It
seemed to her that she travelled as far away from Beni-Mora as she had
travelled from England in coming to Beni-Mora. She made her way towards
the sun, joining the pale crowd of the Desert's worshippers. And always,
as she travelled, she heard the clashing of the cymbals of Liberty. A
conviction was born in her that Fate meant her to know the Desert well,
strangely well; that the Desert was waiting calmly for her to come to
it and receive that which it had to give to her; that in the Desert
she would learn more of the meaning of life than she could ever learn
elsewhere. It seemed to her suddenly that she understood more clearly
than hitherto in what lay the intense, the over-mastering and hypnotic
attraction exercised already by the Desert over her nature. In the
Desert there must be, there was--she felt it--not only light to warm
the body, but light to illuminate the dark places of the soul. An
almost fatalistic idea possessed her. She saw a figure--one of the
Messengers--standing with her beside the corpse of her father and
whispering in her ear "Beni-Mora"; taking her to the map and pointing to
the word there, filling her brain and heart with suggestions, till--as
she had thought almost without reason, and at haphazard--she chose
Beni-Mora as the place to which she would go in search of recovery, of
self-knowledge.
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