Desert Air

Over dinner in London, a doctor suggests that a change of climate can alter a person's nature. One guest answers with a story about Henry Marnier, a serious young Oxford graduate who plans to enter the clergy. Travelling together to Beni-Kouidar in the Sahara, Marnier and the narrator encounter a desert city whose strikingly fresh air seems to affect the young man with unusual force.

Robert Hichens builds this short story around the distance between Marnier's restrained conversation and the unsettled behaviour that begins to concern his companion. A dancing-house, the dancer Algia, a jealous local official and a priest's warning give the city an atmosphere of mounting danger. The account moves between close observation and the narrator's theory about climate, leaving readers to weigh how much an unfamiliar place can explain a person's choices. Its appeal lies in that uneasy connection between landscape, self-control and judgment.