106 



THE DESEKT 



The Tnid- 

 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- 



