214 THE DESERT AND THE ROSE 



your actions. We would that for us it were pos- 

 sible, as for another desert lover, to pass weeks 

 alone beneath those jewelled peaks, and to have 

 given to the world as he has the story of the desert's 

 teeming life, its mysterious ways, its enveloping 

 silences. The jangle of voices around us, the com- 

 monplaces of barrenness and monotony, are but as 

 the crackling of thorns under a pot. And the gates 

 of the soul open wide that the Spirit of the Desert 

 may enter in, there to abide for all time : to illumine 

 the darkness of troubled nights, to create stillness in 

 the centre of life's driving storm, and to bestow 

 the peace which passeth understanding when the cry 

 of the Human, without and within, urges too 

 fiercely. 



For it is good that man should sometimes tarry 

 far from the world that is too much with him, in the 

 immense solitudes of God's country. As Christ 

 went up into the mountain to pray so it is well that 

 we should go out into a desert place alone, and there 

 pressed close to Nature's breast, even were she nev- 

 er so aloof and self sufficing, watch and listen and 

 commune with our own hearts, and be still. 



And thus it might be that at the long last all 

 things would be made plain. 



The radiant day draws to its close. There, upon 

 the battlemented horizon where for uncounted ages 

 he has rested in his passing, the sun lingers now, 

 bidding farewell to the serried hosts which all day 

 long followed him in invisible array from the hither 

 brim to the further of the earth's cup. Now flaming 

 in coats of many colors they range themselves above 



