He was there like an enemy, like something determined, egoistical, that said to her, “You would look at the greatness of the desert, at immensity, infinity, God!--Look at me.” And she could not turn her eyes away. Each time the man had, as if without effort, conquered the great competing power, fastened her thoughts upon himself, set her imagination working about his life, even made her heart beat faster with some thrill of--what? Was it pity? Was it a faint horror? She knew that to call the feeling merely repugnance would not be sincere. The intensity, the vitality of the force shut up in a human being almost angered her at this moment as she looked at the empty chair and realised all that it had suddenly set at work. There was something insolent in humanity as well as something divine, and just then she felt the insolence more than the divinity. Terrifically greater, more overpowering than man, the desert was yet also somehow less than man, feebler, vaguer. Or else how could she have been grasped, moved, turned to curiosity, surmise, almost to a sort of dread--all at the desert’s expense--by the distant moving figure seen through the glasses? Yes, as she looked at the little white table and thought of all this, Domini began to feel angry. But she was capable of effort, whether mental or physical, and now she resolutely switched her mind off from the antagonistic stranger and devoted her thoughts to the priest, whose narrow back she saw down the room in the distance. As she ate her fish--a mystery of the seas of Robertville--she imagined his quiet existence in this remote place, sunny day succeeding sunny day, each one surely so like its brother that life must become a sort of dream, through which the voice of the church bell called melodiously and the incense rising before the altar shed a drowsy perfume. How strange it must be really to live in Beni-Mora, to have your house, your work here, your friendships here, your duties here, perhaps here too the tiny section of earth which would hold at the last your body. It must be strange and monotonous, and yet surely rather sweet, rather safe. The officers lifted their heads from their plates, the fat man stared, the priest looked quietly up over his napkin, and the Arab waiter slipped forward with attentive haste. For the swing door of the _salle-a-manger_ at this moment was pushed open, and the traveller--so Domini called him in her thoughts--entered and stood looking with hesitation from one table to another.