The Garden of Allah Part 43

"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 gla.s.s 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."

His eyes seemed to rout out the secrets from every corner of her being, and to scatter them upon the ground as the sand was scattered.

"Dans le grand desert du Sahara," Count Anteoni repeated, as if he loved the music of the words. "Then there is a desert life for Madame?"

The Diviner dropped his fingers on to the pyramid, lightly pressing the sand down and outward. He no longer looked at Domini. The searching and the satire slipped away from his eyes and body. He seemed to have forgotten the two watchers and to be concentrated upon the grains of sand. Domini noticed that the tortured expression, which had come into his face when she met him in the street and he stared into the bag, had returned to it. After pressing down the sand he spread the bag which had held it at Domini's feet, and deftly transferred the sand to it, scattering the grains loosely over the sacking, in a sort of pattern.

Then, bending closely over them, he stared at them in silence for a long time. His pock-marked face was set like stone. His emaciated hands, stretched out, rested above the grains like carven things. His body seemed entirely breathless in its absolute immobility.

The Count stood in the doorway, still as he was, surrounded by the motionless purple flowers. Beyond, in their serried ranks, stood the motionless trees. No incense was burning in the little brazier to-day.

This cloistered world seemed spell-bound.

A low murmur at last broke the silence. It came from the Diviner. He began to talk rapidly, but as if to himself, and as he talked he moved again, broke up with his fingers the patterns in the sand, formed fresh ones; spirals, circles, snake-like lines, series of mounting dots that reminded Domini of spray flung by a fountain, curves, squares and oblongs. So swiftly was it done and undone that the sand seemed to be endowed with life, to be explaining itself in these patterns, to be presenting deliberate glimpses of hitherto hidden truths. And always the voice went on, and the eyes were downcast, and the body, save for the moving hands and arms, was absolutely motionless.

Domini looked over the Diviner to Count Anteoni, who came gently forward and sat down, bending his head to listen to the voice.

"Is it Arabic?" she whispered.

He nodded.

"Can you understand it?"

"Not yet. Presently it will get slower, clearer. He always begins like this."

"Translate it for me."

"Exactly as it is?"

"Exactly as it is."

"Whatever it may be?"

"Whatever it may be."

He glanced at the tortured face of the Diviner and looked grave.

"Remember you have said I am fearless," she said.

He answered:

"Whatever it is you shall know it."

Then they were silent again. Gradually the Diviner's voice grew clearer, the pace of its words less rapid, but always it sounded mysterious and inward, less like the voice of a man than the distant voice of a secret.

"I can hear now," whispered the Count.

"What is he saying?"

"He is speaking about the desert."

"Yes?"

"He sees a great storm. Wait a moment!"

The voice spoke for some seconds and ceased, and once again the Diviner remained absolutely motionless, with his hands extended above the grains like carven things.

"He sees a great sand-storm, one of the most terrible that has ever burst over the Sahara. Everything is blotted out. The desert vanishes.

Beni-Mora is hidden. It is day, yet there is a darkness like night. In this darkness he sees a train of camels waiting by a church."

"A mosque?"

"No, a church. In the church there is a sound of music. The roar of the wind, the roar of the camels, mingles with the chanting and drowns it.

He cannot hear it any more. It is as if the desert is angry and wishes to kill the music. In the church your life is beginning."

"My life?"

"Your real life. He says that now you are fully born, that till now there has been a veil around your soul like the veil of the womb around a child."

"He says that!"

There was a sound of deep emotion in her voice.

"That is all. The roar of the wind from the desert has silenced the music in the church, and all is dark."

The Diviner moved again, and formed fresh patterns in the sand with feverish rapidity, and again began to speak swiftly.

"He sees the train of camels that waited by the church starting on a desert journey. The storm has not abated. They pa.s.s through the oasis into the desert. He sees them going towards the south."

Domini leaned forward on the divan, looking at Count Anteoni above the bent body of the Diviner.

"By what route?" she whispered.