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Hichens, Robert Smythe, 1864-1950

"The Garden of Allah"

She looked at him in surprise.
"I never knew you to take a dislike to any halting-place before," she
said. "What's the matter, Boris?"
He smiled at her, but almost immediately his face was clouded by the
shadow of a gloom that seemed to respond to the gloom of the sky. And he
fixed his eyes again upon the tower.
"I like a far horizon," he answered. "And there's no sun to-day."
"I suppose even in the desert we cannot have it always," she said. And
in her voice, too, there was a touch of melancholy, as if she had caught
his mood. A minute later she added:
"I feel exactly as if I were on a hill top and were coming to a view of
the sea."
Almost as she spoke they cantered in among the tents of the attendants,
and reined in their horses at the edge of a slope that was almost a
precipice. Then they sat still in their saddles, gazing.
They had been living for weeks in the midst of vastness, and had become
accustomed to see stretched out around them immense tracts of land
melting away into far blue distances, but this view from Mogar made them
catch their breath and stiffed their pulses.
It was gigantic.


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