"By prayer alone can she find peace," he repeated wistfully.
Out in the desert Mes'oodeh, kneeling in apparent prayer, smiled cynically, as she whispered tensely, "In time, I know that he will come to me."
3
A week later as Andrea Giovanni walked through the mellah of Wadi-el-Gibli, he overheard two old Jewish merchants speaking of the desert woman, Mes'oodeh.
"She has disappeared," said one, "and the city is well rid of her. She had no soul; her only God was Self. Now she has vanished and I am as glad at her going as I would be at the passing of a plague. But where she has gone is a mystery."
"She was last seen riding out alone into the desert," declared the other. "Her disappearance is but another mystery added to the multitudes which have shrouded the desert for ages. She has probably lost her way out there among those rolling sand dunes, and perished as she deserves. Truly it seems that God has purposely caused her to go away in order to purge our city."
"And yet," hazarded the first speaker, "it is a terrible death for a woman. Imagine how she must be suffering, plunging blindly, desperately about among those sand dunes; her lips cracked and broken, her tongue scorched and blackened, her eyes dried into glistening balls of heat, all sense of direction dead within her. Even a rabid dog of the streets deserves a better death than that."
"The people of Wadi-el-Gibli think differently. They say that by arriving at such an end, she does but get what she deserves. It is not their intention to go in search of her. Not a single person will enter the desert on such a quest. They say, 'It is the Will of Allah!'"
That evening Andrea Giovanni rode
off alone into the desert. The night
was exquisitely silent, not a breath of
sound shattered the wondrous web of
solitude. The moon glowed down upon
the desert, creating a glorious brilliance
almost as light as day. Not till it had
set did he dismount from his camel,
utterly worn out, and throw himself at
full length upon the burning sand-mat-tress
of desolation. Sleep came almost
instantly; a dreamless, profound sleep
which comes only to a man who is utterly
exhausted.
Dawn had painted the eastern skies with silver before he again opened his eyes, and probably he would not have awakened even then if it had not been for a dull, ominous, moaning sound which seemed to roll to his ears from far off over the desert. Curiously, he rose to his feet and surveyed the far horizon, and there, away off to the south, a great grim wall of dense smoke seemed to be rushing toward him over the desert. In less than fifteen minutes he was engulfed in a raging yellow sandstorm. He threw himself face downward upon the sand, drawing his baracan about his face. The desert seemed to have become alive. Waves of sand surged and roared about him, while the air became so crowded with fine particles of molten dust that the sky disappeared utterly, swallowed up in the dense pall of gloom. As the storm increased in violence, the sand grew as hot as a lava stream. Particles of burning dust even penetrated through the thick folds of his baracan, blinding his eyes, parching his throat and even seeming to burn deep into the flesh of his face. The heat intensified so frightfully that it seemed as though he were being scalded
