The Sheik

The promised send-off had been enthusiastic. The arrangements for the

trip had been perfect; there had been no hitch anywhere. The guide,

Mustafa Ali, appeared capable and efficient, effacing himself when not

wanted and replying with courteous dignity when spoken to. The day had

been full of interest, and the long, hot ride had for Diana been the

height of physical enjoyment. They had reached the oasis where the

first night was to be passed an hour before, and found the camp already

established, tents pitched, and everything so ordered that Sir Aubrey

could find nothing to criticise; even Stephens, his servant, who had

travelled with him since Diana was a baby, and who was as critical as

his master on the subject of camps, had no fault to find.

Diana glanced about her little travelling tent with complete content.

It was much smaller than the ones to which she had always been

accustomed, ridiculously so compared with the large one she had had in

India the previous year, with its separate bath--and dressing-rooms.

Servants, too, had swarmed in India. Here service promised to be

inadequate, but it had been her whim on this tour to dispense with the

elaborate arrangements that Sir Aubrey cultivated and to try

comparative roughing it. The narrow camp cot, the tin bath, the little

folding table and her two suit-cases seemed to take up all the

available space. But she laughed at the inconvenience, though she had

drenched her bed with splashing, and the soap had found its way into

the toe of one of her long boots. She had changed from her riding

clothes into a dress of clinging jade-green silk, swinging short above

her slender ankles, the neck cut low, revealing the gleaming white of

her soft, girlish bosom. She came out of the tent and stood a moment

exchanging an amused smile with Stephens, who was hovering near

dubiously, one eye on her and the other on his master. She was late,

and Sir Aubrey liked his meals punctually. The baronet was lounging in

one deck-chair with his feet on another.

Diana wagged an admonishing forefinger. "Fly, Stephens, and fetch the

soup! If it is cold there will be a riot." She walked to the edge of

the canvas cloth that had been thrown down in front of the tents and

stood revelling in the scene around her, her eyes dancing with

excitement as they glanced slowly around the camp spread out over the

oasis--the clustering palm trees, the desert itself stretching away

before her in undulating sweeps, but seemingly level in the evening

light, far off to the distant hills lying like a dark smudge against

the horizon. She drew a long breath. It was the desert at last, the

desert that she felt she had been longing for all her life. She had

never known until this moment how intense the longing had been. She

felt strangely at home, as if the great, silent emptiness had been

waiting for her as she had been waiting for it, and now that she had

come it was welcoming her softly with the faint rustle of the

whispering sand, the mysterious charm of its billowy, shifting surface

that seemed beckoning to her to penetrate further and further into its

unknown obscurities.