It was the
sand-diviner. Made fantastic and unreal by the whirling sand grains,
Domini saw his lean face pitted with small-pox; his eyes, blazing with
an intelligence that was demoniacal, fixed upon her; the long wound that
stretched from his cheek to his forehead. The pleading that had been
mingled with the almost tyrannical command of his demeanour had vanished
now. He looked ferocious, arbitrary, like a savage of genius full of
some frightful message of warning or rebuke. As the camel rose he
cried aloud some words in Arabic. Domini heard his voice, but could not
understand the words. Laying his hands on the stuff of the palanquin he
shouted again, then took away his hands and shook them above his head
towards the desert, still staring at Domini with his fanatical eyes.
The wind shrieked, the sand grains whirled in spirals about his body,
the camel began to move away from the church slowly towards the village.
"A-ah!" cried the camel-driver. "A-ah!"
In the storm his call sounded like a wail of despair.
CHAPTER XVII
As the voice of the Diviner fainted away on the wind, and the vision of
his wounded face and piercing eyes was lost in the whirling sand grains,
Androvsky stretched out his hand and drew together the heavy curtains
of the palanquin.
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