That came in a pale cloud of sand, with a pale crowd of worshippers,
those who had received gifts from the Desert's hands and sought for
more: white-robed Marabouts who had found Allah in his garden and become
a guide to the faithful through all the circling years: murderers who
had gained sanctuary with barbaric jewels in their blood-stained hands:
once tortured men and women who had cast away terrible recollections in
the wastes among the dunes and in the treeless purple distances, and who
had been granted the sweet oases of forgetfulness to dwell in: ardent
beings who had striven vainly to rest content with the world of hills
and valleys, of sea-swept verges and murmuring rivers, and who had been
driven, by the labouring soul, on and on towards the flat plains where
roll for ever the golden wheels of the chariot of the sun. She saw, too,
the winds that are the Desert's best-loved children: Health with
shining eyes and a skin of bronze: Passion, half faun, half black-browed
Hercules: and Liberty with upraised arms, beating cymbals like monstrous
spheres of fire.
And she saw palm trees waving, immense palm trees in the south.
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