"Who cares for such things on the Nile?" she said.
She laughed.
"At least, what Western woman can care? I do not. I am too drunk with your sun."
She sent him a look.
"Is it to be in--or out?" she asked. "The house or the orange-gardens?"
"Which you wish."
But his movement was outwards, and she seconded it with hers.
As they went down the steps the loud voice of a shadûf man came to them from some distant place by the Nile, reminding her of the great river which seemed ever to be flowing through her Egyptian life, reminding her of the narrowness of Upper Egypt, a corridor between the mountains of Libya and of the Arabian desert. She stood still at the bottom of the steps to listen. There was a pause. Then the fierce voice was lifted again, came to them violently through the ordered alleys of lovely little trees. The first time she had ever seen the man with whom she had been divorced was at the opera in London. She remembered now that the opera on that night of fate had been "Aîda," with its cries of the East, with its scenes beside the Nile. And for a moment it seemed to her that the hidden Egyptian who was working the shadûf was calling to them from a stage, that this garden of oranges was only a wonderful décor. But the illusion was too perfect for the stage. Reality broke in with its rough, tremendous touch that cannot be gainsaid, and she walked on in something that had a strangeness of truth--that naked wonder, and sometimes terror--more strange than that to be found in the most compelling art.
And yet she was walking in the Villa Nuit d'Or, a name evidently given to his property by the child of the gilded ball, a name that might be in place, surely, on the most stagey stage. She knew that, felt it, smiled at it--and yet mentally caressed the name, caressed the thing in Baroudi which had sought and found it appropriate.
"What hundreds and hundreds of orange-trees! We are losing ourselves in them," she said.
The little house was lost to sight in the trees.
"Where are we going?" she added.
"Wait a moment and you will see."
He walked on slowly, with his easy, determined gait, which, in its lightness, denoted a strength that had been trained.
"Now to the right."
He was walking on her left. She obeyed his direction, and, turning towards the Nile, saw before her a high arbour made of bamboo and encircled by a hedge of wild geranium. Its opening was towards the Nile, and when she entered it she perceived, far off, at the end of a long alley of orange-trees, the uneven line of the bank. Just where she saw it the ground had crumbled, the line wavered, and was depressed, and though the water was not visible the high lateen sails of the native boats, going southward in the sun, showed themselves to her strangely behind the fretwork of the leaves. At her approach a hoopoo rose and flew away above the trees. Somewhere a lark was singing.