THE DESERTS 
29 
come, one may not know; but, one hour later, they return 
westward—a journey, maybe, of hundreds of miles with 
the reward of a three-seconds’ sip of water! 
To return for a moment to the varying- characters of the 
Desert itself. There are, besides those above described, 
two types which should hardly be passed unmentioned. 
There is the uncompromising type of hard brown sand— 
incipient sandstone—innocent of vegetation and flat as 
a floor, the sort that rejects all Nature’s kindly offices 
to alleviate its ugliness or soften a barren asperity : over 
such, a motor-car could be driven at top speed from 
horizon to horizon, all unrelieved by a single object, 
animate or inanimate, or even by pleasing play of colour. 
Such an atrocity of creation surely represents Afric’s last 
word in the consummation of desolation. The Arabs 
have a proverb that “Allah laughed when He made the 
Sudan.” 
Then there occur stretches where, league beyond 
league, the thirsty sands are clad waist-deep in thorn- 
scrub and stunted mimosa that wearies the sight. How 
do they survive? Therein occurs an anomaly, since 
plant-life (we are told) depends for its existence upon 
moisture: here there is no moisture, whether in heaven 
or in earth, or for 50 feet beneath the earth; none, at 
least that (local) human intelligence or industry has yet 
discovered or exploited. Therein we humans seem to 
come in a bad second to sapless mimosa, or to Nature. 
She, science avers, runs in the desert a secret laboratory 
wherein, by subtle chemical combination, something; is 
evolved that, though not quite water, is fluid enough to 
make good the deficiency of that element as it relates to 
plant-life. The mimosa can live where the human (and 
even the camel) dies of thirst. As for the desert animals 
of the rainless zone—addax, oryx, addra, and other 
gazelles—they neither drink nor need to do so (in our 
sense of the word) from year’s end to year’s end. 
Upon these bush-clad deserts the mimosa-scrub may 
