DESERT JOURNEYS. 32T 



even traversed it; but every son of earth who has set foot on it 

 and crossed some part of it, is in his inmost heart impressed with 

 its size and grandeur, its charm and its horror. Even on the most 

 matter-of-fact Northerner who sojourns in the desert a lasting, 

 ineffaceable impression is left by the glowing splendour of the sun- 

 light and the parching heat of its days, by the heavenly peacefulness 

 and the magical phantoms of its nights, by the witchery of the 

 radiant atmosphere, by the dreadfulness of its mountain-moving^ 

 storms; and many a one may have experienced, what the children 

 of the desert so acutely feel — a lounging to return, to breathe its air 

 for a day, an hour, to see its pictures again with the bodily eye, to 

 experience again that "unutterable harmony" whose echoes the 

 desert awakens in the poetic soul. In short, there is a home-sick- 

 ness for the desert. 



It is literally and truly " El Bahhr bela maa " — the sea without 

 water — the sea's antithesis. To the sea the desert is not subject as 

 are other parts of the earth; the might of the vitalizing and sustain- 

 ing element is here annulled. " Water silently embraces all things" 

 — the desert alone excepted. Over the whole earth the winds bear the 

 clouds, the sea's messengers, but these fade away before the glow 

 of the desert. It is rarely that one sees there even a thin, hardly 

 perceptible vapour; rarely can one detect on a leaf in the morning 

 the damp breath of the night. The flush of dawn and the red glow 

 of sunset are indeed seen, but only, as it were, in a breath which is 

 scarce formed when it passes away. Wherever water gains the 

 mastery, the desert changes into fertile land, which may, indeed, be 

 poor enough, but the limits between them are always sharply 

 defined. Where the last wave of the sacred Nile, raised above its 

 level by man's ingenuity, loses itself in the sand, the contrast is 

 seen; the traveller, whose way lies from the river to the hills 

 adjacent, may stand with one foot on a field of sprouting grain, and 

 with the other touch the desert. It is not the sand itself which 

 hinders the growth of plants, but solely the scorching heat which 

 radiates through it. For, wherever it is irrigated or periodically 

 watered, there, amid the otherwise plantless desert, a green carpet 

 of vegetation is spread, and even shrubs and trees may grow. 



