In solitude the Desert soaked down into him.

At night the jackals cried in the darkness round his cautiously-fed

camp fire—small, because wood had to be carried—and in the daytime

kites circled overhead to inspect him, and an occasional white vulture

flapped across the blue. The weird desolation of this rocky valley, he

thought, was like the scenery of the moon. He took no watch with him,

and the arrival of the donkey boy an hour after sunrise came almost

from another planet, bringing things of time and common life out of

some distant gulf where they had lain forgotten among lost ages.

The short hour of twilight brought, too, a bewitchment into the

silence that was a little less than comfortable. Full light or darkness

he could manage, but this time of half things made him want to shut his

eyes and hide. Its effect stepped over imagination. The mind got lost.

He could not understand it. For the cliffs and boulders of discoloured

limestone shone then with an inward glow that signaled to the Desert

with veiled lanterns. The misshapen hills, carved by wind and rain into

ominous outlines, stirred and nodded. In the morning light they retired

into themselves, asleep. But at dusk the tide retreated. They rose from

the sea, emerging naked, threatening. They ran together and joined

shoulders, the entire army of them. And the glow of their sandy bodies,

self-luminous, continued even beneath the stars. Only the moonlight

drowned it. For the moonrise over the Mokattam Hills brought a white,

grand loveliness that drenched the entire Desert. It drew a marvellous

sweetness from the sand. It shone across a world as yet unfinished,

whereon no life might show itself for ages yet to come. He was alone

then upon an empty star, before the creation of things that breathed

and moved.

What impressed him, however, more than everything else was the

enormous vitality that rose out of all this apparent death. There was

no hint of ht melancholy that belongs commonly to flatness; the sadness

of wide, monotonous landscape was not here. The endless repetition of

sweeping vale and plateau brought infinity within measurable

comprehension. He grasped a definite meaning in the phrase “world

without end”; the Desert had no end and no beginning. It gave him a

sense of eternal peace, the silent peace that starfields know. Instead

of subduing the soul with bewilderment, it inspired with courage,

confidence, hope. Through this sand which was the wreck of countless

geological ages, rushed life that was terrific and uplifting, too huge

to include melancholy, too deep to betray itself in movement. Here was

the stillness of eternity. Behind the spread grey masque of apparent

death lay stores of accumulated life, ready to break forth at any

point. In the Desert he felt himself absolutely royal.

And this contrast of Life, veiling itself in Death, was a

contradiction that somehow intoxicated. The Desert exhilaration never

left him. He was never alone. A companionship of millions went with

him, and he felt the Desert close, as stars are close to one another,

or grains of sand.

It was the Khamasin, the hot wind bringing sand, that drove him

in—with the feeling that these few days and nights had been

immeasurable, and that he had been away a thousand years.