The Garden Of Allah

R >> Robert Hichens >> The Garden Of Allah


While she stood there, half turning round, she heard the sound again and
knew what caused it. A foot had shifted on the plaster floor. There was
someone else then looking out over the desert. A sudden idea struck her.
Probably it was Count Anteoni. He knew she was coming and might have
decided to act once more as her cicerone. He had not heard her climbing
the stairs, and, having gone to the far side of the tower, was no doubt
watching the sunset, lost in a dream as she had been.

She resolved not to disturb him--if it was he. When he had dreamed
enough he must inevitably come round to where she was standing in order
to gain the staircase. She would let him find her there. Less troubled
now, but in an utterly changed mood, she turned, leaned once more on
the parapet and looked over, this time observantly, prepared to note the
details that, combined and veiled in the evening light of Africa, made
the magic which had so instantly entranced her.

She looked down into the village and could see its extent, precisely how
it was placed in the Sahara, in what relation exactly it stood to the
mountain ranges, to the palm groves and the arid, sunburnt tracts, where
its life centred and where it tailed away into suburban edges not unlike
the ragged edges of worn garments, where it was idle and frivolous,
where busy and sedulous. She realised for the first time that there
were two distinct layers of life in Beni-Mora--the life of the streets,
courts, gardens and market-place, and above it the life of the roofs.
Both were now spread out before her, and the latter, in its domestic
intimacy, interested and charmed her. She saw upon the roofs the
children playing with little dogs, goats, fowls, mothers in rags of
gaudy colours stirring the barley for cous-cous, shredding vegetables,
pounding coffee, stewing meat, plucking chickens, bending over bowls
from which rose the steam of soup; small girls, seated in dusty corners,
solemnly winding wool on sticks, and pausing, now and then, to squeak to
distant members of the home circle, or to smell at flowers laid beside
them as solace to their industry. An old grandmother rocked and kissed
a naked baby with a pot belly. A big grey rat stole from a rubbish heap
close by her, flitted across the sunlit space, and disappeared into a
cranny. Pigeons circled above the home activities, delicate lovers of
the air, wandered among the palm tops, returned and fearlessly alighted
on the brown earth parapets, strutting hither and thither and making
their perpetual, characteristic motion of the head, half nod, half
genuflection. Veiled girls promenaded to take the evening cool, folding
their arms beneath their flowing draperies, and chattering to one
another in voices that Domini could not hear. More close at hand certain
roofs in the dancers' street revealed luxurious sofas on which painted
houris were lolling in sinuous attitudes, or were posed with a stiffness
of idols, little tables set with coffee cups, others round which were
gathered Zouaves intent on card games, but ever ready to pause for a
caress or for some jesting absurdity with the women who squatted beside
them. Some men, dressed like girls, went to and fro, serving the dancers
with sweetmeats and with cigarettes, their beards flowing down with a
grotesque effect over their dresses of embroidered muslin, their hairy
arms emerging from hanging sleeves of silk. A negro boy sat holding a
tomtom between his bare knees and beating it with supple hands, and a
Jewess performed the stomach dance, waving two handkerchiefs stained red
and purple, and singing in a loud and barbarous contralto voice which
Domini could hear but very faintly. The card-players stopped their game
and watched her, and Domini watched too. For the first time, and from
this immense height, she saw this universal dance of the east; the
doll-like figure, fantastically dwarfed, waving its tiny hands,
wriggling its minute body, turning about like a little top, strutting
and bending, while the soldiers--small almost from here as toys taken
out of a box--assumed attitudes of deep attention as they leaned upon
the card-table, stretching out their legs enveloped in balloon-like
trousers.

Domini thought of the recruits, now, no doubt, undergoing elsewhere
their initiation. For a moment she seemed to see their coarse peasant
faces rigid with surprise, their hanging jaws, their childish, and yet
sensual, round eyes. Notre Dame de la Garde must seem very far away from
them now.

With that thought she looked quickly away from the Jewess and the
soldiers. She felt a sudden need of something more nearly in relation
with her inner self. She was almost angry as she realised how deep had
been her momentary interest in a scene suggestive of a license which was
surely unattractive to her. Yet was it unattractive? She scarcely
knew. But she knew that it had kindled in her a sudden and very strong
curiosity, even a vague, momentary desire that she had been born in some
tent of the Ouled Nails--no, that was impossible. She had not felt such
a desire even for an instant. She looked towards the thickets of the
palms, towards the mountains full of changing, exquisite colours,
towards the desert. And at once the dream began to return, and she felt
as if hands slipped under her heart and uplifted it.

What depths and heights were within her, what deep, dark valleys,
and what mountain peaks! And how she travelled within herself, with
swiftness of light, with speed of the wind. What terrors of activity she
knew. Did every human being know similar terrors?

The colours everywhere deepened as day failed. The desert spirits were
at work. She thought of Count Anteoni again, and resolved to go round to
the other side of the tower. As she moved to do this she heard once more
the shifting of a foot on the plaster floor, then a step. Evidently
she had infected him with an intention similar to her own. She went on,
still hearing the step, turned the corner and stood face to face in the
strong evening light with the traveller. Their bodies almost touched in
the narrow space before they both stopped, startled. For a moment they
stood still looking at each other, as people might look who have spoken
together, who know something of each other's lives, who may like or
dislike, wish to avoid or to draw near to each other, but who cannot
pretend that they are complete strangers, wholly indifferent to each
other. They met in the sky, almost as one bird may meet another on the
wing. And, to Domini, at any rate, it seemed as if the depth, height,
space, colour, mystery and calm--yes, even the calm--which were above,
around and beneath them, had been placed there by hidden hands as a
setting for their encounter, even as the abrupt pageant of the previous
day, into which the train had emerged from the blackness of the tunnel,
had surely been created as a frame for the face which had looked upon
her as if out of the heart of the sun. The assumption was absurd,
unreasonable, yet vital. She did not combat it because she felt it too
powerful for common sense to strive against. And it seemed to her that
the stranger felt it too, that she saw her sensation reflected in his
eyes as he stood between the parapet and the staircase wall, barring--in
despite of himself--her path. The moment seemed long while they stood
motionless. Then the man took off his soft hat awkwardly, yet with real
politeness, and stood quickly sideways against the parapet to let her
pass. She could have passed if she had brushed against him, and made a
movement to do so. Then she checked herself and looked at him again as
if she expected him to speak to her. His hat was still in his hand, and
the light desert wind faintly stirred his short brown hair. He did not
speak, but stood there crushing himself against the plaster work with a
sort of fierce timidity, as if he dreaded the touch of her skirt against
him, and longed to make himself small, to shrivel up and let her go by
in freedom.

"Thank you," she said in French.

She passed him, but was unable to do so without touching him. Her left
arm was hanging down, and her bare hand knocked against the back of the
hand in which he held his hat. She felt as if at that moment she
touched a furnace, and she saw him shiver slightly, as over-fatigued
men sometimes shiver in daylight. An extraordinary, almost motherly,
sensation of pity for him came over her. She did not know why. The
intense heat of his hand, the shiver that ran over his body, his
attitude as he shrank with a kind of timid, yet ferocious, politeness
against the white wall, the expression in his eyes when their hands
touched--a look she could not analyse, but which seemed to hold a
mingling of wistfulness and repellance, as of a being stretching out
arms for succour, and crying at the same time, "Don't draw near to me!
Leave me to myself!"--everything about him moved her. She felt that
she was face to face with a solitariness of soul such as she had never
encountered before, a solitariness that was cruel, that was weighed down
with agony. And directly she had passed the man and thanked him formally
she stopped with her usual decision of manner. She had abruptly made up
her mind to talk to him. He was already moving to turn away. She spoke
quickly, and in French.

"Isn't it wonderful here?" she said; and she made her voice rather loud,
and almost sharp, to arrest his attention.

He turned round swiftly, yet somehow reluctantly, looked at her
anxiously, and seemed doubtful whether he would reply.

After a silence that was short, but that seemed, and in such
circumstances was, long, he answered, in French:

"Very wonderful, Madame."

The sound of his own voice seemed to startle him. He stood as if he had
heard an unusual noise which had alarmed him, and looked at Domini as
if he expected that she would share in his sensation. Very quietly and
deliberately she leaned her arms again on the parapet and spoke to him
once more.

"We seem to be the only travellers here."

The man's attitude became slightly calmer. He looked less momentary,
less as if he were in haste to go, but still shy, fierce and
extraordinarily unconventional.

"Yes, Madame; there are not many here."

After a pause, and with an uncertain accent, he added:

"Pardon, Madame--for yesterday."

There was a sudden simplicity, almost like that of a child, in the sound
of his voice as he said that. Domini knew at once that he alluded to the
incident at the station of El-Akbara, that he was trying to make amends.
The way he did it touched her curiously. She felt inclined to stretch
out her hand to him and say, "Of course! Shake hands on it!" almost as
an honest schoolboy might. But she only answered:

"I know it was only an accident. Don't think of it any more."

She did not look at him.

"Where money is concerned the Arabs are very persistent," she continued.

The man laid one of his brown hands on the top of the parapet. She
looked at it, and it seemed to her that she had never before seen the
back of a hand express so much of character, look so intense, so ardent,
and so melancholy as his.

"Yes, Madame."

He still spoke with an odd timidity, with an air of listening to his own
speech as if in some strange way it were phenomenal to him. It occurred
to her that possibly he had lived much in lonely places, in which his
solitude had rarely been broken, and he had been forced to acquire the
habit of silence.

"But they are very picturesque. They look almost like some religious
order when they wear their hoods. Don't you think so?"

She saw the brown hand lifted from the parapet, and heard her
companion's feet shift on the floor of the tower. But this time he said
nothing. As she could not see his hand now she looked out again over
the panorama of the evening, which was deepening in intensity with every
passing moment, and immediately she was conscious of two feelings that
filled her with wonder: a much stronger and sweeter sense of the African
magic than she had felt till now, and the certainty that the greater
force and sweetness of her feeling were caused by the fact that she had
a companion in her contemplation. This was strange. An intense desire
for loneliness had driven her out of Europe to this desert place, and a
companion, who was an utter stranger, emphasised the significance, gave
fibre to the beauty, intensity to the mystery of that which she looked
on. It was as if the meaning of the African evening were suddenly
doubled. She thought of a dice-thrower who throws one die and turns up
six, then throws two and turns up twelve. And she remained silent in her
surprise. The man stood silently beside her. Afterwards she felt as if,
during this silence in the tower, some powerful and unseen being had
arrived mysteriously, introduced them to one another and mysteriously
departed.

The evening drew on in their silence and the dream was deeper now. All
that Domini had felt when first she approached the parapet she felt more
strangely, and she grasped, with physical and mental vision, not only
the whole, but the innumerable parts of that which she looked on. She
saw, fancifully, the circles widen in the pool of peace, but she saw
also the things that had been hidden in the pool. The beauty of dimness,
the beauty of clearness, joined hands. The one and the other were, with
her, like sisters. She heard the voices from below, and surely also
the voices of the stars that were approaching with the night, blending
harmoniously and making a music in the air. The glowing sky and the
glowing mountains were as comrades, each responsive to the emotions of
the other. The lights in the rocky clefts had messages for the shadowy
moon, and the palm trees for the thin, fire-tipped clouds about the
west. Far off the misty purple of the desert drew surely closer, like a
mother coming to fold her children in her arms.

The Jewess still danced upon the roof to the watching Zouaves, but now
there was something mystic in her tiny movements which no longer roused
in Domini any furtive desire not really inherent in her nature. There
was something beautiful in everything seen from this altitude in this
wondrous evening light.

Presently, without turning to her companion, she said:

"Could anything look ugly in Beni-Mora from here at this hour, do you
think?"

Again there was the silence that seemed characteristic of this man
before he spoke, as if speech were very difficult to him.

"I believe not, Madame."

"Even that woman down there on that roof looks graceful--the one dancing
for those soldiers."

He did not answer. She glanced at him and pointed.

"Down there, do you see?"

She noticed that he did not follow her hand and that his face became
stern. He kept his eyes fixed on the trees of the garden of the Gazelles
near Cardinal Lavigerie's statue and replied:

"Yes, Madame."

His manner made her think that perhaps he had seen the dance at close
quarters and that it was outrageous. For a moment she felt slightly
uncomfortable, but determined not to let him remain under a false
impression, she added carelessly:

"I have never seen the dances of Africa. I daresay I should think
them ugly enough if I were near, but from this height everything is
transformed."

"That is true, Madame."

There was an odd, muttering sound in his voice, which was deep, and
probably strong, but which he kept low. Domini thought it was the most
male voice she had ever heard. It seemed to be full of sex, like his
hands. Yet there was nothing coarse in either the one or the other.
Everything about him was vital to a point that was so remarkable as to
be not actually unnatural but very near the unnatural.

She glanced at him again. He was a big man, but very thin. Her
experienced eyes of an athletic woman told her that he was capable
of great and prolonged muscular exertion. He was big-boned and
deep-chested, and had nervous as well as muscular strength. The timidity
in him was strange in such a man. What could it spring from? It was
not like ordinary shyness, the _gaucherie_ of a big, awkward lout
unaccustomed to woman's society but able to be at his ease and
boisterous in the midst of a crowd of men. Domini thought that he would
be timid even of men. Yet it never struck her that he might be a coward,
unmanly. Such a quality would have sickened her at once, and she knew
she would have at once divined it. He did not hold himself very well,
but was inclined to stoop and to keep his head low, as if he were in the
habit of looking much on the ground. The idiosyncrasy was rather ugly,
and suggested melancholy to her, the melancholy of a man given to
over-much meditation and afraid to face the radiant wonder of life.

She caught herself up at this last thought. She--thinking naturally that
life was full of radiant wonder! Was she then so utterly transformed
already by Beni-Mora? Or had the thought come to her because she stood
side by side with someone whose sorrows had been unfathomably deeper
than her own, and so who, all unconsciously, gave her a knowledge of her
own--till then unsuspected--hopefulness?

She looked at her companion again. He seemed to have relinquished his
intention of leaving her, and was standing quietly beside her, staring
towards the desert, with his head slightly drooped forward. In one hand
he held a thick stick. He had put his hat on again. His attitude was
much calmer than it had been. Already he seemed more at ease with her.
She was glad of that. She did not ask herself why. But the intense
beauty of evening in this land and at this height made her wish
enthusiastically that it could produce a happiness such as it created in
her in everyone. Such beauty, with its voices, its colours, its lines
of tree and leaf, of wall and mountain ridge, its mystery of shapes and
movements, stillness and dreaming distance, its atmosphere of the far
off come near, chastened by journeying, fine with the unfamiliar, its
solemn changes towards the impenetrable night, was too large a thing and
fraught with too much tender and lovable invention to be worshipped in
any selfishness. It made her feel as if she could gladly be a martyr for
unseen human beings, as if sacrifice would be an easy thing if made for
those to whom such beauty would appeal. Brotherhood rose up and cried in
her, as it surely sang in the sunset, in the mountains, the palm groves
and the desert. The flame above the hills, their purple outline, the
moving, feathery trees; dark under the rose-coloured glory of the west,
and most of all the immeasurably remote horizons, each moment more
strange and more eternal, made her long to make this harsh stranger
happy.

"One ought to find happiness here," she said to him very simply.

She saw his hand strain itself round the wood of his stick.

"Why?" he said.

He turned right round to her and looked at her with a sort of anger.

"Why should you suppose so?" he added, speaking quite quickly, and
without his former uneasiness and consciousness.

"Because it is so beautiful and so calm."

"Calm!" he said. "Here!"

There was a sound of passionate surprise in his voice. Domini was
startled. She felt as if she were fighting, and must fight hard if she
were not to be beaten to the dust. But when she looked at him she could
find no weapons. She said nothing. In a moment he spoke again.

"You find calm here," he said slowly. "Yes, I see."

His head dropped lower and his face hardened as he looked over the edge
of the parapet to the village, the blue desert. Then he lifted his eyes
to the mountains and the clear sky and the shadowy moon. Each element in
the evening scene was examined with a fierce, painful scrutiny, as if he
was resolved to wring from each its secret.

"Why, yes," he added in a low, muttering voice full of a sort of
terrified surprise, "it is so. You are right. Why, yes, it is calm
here."

He spoke like a man who had been suddenly convinced, beyond power of
further unbelief, of something he had never suspected, never dreamed of.
And the conviction seemed to be bitter to him, even alarming.

"But away out there must be the real home of peace, I think," Domini
said.

"Where?" said the man, quickly.

She pointed towards the south.

"In the depths of the desert," she said. "Far away from civilisation,
far away from modern men and modern women, and all the noisy trifles we
are accustomed to."

He looked towards the south eagerly. In everything he did there was a
flamelike intensity, as if he could not perform an ordinary action, or
turn his eyes upon any object, without calling up in his mind, or heart,
a violence of thought or of feeling.

"You think it--you think there would be peace out there, far away in the
desert?" he said, and his face relaxed slightly, as if in obedience to
some thought not wholly sad.

"It may be fanciful," she replied. "But I think there must. Surely
Nature has not a lying face."

He was still gazing towards the south, from which the night was slowly
emerging, a traveller through a mist of blue. He seemed to be held
fascinated by the desert which was fading away gently, like a mystery
which had drawn near to the light of revelation, but which was now
slipping back into an underworld of magic. He bent forward as one who
watches a departure in which he longs to share, and Domini felt sure
that he had forgotten her. She felt, too, that this man was gripped by
the desert influence more fiercely even than she was, and that he must
have a stronger imagination, a greater force of projection even than she
had. Where she bore a taper he lifted a blazing torch.

A roar of drums rose up immediately beneath them. From the negro village
emerged a ragged procession of thick-lipped men, and singing, capering
women tricked out in scarlet and yellow shawls, headed by a male dancer
clad in the skins of jackals, and decorated with mirrors, camels' skulls
and chains of animals' teeth. He shouted and leaped, rolled his bulging
eyes, and protruded a fluttering tongue. The dust curled up round his
stamping, naked feet.

"Yah-ah-la! Yah-ah-la!"

The howling chorus came up to the tower, with a clash of enormous
castanets, and of poles beaten rhythmically together.

"Yi-yi-yi-yi!" went the shrill voices of the women.

The cloud of dust increased, enveloping the lower part of the
procession, till the black heads and waving arms emerged as if from a
maelstrom. The thunder of the drums was like the thunder of a cataract
in which the singers, disappearing towards the village, seemed to be
swept away.

The man at Domini's side raised himself up with a jerk, and all the
former fierce timidity and consciousness came back to his face. He
turned round, pulled open the door behind him, and took off his hat.

"Excuse me, Madame," he said. "Bon soir!"

"I am coming too," Domini answered.

He looked uncomfortable and anxious, hesitated, then, as if driven to do
it in spite of himself, plunged downward through the narrow doorway of
the tower into the darkness. Domini waited for a moment, listening to
the heavy sound of his tread on the wooden stairs. She frowned till her
thick eyebrows nearly met and the corners of her lips turned down. Then
she followed slowly. When she was on the stairs and the footsteps died
away below her she fully realised that for the first time in her life a
man had insulted her. Her face felt suddenly very hot, and her lips very
dry, and she longed to use her physical strength in a way not wholly
feminine. In the hall, among the shrouded furniture, she met the smiling
doorkeeper. She stopped.

"Did the gentleman who has just gone out give you his card?" she said
abruptly.

The Arab assumed a fawning, servile expression.

"No, Madame, but he is a very good gentleman, and I know well that
Monsieur the Count--"

Domini cut him short.

"Of what nationality is he?"

"Monsieur the Count, Madame?"

"No, no."

"The gentleman? I do not know. But he can speak Arabic. Oh, he is a very
nice--"

"Bon soir," said Domini, giving him a franc.

When she was out on the road in front of the hotel she saw the stranger
striding along in the distance at the tail of the negro procession. The
dust stirred up by the dancers whirled about him. Several small negroes
skipped round him, doubtless making eager demands upon his generosity.
He seemed to take no notice of them, and as she watched him Domini
was reminded of his retreat from the praying Arab in the desert that
morning.

"Is he afraid of women as he is afraid of prayer?" she thought, and
suddenly the sense of humiliation and anger left her, and was succeeded
by a powerful curiosity such as she had never felt before about anyone.
She realised that this curiosity had dawned in her almost at the first
moment when she saw the stranger, and had been growing ever since. One
circumstance after another had increased it till now it was definite,
concrete. She wondered that she did not feel ashamed of such a feeling
so unusual in her, and surely unworthy, like a prying thing. Of all her
old indifference that side which confronted people had always been the
most sturdy, the most solidly built. Without affectation she had been a
profoundly incurious woman as to the lives and the concerns of others,
even of those whom she knew best and was supposed to care for most.
Her nature had been essentially languid in human intercourse. The
excitements, troubles, even the passions of others had generally stirred
her no more than a distant puppet-show stirs an absent-minded passer in
the street.