White Rose, where art thou? I need thy hand under
my arm."
Victoria tried to think only of M'Barka, and to wait with patience for
the supreme moment--if it were to come. Even if she had wished it, she
could not have asked questions now.
XXIV
It was midnight when Nevill's car ran into the beautiful oasis town,
guarded by the most curious mountains of the Algerian desert, and they
were at their strangest, cut out clear as the painted mountains of stage
scenery, in the light of the great acetylene lamps. Stephen thought them
like a vast, half-burned Moorish city of mosques and palaces, over which
sand-storms had raged for centuries, leaving only traces here and there
of a ruined tower, a domed roof, or an ornamental frieze.
Of the palms he could see nothing, except the long, dark shape of the
oasis among the pale sand-billows; but early next morning he and Nevill
were up and out on the roof of the little French hotel, while sunrise
banners marched across the sky. Stephen had not known that desert dunes
could be bright peach-pink, or that a river flowing over white stones
could look like melted rubies, or that a few laughing Arab girls,
ankle-deep in limpid water, could glitter in morning light like jewelled
houris in celestial gardens. But now that he knew, he would never forget
his first desert picture.
The two men stood on the roof among the bubbly domes for a long time,
looking over the umber-coloured town and the flowing oasis which swept
to Bou-Saada's brown feet like a tidal wave.
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