DESERT SANDS 341 



DESERT SANDS 



If deserts have a fault (wliich their present biographer is far 

 from admitting), that fault may doubtless be found in the 

 fact that their scenery as a rule tends to be just a tritlo 

 monotonous. Thoui,'h Ihie in themselves, they lack variety. 

 To be sure, very few of the deserts of real life possess that 

 absolute flatness, sandiness and sameness, which charac- 

 terises the familiar desert of the poet and of the annual 

 exhibitions — a desert all level yellow expanse, most bilious 

 in its colournig, and relieved by but four allowable academy 

 properties, a palm-tree, a camel, a sphinx, and a pyramid. 

 For foreground, throw in a sheikh in appropriate drapery ; 

 fcr background, a sky-line and a bleaching skeleton ; stir 

 and mix, and your picture is finished. Most practical 

 deserts one comes across in travelling, however, are a great 

 deal less simple and theatrical than that ; rock prepon- 

 derates over sand in their composition, and inequalities of 

 surface are often the rule rather than the exception. 

 There is reason to believe, indeed, that the artistic con- 

 ception of the common or Burlington House desert has 

 been unduly influenced for evil by the accessibility and the 

 poetic adjuncts of the Egyptian sand- waste, which, being 

 situated in a great alluvial river valley is really flat, and 

 being the most familiar, has therefore distorted to its own 

 shape the mental picture of all its kind elsewhere. But 

 most deserts of actual nature are not all flat, nor all sandy ; 



