194 East and West 
sea: a spell, a witchery, which is like music, 
like poetry, is perhaps itself music and poetry 
in another form. But this is not the saffron 
desert of Africa and Asia; these desert plains 
are rocky or gravelly and covered with ver- 
dure, so that not saffron, orange, or yellow, but 
green, purple, and lilac predominate. From 
the plain, these mountains, rising like rocky 
islands from the sea, have at twenty miles one 
tone, at forty miles another, and at seventy- 
five and a hundred miles, still others. They 
grow more and more ethereal in the distance 
until they become mere wraiths on the horizon, 
appearing only in certain lights; and these 
pale phantoms seem to beckon you to come 
out over the desert into the unknown. Should 
you go, others would rise day by day, ever 
beckoning, ever promising, like the mirage, 
that which they can never fulfil. This is the 
spell of the desert. The secret of that spell 
is not in any realisation but in a continual 
anticipation of something which lies beyond, 
and in this it is much like life itself. 
At length, one morning before daybreak, I 
set out to ride over the desert. That particu- 
lar morning is impressed on my mind, for no 
subsequent impressions are ever quite so 
sharply outlined as are the first, when the 
