If Stephen had been a tourist, guide-book in hand, he would have
delighted in the stony road among the mountains between Bordj-bou
Arreredj and Msila; but it was the future, not the past, which held his
thoughts to-day, and he had no more than a passing glance for ruined
mosques and palaces. It was only after nightfall, far beyond the town of
Msila, far beyond the vast plain of the Hodna, that his first dim
glimpse of the desert thrilled him out of self-absorption.
Even under the stars which crusted a moonless sky, the vast stretches of
billowing sand glimmered faintly golden as a phosphorescent sea. And
among the dimly gleaming waves of that endless waste the motor tossed,
rocking on the rough track like a small boat in mid-ocean.
Nowhere was there any sound except the throbbing of their machinery, and
a fairy fiddling of unseen crickets, which seemed to make the silence
more intense, under the great sparkling dome that hung over the gold.
"Now I am in the place where she wished to be: the golden silence,"
Stephen said to himself. And he found himself listening, as if for the
call Victoria had promised to give if she needed him.
XXIII
On the top of a pale golden hill, partly sand, partly rock, rises a
white wall with square, squat towers which look north and south, east
and west. The wall and the towers together are like an ivory crown set
on the hill's brow, and from a distance the effect is very barbaric,
very impressive, for all the country round about is wild and desolate.
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