The very phrase is like an everlasting echo, that can never cease to say the same sacred word; and when I saw afterwards the mightiest and most magnificent of all the mosques of that land, I found that its inscriptions had the same character of a deliberate and defiant sameness.  The ancient Arabic alphabet and script is itself at once so elegant and so exact that it can be used as a fixed ornament, like the egg and dart pattern or the Greek key.  It is as if we could make a heraldry of handwriting, or cover a wall-paper with signatures.  But the literary style is as recurrent as the decorative style; perhaps that is why it can be used as a decorative style.  Phrases are repeated again and again like ornamental stars or flowers.  Many modern people, for example, imagine that the Athanasian Creed is full of vain repetitions; but that is because people are too lazy to listen to it, or not lucid enough to understand it.  The same terms are used throughout, as they are in a proposition of Euclid.  But the steps are all as differentiated and progressive as in a proposition of Euclid.  But in the inscriptions of the Mosque whole sentences seem to occur, not like the steps of an argument, but rather like the chorus of a song.  This is the impression everywhere produced by this spirit of the sandy wastes; this is the voice of the desert, though the muezzin cries from the high turrets of the city.  Indeed one is driven to repeating oneself about the repetition, so overpowering is the impression of the tall horizons of those tremendous plains, brooding upon the soul with all the solemn weight of the self-evident.

There is indeed another aspect of the desert, yet more ancient and momentous, of which I may speak; but here I only deal with its effect on this great religion of simplicity.  For it is through the atmosphere of that religion that a man makes his way, as so many pilgrims have done, to the goal of this pilgrimage.  Also this particular aspect remained the more sharply in my memory because of the suddenness with which I escaped from it.  I had not expected the contrast; and it may have coloured all my after experiences.  I descended from the desert train at Ludd, which had all the look of a large camp in the desert; appropriately enough perhaps, for it is the traditional birthplace of the soldier St. George.  At the moment, however, there was nothing rousing or romantic about its appearance.  It was perhaps unusually dreary; for heavy rain had fallen; and the water stood about in what it is easier to call large puddles than anything so poetic as small pools.  A motor car sent by friends had halted beside the platform; I got into it with a not unusual vagueness about where I was going; and it wound its way up miry paths to a more rolling stretch of country with patches of cactus here and there.  And then with a curious abruptness I became conscious that the whole huge desert had vanished, and I was in a new land.  The dark red plains had rolled away like an enormous nightmare; and I found myself in a fresh and exceedingly pleasant dream.