106 



THE DESERT 



The mid- 

 night sky. 



Alone in the 

 desert. 



The 

 mysteries. 



alone and at night,, with a saddle for your pil- 

 low, and your eyes staring upward at the stars, 

 how incomprehensible it all seems ! The im- 

 mensity and the mystery are appalling; and 

 yet how these very features attract the thought 

 and draw the curiosity of man. In the pres- 

 ence of the unattainable and the insurmount- 

 able we keep sending a hope, a doubt, a query, 

 up through the realms of air to Saturn's 

 throne. What key have we wherewith to un- 

 lock that door ? We cannot comprehend a tiny 

 flame of our own invention called electricity, 

 yet we grope at the meaning of the blazing 

 splendor of Arcturus. Around us stretches 

 the great sand-wrapped desert whose mystery 

 no man knows, and not even the Sphinx could 

 reveal ; yet beyond it, above it, upward still 

 upward, we seek the mysteries of Orion and 

 the Pleiades. 



What is it that draws us to the boundless and 

 the fathomless ? Why should the lovely things 

 of earth the grasses, the trees, the lakes, the 

 little hills appear trivial and insignificant 

 when we come face to face with the sea or the 

 desert or the vastness of the midnight sky ? Is 

 it that the one is the tale of things known and 

 the other merely a hint, a suggestion of the un- 



