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Page 91
DESERT MAGIC
He had meant but forty winks, but it had been dark when his eyes
closed and he opened them to the unreal half-lights of early dawn.
The sky was pearl; the sands were fawn-colored; the crest of a low
hill to the east shone as if it were living gold, and the next
instant it seemed as if a fire were kindled upon it. It was the sun
surging up into the heavens, and great waves of color, like a sea of
flame, mounted higher and higher with it.
Impulsively Billy bent over the little figure sleeping so soundly at
his side, speaking her name gently. And Arlee, waking with a start
and a catch of her breath that went to his heart, opened her eyes on
a wild splendor of morning that seemed the outer aspect of the
radiant joy within her.
They looked and looked while the east flamed like a burning Rome,
and then the glow softened and paled and dissolved in mysteries and
miracles of color, in tender rose and exquisite shell pinks, in
amethysts and violets and limpid, delicate, fair greens. All about
them the sands were turning to gold, and the rim of the distant
horizon grew clearer and clearer against the brightening blue of the
sky, like a great circling tawny sea lapping on every side the arch
of the heavens.
As they looked their hearts stirred and quickened with that
incommunicable thrill of the desert, and their eyes turned and
sought each other in silence. The gold of the sun was on Arlee's
hanging hair and the morning-blue of the sky in her eyes; her face
was flushed from sleep and a tiny tendril still clung to the pink
cheek on which she had been sleeping. Somehow that inconsequent
small tendril roused in Billy a thrill of absurd tenderness and
delight.... She was so very small and childish, sitting there in the
Libyan desert with him, looking up at him with such adorable
simplicity.... In her eyes he seemed to see something of the wonder
and the joy in his. It was a moment of magic. It brought a lump into
his throat.... He wanted to bend over her reverently, to lift a
strand of that shining hair to his lips, to touch the sandy little
hands....
Somehow he managed not to. The moment of longing and of glamor
passed.
"It's exactly as if we'd been shipwrecked!" said Arlee, looking
about with an air of childish delight.
"On a very large island," he smiled back, and felt a furtive pain
mingling with his joy. He was just her rescuer to her, of course;
she accepted him simply as a heaven-dropped deliverer; her thoughts
had not been going out to him in those long days as his had gone to
her.... Decisively he jumped to his feet and said breakfast. Where
was it? What was to be done?
Directions were vague. They had come south on the edge of the
desert, and the Nile lay somewhere to the east of them, and to the
east, therefore lay breakfast and trains and telegraph lines and all
the outposts of civilization.
To the east they rode then, straight toward the tinted dawn, and as
they went they laughed out at each other on their strange mounts
like two children on a holiday. Their spirits lifted with the beauty
of the morning, and with that strange primitive exhilaration of the
desert, that wild joy in vast, lonely reaches, in far horizons and
illimitable space. The air intoxicated them; the leaping light and
the free winds fired them, and with laughing shouts and challenges
they urged their camels forward in a wild race that sent the desert
hares scattering to right and left. Like runaways they tore over the
level wastes and through the rolling dunes, and at last, spent and
breathless, they pulled back into a walk their excited beasts that
squealed and tossed their tasseled heads.
Their eyes met in a gaiety of the spirit that no words could
express. When Arlee spoke she merely cried out, "I've read the camel
had four paces, but mine has forty-four," and Billy gave back, "And
forty-three are sudden death!" and their ringing laughter made a
worried little jackal draw back his cautious nose into his rocky
lair.
They were in broken ground now, more and more rocky, leading through
the low hills ahead of them, and great clumps of grayish _mit minan_
and bright green hyssop dotted the amber of the sands. Here and
there the fork-like helga showed its purple blossom, and sometimes
a scarlet ice-plant gleamed at them from a rocky crack. Across their
path two great butterflies strayed, as gold and jeweled as the day.
High overhead, black against the stainless blue, hung a far hawk.
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