She felt that
the last days of her childhood had been left behind, on the threshold of
these mysterious spaces, this vastness into which she had plunged, as
into an ocean. Yet she did not regret the loss, if it were a loss.
Never, she thought, whatever might happen, would she wish not to have
known this experience, not to have entered upon this great adventure,
whose end Maieddine still hid behind a veil of secrecy.
It was true, as she had told him, that she was not impatient, though she
would have liked to count the days like the beads of a rosary. She
looked forward to each one, as to the discovery of a beautiful thing new
to the world and to her; for though the spaces surrounding her were wide
beyond thinking, they were not empty. As ships, great and small, sail
the sea, so sailed the caravans of the nomad tribes in the desert which
surges on unchecked to Egypt: nomads who come and go, north and south,
east and west, under the burning sun and the throbbing stars, as Allah
has written their comings and goings in His book: men in white,
journeying with their women, their children, and their trains of beasts,
singing as they pass, and at night under the black tents resting to the
music of the tom-tom and raita.
Victoria's gaze waded through the shadows that flow over the desert at
evening, deep and blue and transparent as water. She searched the
distances for the lives that must be going on somewhere, perhaps not far
away, though she would never meet them.
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