She had heard the tale of the half-starved, half-witted, degenerate races which are supposed to inhabit the mysterious, unexplored depths of the great desert; living like lizards, worshipping the elements, inter-marrying until brain and body are sapped of strength, and for the first time she felt grateful for the ring of quaking sand which kept her safe from robbers, beasts, and such foul creatures as those which danced so merrily under the lowering sky.
She loved beauty, she loved strength, and watched with a shudder until the last white figure, leaping and bounding, had followed its fellows back to the unexplored regions of the desert, then knelt and bowed her beautiful head almost to the ground.
But she knelt before the scorching flames of the love which had sprung up in her heart for Ralph Trenchard as she had lain in his arms. Not for a day, nor for an hour of a day, had he been out of her thoughts since the morning of the accident. She lay awake at night thinking of the handsome face bent down to hers; she thrilled at the thought of his arms about her; she had thought of him unceasingly as she raced death to reach her father; she had sworn by the beard of the Prophet, which being a soulless woman she had no right to do, to bring him some day to her mountain home and for ever to her feet.
She stretched out her arms and called him by name, scorched by the hot wind which had twisted the sand into dancing shapes, sending them capering and leaping this way and that way, in the cross-eddies from the east, a ghostly phenomenon seen once in a lifetime, if that.
She ran to the side and looked out across the desert, which lay silent, foreboding, empty, and shivered under a sudden premonition of evil.
“Where are you?” she cried, beating her hands upon the burning stones. “Where are you? I love you, love you, love you, and I am calling you.”
At that very moment Ralph Trenchard rode into the holiday camp pitched by Helen Raynor and her grandfather—Egypt’s Water Finder. They had pitched it some fifty miles west of Ismailiah whilst they waited to start upon an expedition into Arabia, which had for its object the discovery of water hidden in the heart of a range of mountains, as described upon vellum inscribed by the Holy Palladius.