They were in his land, after all, and it didn’t make too much sense to antagonise him.
Not overly, anyway.
They had been riding for some hours when they came to the first oasis that had been sighted since leaving the one where the midday halt was made.
Helen, who always preferred to ride alone, pulled up her horse to look at it, for it was unusually beautiful in the luxuriousness and arrangement of its group of palms and leafy bushes. Some pigeons were cooing softly, hidden from sight amongst the trees, with a plaintive melancholy that somehow seemed in keeping with the deserted spot. Beside the well, forming a triangle, stood what had been three particularly fine palm trees, but the tops had been broken off about twenty feet up from the ground, and the mutilated trunks reared themselve
