Nevertheless, despite what was indeed almost a horror of its spaces, she now found that she felt more strongly their fascination, which seemed calling her, but to danger or sorrow rather than to any pleasure or permanent satisfaction. She often felt an uneasy desire to be more intimate with the thing which she feared, and which woke up in her a prophetic dread of the future when the Indian summer would have faded for ever. And when one day Nigel suggested that he should take two or three days' holiday, and that they should remove the camp into the wilds at the north-eastern end of the sacred lake of Kurûn, where Ibrahim and Hamza said he could get some first-rate duck-shooting, and Ruby could come to close quarters with the reality of the Libyan desert, she assented almost eagerly. Any movement, any change, was welcome to her; and--she had to be more intimate with the thing which she feared.
So one morning the riding camels kneeled down, the tents collapsed, were rolled up and sent forward, and they started to go still farther into the wilds.
They made a détour in the oasis to give their Bedouins time to pitch their camp in the sands, and Ibrahim an hour or two to prepare everything for their arrival. It was already afternoon when they were on the track that leads to the lake, leaving the groves of palms behind them and the low houses of the fellahîn, moving slowly towards the sand-hills that appeared far off, where huddled the patched and discoloured tents of the gipsies and the almost naked fishermen who are the only dwellers in this strange and blanched desolation, where the sands and the salty waters meet in a wilderness of tamarisk bushes.
It was a grey and windless day, and the sky looked much lower than it usually does in Egypt. The atmosphere was sad. Clouds of wild pigeons flew up to right and left of them, circling over the now diminishing crops and the little runlets of water that soon would die away where sterility's empire began. In low, yet penetrating, voices the camel men sang the songs of the sands, as they ran on, treading softly with naked feet. Hamza, who accompanied the little caravan with his donkey in case Mrs. Armine grew tired of her camel, holding his hieratic wand, kept always softly and unweariedly behind them.
And thus, always accompanied by the hum and the twittering of a melancholy music, they went on towards the lake.
Upon Nigel's beast were slung his guns. He was eagerly looking forward to his holiday. He had been toiling really hard with his fellahîn, often almost up to his knees in mud and water, driving the sand-plough, working the small and primitive engines, digging, planting, even following the hand-plough drawn by a camel yoked to a donkey. He was in grand condition, hard as nails, burnt by the sun, joyful with the almost careless joy that is born of a health made perfect by labour. The desolation before them to him seemed a land of promise, for he was entering it with Ruby, and in it there were thousands of wild duck, and jackals that slunk out by night among the stunted tamarisk bushes.