“I’ll lie down,” she replied, “but I don’t suppose I shall sleep. The very fact of being anywhere near you disgusts me too much to allow me to go to sleep.”
“You must try to master that feeling,” he said, with perfect seriousness. “It hurts nobody but yourself. I can quite understand your being angry; but I think Al Ghazzali, the Muslim philosopher, put the matter in a nutshell when he said: ‘God loves those who swallow down their anger, and not those who have no anger at all.’ It only makes you yourself miserable to be in a temper; but try to say to yourself that you won’t let me be of such importance in your life as to have the power to upset you. You ought to say: ‘Nothing that this fellow does can shake my equanimity: he has absolutely no power over my inner self.’ If you can really say that to yourself you’ll sleep all right. There’ll be some tea going at half-past four.”
She stared at him freezingly and went out of the room, while Daniel quietly settled down to his writing, refusing to allow himself any further thoughts in regard to her.
At tea-time he told her that he wanted her to come down into the Oasis with him. “It will take your thoughts off yourself,” he said.
“Thank you,” she replied. “I prefer to stay here in my prison. I wish you’d realize that your society is obnoxious to me. I hate the sight of you.”
“I quite understand that,” he said, “but, all the same, I want you to come, please.”
“If I refuse,” she retorted, “I suppose you’ll drag me down by the hair?”
“No.” he replied, “not by your hair: only by your hand.”
She was too tired to put up any resistance, and soon they left the house together, descending by the rough path down the cliffs to the lower level, where the shadow lay deep.
Presently they entered the forest of palms, wherein, here and there stood a mud-brick hut or cluster of huts, upon the flat roofs of which the goats and chickens ran about, and sometimes a dog looked down at them and barked.
The shadow of the cliffs extended for some distance, like a blue veil, but further ahead the sun still struck down upon the Oasis, and the mellow light, seen between the tree-trunks and foliage, was made so rich by contrast with the cool tones of the shadowed foreground that Muriel was constrained to remark on its beauty. Pigeons fluttered to and fro amongst the trees, those close at hand being white as snow, but those in the sunlit distance appearing to flash before the eyes like gilded birds of a fairy tale.