The light of the moon was violent-walking along the white street in it was like being in the sunlight. “Anyone could see me.” But there was no one. She walked straight to the edge of town, where the oasis straggled over into the courtyards of the houses. Below, in the wide black mass formed by the tops of the palms, the drums were still going. The sound came from the direction of the ksar, the Negro village in the middle of the oasis.

She turned into a long, straight alley bordered by high walls. On the other side of them the palms rustled and the running water gurgled. Occasionally there was a white pile of dried palm branches stacked against the wall; each time she thought it was a man sitting in the moonlight. The alley swerved toward the sound of the drums, and she came out upon a square, full of little channels and aqueducts running paradoxically in all directions; it looked like a very complex toy railway. Several walks led off into the oasis from here. She chose the narrowest, which she thought might skirt the ksar rather than lead to it, and went on ahead between the walls. The path turned this way and that.

The sound of the drums was louder: now she could hear voices repeating a rhythmical refrain, always the same. They were men’s voices, and there seemed to be a great many of them. Sometimes, when she reached the heavy shadows, she stopped and listened, an inscrutable smile on her lips.

The little bag was growing heavy. More and more frequently she shifted it from one hand to the other. But she did not want to stop and rest. At each instant she was ready to turn around and go back to look for another alley, in case she should come out all at once from between the walls into the middle of the ksar. The music seemed quite nearby at times, but it was hard to tell with all the twisting walls and trees in between. Occasionally it sounded almost at hand, as if only a wall and a few hundred feet of garden separated her from it, and then it retreated into the distance and was nearly covered by the dry sound of the wind blowing through the palm leaves.

And the liquid sound of the rivulets on all sides had their effect without her knowing it: she suddenly felt dry. The cool moonlight and the softly moving shadows through which she passed did much to dispel the sensation, but it seemed to her that she would be completely content only if she could have water all around her. All at once she was looking through a wide break in the wall into a garden; the graceful palm trunks rose high into the air from the sides of a wide pool. She stood staring at the calm dark surface of water; straightway she found it impossible to know whether she had thought of bathing just before or just after seeing the pool. Whichever it was, there was the pool. She reached through the aperture in the crumbling wall and set down her bag before climbing across the pile of dirt that lay in her way. Once in the garden she found herself pulling off her clothes. She felt a vague surprise that her actions should go on so far ahead of her consciousness of them. Every movement she made seemed the perfect expression of lightness and grace. “Look out,” said a part of her, “Go carefully.” But it was the same part of her that sent out the warning when she was drinking too much. At this point it was meaningless. “Habit,” she thought. “Whenever I’m about to be happy I hang on instead of letting go.” She kicked off her sandals and stood naked in the shadows. She felt a strange intensity being born within her. As she looked about the quiet garden she had the impression that for the first time since her childhood she was seeing objects clearly. Life was suddenly there, she was in it, not looking through the window at it. The dignity that came from feeling a part of its power and grandeur, that was a familiar sensation, but it was years ago that she had last known it. She stepped out into the moonlight and waded slowly toward the center of the pool. Its floor was slippery with clay; in the middle the water came to her waist. As she immersed herself completely, the thought came to her: “I shall never be hysterical again.” That kind of tension, that degree of caring about herself, she felt she would never attain them any more in her life.

She bathed lengthily; the cool water on her skin awakened an impulse to sing. Each time she bent to get water between her cupped palms she uttered a burst of wordless song. Suddenly she stopped and listened. She no longer heard the drums—only the drops of water falling from her body into the pool. She finished her bath in silence, her excess of high spirits gone; but life did not recede from her. “It’s here to stay,” she murmured aloud, as she walked toward the bank. She used her coat as a towel, hopping up and down with cold as she dried herself. While she dressed she whistled under her breath. Every so often she stopped and listened for a second, to see if she could hear the sound of voices, or the drums starting up again. The wind came by, up there above her head, in the tops of the trees, and there was the faint trickle of water somewhere nearby. Nothing more. All at once she was seized with the suspicion that something had happened behind her back, that time had played a trick on her: she had spent hours in the pool instead of minutes, and never realized it. The festivities in the ksar had come to an end, the people had dispersed, and she had not even been conscious of the cessation of the drums. Absurd things like that did happen, sometimes. She bent to take her wrist watch from the stone where she had laid it. It was not there; she could not verify the hour. She searched a bit, already convinced that she would never find it: its disappearance was a part of the trick. She walked lightly over to the wall and picked up her valise, flung her coat over her arm, and said aloud to the garden: “You think it matters to me?” And she laughed before climbing back across the broken wall.

Swiftly she walked along, focusing her mind on that feeling of solid delight she had recaptured. She had always known it was there, just behind things, but long ago she had accepted not having it as a natural condition of life. Because she had found it again, the joy of being, she said to herself that she would hang on to it no matter what the effort entailed. She pulled a piece of bread from the pocket of her coat and ate it voraciously.

The alley grew wide, its wall receding to follow the line of vegetation. She had reached the oued, at this point a flat open valley dotted with small dunes. Here and there a weeping tamarisk tree lay like a mass of gray smoke along the sand. Without hesitating she made for the nearest tree and set her bag down. The feathery branches swept the sand on all sides of the trunk—it was like a tent. She put on her coat, crawled in, and pulled the valise in after her. In no time at all she was asleep.

XXV

Lieutenant d’Armagnac stood in his garden supervising Ahmed and several native masons in the work of topping the high enclosing wall with a crown of broken glass. A hundred times his wife had suggested this added protection for their dwelling, and he like a good colonial had promised but not performed; now that she was returning from France he would have it ready for her as one more pleasant surprise. Everything was going well: the baby was healthy, Mme. d’Armagnac was happy, and he would go up to Algiers at the end of the month to meet them. At the same time they would spend a happy few days in some good little hotel there—a sort of second honeymoon—before returning to Bou Noura.

It was true that things were going well only in his own little cosmos; he pitied Captain Broussard down in Sba and thought with an inward shudder that but for the grace of God all that trouble would have fallen upon him. He had even urged the travelers to stay on in Bou Noura; at least he was able to feel blameless on that score. He had not known the American was ill, so that it was not his fault the man had gone on and died in Broussard’s territory. But of course death from typhoid was one thing and the disappearance of a white woman into the desert was another; it was the latter which was making all the trouble. The terrain around Sba was not favorable to the success of searching parties conducted in jeeps; besides, there were only two such vehicles in the region, and the expeditions had not been inaugurated immediately because of the more pressing business of the dead American at the fort. And everyone had imagined that she would be found somewhere in the town. He regretted not having met the wife. She sounded amusing—a typical, high-spirited American girl. Only an American could do anything so unheard—of as to lock her sick husband into a room and run off into the desert, leaving him behind to die alone. It was inexcusable, of course, but he could not be really horrified at the idea, as it seemed Broussard was. But Broussard was a puritan. He was easily scandalized, and unpleasantly irreproachable in his own behavior. He had probably hated the girl because she was attractive and had disturbed his poise; that would be difficult for Broussard to forgive.