand dunes. His face was
bright red, burnt, as a fair delicate skin burns, by the sun. His eyes,
although protected by large sun spectacles, were inflamed. The skin was
peeling from his nose. His hair was full of sand, and he rode leaning
forward over his animal's neck, holding the reins loosely in his hands,
that seemed nerveless from fatigue. Yet he looked smart and well-bred
despite his evident exhaustion, as if on parade he would be a dashing
officer. It was evident that both he and his men were riding in from
some tremendous journey. The latter looked dog-tired, scarcely human in
their collapse. They kept on their mules with difficulty, shaking this
way and that like sacks, with their unshaven chins wagging loosely up
and down. But as they saw the tower they began to sing in chorus half
under their breath, and leaning their broad hands on the necks of the
beasts for support they looked with a sort of haggard eagerness in its
direction.

Domini was roused from her contemplation of the mirage and the daydreams
it suggested by the approach of this small cavalcade. The officer was
almost upon her ere she heard the clatter of his mule among the stones.
She looked up, startled, and he looked down, even more surprised,
apparently, to see a lady ensconced at the foot of the tower. His
astonishment and exhaustion did not, however, get the better of his
instinctive good breeding, and sitting straight up in the saddle he took
off his sun helmet and asked Domini's pardon for disturbing her.

"But this is my home for the night, Madame," he added, at the same time
drawing a key from the pocket of his loose trousers. "And I'm thankful
to reach it. _Ma foi_! there have been several moments in the last days
when I never thought to see Mogar."

Slowly he swung himself off his mule and stood up, catching on to the
saddle with one hand.

"F-f-f-f!" he said, pursing his lips. "I can hardly stand. Excuse me,
Madame."

Domini had got up.

"You are tired out," she said, looking at him and his men, who had now
come up, with interest.

"Pretty well indeed. We have been three days lost in the great dunes
in a sand-storm, and hit the track here just as we were preparing for
a--well, a great event."

"A great event?" said Domini.

"The last in a man's life, Madame."

He spoke simply, even with a light touch of humour that was almost
cynical, but she felt beneath his words and manner a solemnity and a
thankfulness that attracted and moved her.

"Those terrible dunes!" she said.

And, turning, she looked out over them.

There was no sunset, but the deepening of the grey into a dimness that
seemed to have blackness behind it, the more ghastly hue of the white
plains of saltpetre, and the fading of the mirage sea, whose islands now
looked no longer red, but dull brown specks in a pale mist, hinted at
the rapid falling of night.

"My husband is out in them," she added.

"Your husband, Madame!"

He looked at her rather narrowly, shifted from one leg to the other as
if trying his strength, then added:

"Not far, though, I suppose. For I see you have a camp here."

"He has only gone after gazelle."

As she said the last word she saw one of the soldiers, a mere boy, lick
his lips and give a sort of tragic wink at his companions. A sudden
thought struck her.

"Don't think me impertinent, Monsieur, but--what about provisions in
your tower?"

"Oh, as to that, Madame, we shall do well enough. Here, open the door,
Marelle!"

And he gave the key to a soldier, who wearily dismounted and thrust it
into the door of the tower.

"But after three days in the dunes! Your provisions must be exhausted
unless you've been able to replenish them."

"You are too good, Madame. We shall manage a cous-cous."

"And wine? Have you any wine?"

She glanced again at the exhausted soldiers covered with sand and saw
that their eyes were fixed upon her and were shining eagerly. All the
"good fellow" in her nature rose up.

"You must let me send you some," she said. "We have plenty."

She thought of some bottles of champagne they had brought with them and
never opened.

"In the desert we are all comrades," she added, as if speaking to the
soldiers.

They looked at her with an open adoration which lit up their tired
faces.

"Madame," said the officer, "you are much too good; but I accept your
offer as frankly as you have made it. A little wine will be a godsend to
us to-night. Thank you, Madame."

The soldiers looked as if they were going to cheer.

"I'll go to the camp--"

"Cannot one of the men go for you, Madame? You were sitting here. Pray,
do not let us disturb you."

"But night is falling and I shall have to go back in a moment."

While they had been speaking the darkness had rapidly increased. She
looked towards the distant dunes and no longer saw them. At once her
mind went to Androvsky. Why had he not returned? She thought of the
signal. From the camp, behind their sleeping-tent, rose the flames of a
newly-made fire.

"If one of your men can go and tell Batouch--Batouch--to come to me here
I shall be grateful," she answered. "And I want him to bring me a big
brand from the fire over there."

She saw wonder dawning in the eyes fixed upon her, and smiled.

"I want to signal to my husband," she said, "and this is the highest
point. He will see it best if I stand here."

"Go, Marelle, ask for Batouch, and be sure you bring the brand from the
fire."

The man saluted and rode off with alacrity. The thought of wine had
infused a gaiety into him and his companions.

"Now, Monsieur, don't stand on ceremony," Domini said to the officer.
"Go in and make your toilet. You are longing to, I know."

"I am longing to look a little more decent--now, Madame," he said
gallantly, and gazing at her with a sparkle of admiration in his
inflamed eyes. "You will let me return in a moment to escort you to the
camp."

"Thank you."

"Will you permit me--my name is De Trevignac."

"And mine is Madame Androvsky."

"Russian!" the officer said. "The alliance in the desert! Vive la
Russie!"

She laughed.

"That is for my husband, for I am English."

"Vive l'Angleterre!" he said.

The two soldier echoed his words impulsively, lifting up in the
gathering darkness hoarse voices.

"Vive l'Angleterre!"

"Thank you, thank you," she said. "Now, Monsieur, please don't let me
keep you."

"I shall be back directly," the officer replied.

And he turned and went into the tower, while the soldiers rode round to
the court, tugging at the cords of the led mules.

Domini waited for the return of Marelle. Her mood had changed. A glow of
cordial humanity chased away her melancholy. The hostess that lurks in
every woman--that housewife-hostess sense which goes hand-in-hand with
the mother sense--was alive in her. She was keenly anxious to play the
good fairy simply, unostentatiously, to these exhausted men who had come
to Mogar out of the jaws of Death, to see their weary faces shine under
the influence of repose and good cheer. But the tower looked desolate.
The camp was gayer, cosier. Suddenly she resolved to invite them all to
dine in the camp that night.