They neared the settlement in the first coolness of early evening. It lay in a strange, fixed fashion, as if moulded low upon the rolling sand. Except for the shadows, it would have been unearthly. Indeed, there was a sharp intensity to the shadows, such as one finds upon the moon through a strong lens, but the colour was lowered—a Gobi colour, a lifeless, sand-scoured yellow. Romney gathered his padded coat about him before the hut-shadows fell across the way. The desert was clean, but the smell of the town was of uncovered dead. In the open, the sun had played upon all surfaces; men had defiled these shadows. Romney shivered, his nostrils had long been clean of Turgim.... Nothing of his reading or imagination had pictured this entrance to Nadiram, and yet there was a strange and evil familiarity about it all—as if some ancient picture of his mind finally opened to tally with the present, object for object. The moon was not yet risen; the town was lit, but the desert still in twilight. The main road through the town stretched straight into the East. In the very centre of it, in the low distance, the planet Jupiter was rising—something to hold to, something of peace and spaciousness. It was needed, because the sights and sounds and scents about him, as the camels rocked in, belonged to a flaring hell. Little shops were lit with torches in the doorways, torches that roared and were red. The faces of the keepers took on this red light, also the faces of the beggars in the streets. The tired beasts moved forward rapidly and with a stealth that had long been forgotten in the desert. The forward drivers were continually screaming for right of way. Thus Romney saw Nadiram, the faces of the people turned upward in the red reflection—like a kindling of hatred upon a countenance of impassive gloom. The three Tartar merchants disappeared into a side street. Romney turned presently into the court-yard of the Russian consulate, and dismounted, deeply conscious in the dusk of the eyes of a woman in the doorway. *2* From the moment that he beckoned to Bamban to make his camel kneel in the court of the Consulate, until the woman’s eyes turned to his from where she stood in the narrow opening of the door, an intensity of sheer living possessed him such as he had never experienced except during the Hankow fortnight. His good limbs stumbled as he crossed the level stone flags, not because he had been on the rack for hours, but because the main force of his life had turned out to the woman’s face—as if all his life hitherto had been but a journey to that face. She gave no sign; merely bowed and said in English: "The Russian Consul is ill. He can see no one."