Does it feel alive
to you?"
"Yes."
"As if it had pulses, like the pulses in our hearts, and knew what we
know?"
"Yes. Mother Earth--I never understood what that meant till to-night."
"We are beginning to understand together. Who can understand anything
alone?"
He kept her hand always in his pressed against the desert as against
a heart. They both thought of it as a heart that was full of love and
protection for them, of understanding of them. Going back to their words
before the song of Ali, he said:
"Love burns up evil, then love can never be evil."
"Not the act of loving."
"Or what it leads to," he said.
And again there was a sort of sternness in his voice, as if he were
insisting on something, were bent on conquering some reluctance, or some
voice contradicting.
"I know that you are right," he added.
She did not speak, but--why she did not know--her thought went to the
wooden crucifix fastened in the canvas of the tent close by, and for a
moment she felt a faint creeping sadness in her. But he pressed her hand
more closely, and she was conscious only of these two warmths---of his
hand above her hand and of the desert beneath it.
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