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Page 35
But leap he from the horizon ever so quickly, don he his most brilliant
armour and pursue he ever so hastily, yet, save for two short hours
when he may barely touch her hem, Night stands ever mockingly,
beckoning, just out of reach.
O thrice-wise woman! How else would there be pursuit?
And Damaris laughed aloud from sheer content as she touched the
coal-black stallion with her heel, and held him, fretting, eager to be
away over the sand, to wherever Fate pointed.
Half-believing, half-doubting the words of the fortune-teller, this
early morning following hard upon her arrival in Heliopolis she slipped
from her room, wakened the astounded night-porter of the Desert Palace
Hotel, and demanded a car to be brought upon the instant. And lucky it
was for her that she made one of the ducal party, for nothing else
would have procured her her heart's desire at that untoward hour before
dawn.
With Wellington beside her, she drove hard along the deserted high-road
towards the village of Makariyeh where, under a sycamore, 'tis said the
Virgin and Child rested on their Flight into Egypt.
The head-lights seemed to hurl the shadows back as she raced down the
Sharia el-Misalla towards the ruins of old Heliopolis, which is all
that remains of the great seat of learning, the biblical City of On.
And the sky lightened way down in the east as she drove along the outer
edge of the fort to the Obelisk, known to the Arab as el-Misalla.
And there the words of the fortune-teller came true, for fretting and
fuming in an endeavour to unseat his _sayis_, who rode him native-wise,
without his feet in the stirrups, rearing and backing at the sound of
the engine throbbing in the gloom, was the coal-black stallion of
Unayza.
Damaris did not cast a look at the Obelisk. She had eyes only for the
beautiful beast which, seemingly, she was to ride on a single rein and
a wisp of a saddle. Standing sixteen hands, born of the desert,
nervous and self-willed, he was no fit mount for a woman, and a gleam
of anxiety flashed across the _sayis's_ face as he measured the slender
girl with his eye and re-adjusted the stirrup-leather.
"In the name of the hawk-headed Ra-Harakht."
The servant salaamed as he mechanically repeated the unintelligible
sentence which had been drummed into him by his master; and Damaris
smiled and replied in the servant's tongue, to his amazement, and
walked up close to el-Sooltan, holding out a flat palm with sugar upon
it.
It took some time before he snuffled her hand, and then only by
stratagem she mounted, swinging herself in a bound to the saddle as the
groom slipped to the ground on the off-side; upon which el-Sooltan
wheeled sharply and headed straight for the village of Khankah, which
is the outskirt proper of the desert.
For two and a half miles, at a tearing gallop, the girl made no attempt
to show any authority. But once on the very edge of the desert she
did, for this was the longed-for moment of her life, when alone, free,
she should ride out into the unknown; and she had no inclination or
intention of being hurled through that moment like a stone from a
catapult. Sooltan, behaving like a very demon, tried his best to
unseat the light weight upon his back by the simple and usually so
effective methods of rearing, plunging and bucking; but Damaris only
smiled and shouted as she looked towards the east, caring not a jot for
any vagary, so content was she.
But as the sun leapt clear of the horizon, she gave one cry, touched
the stallion lightly upon the neck, gave him his head, and was across
the desert, unmindful of an Arab who, some distance away, which, in the
desert, is really no optical distance at all, headed a grey mare,
thoroughbred and of mighty endurance, in the same direction.
Where is there anything to compare to riding across the desert at dawn?
At dawn, when to your right and to your left march phalanxes of ghostly
shapes, which maybe are the shadows of the night, or maybe, as says the
legend, the ghosts of the many long-dead kingdoms buried in oblivion
and the relentless sands; when the whistling of the wind is as the
shouting of men and the thunder of your horse's hoofs as the rolling of
many drums, calling you through the power of past centuries and the
ecstasy of the solitude in your heart, out to the mystery of the plains.
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