through the mid-day heat, and enjoyed the unearthly colouring that swept Day and Night across the huge horizons.  In solitude the Desert soaked down into him.  At night the jackals cried in the darkness round his cautiously-fed camp fire—­small, because wood had to be carried—­and in the day-time kites circled overhead to inspect him, and an occasional white vulture flapped across the blue.  The weird desolation of this rocky valley, he thought, was like the scenery of the moon.  He took no watch with him, and the arrival of the donkey boy an hour after sunrise came almost from another planet, bringing things of time and common life out of some distant gulf where they had lain forgotten among lost ages.

The short hour of twilight brought, too, a bewitchment into the silence that was a little less than comfortable.  Full light or darkness he could manage, but this time of half things made him want to shut his eyes and hide.  Its effect stepped over imagination.  The mind got lost.  He could not understand it.  For the cliffs and boulders of discoloured limestone shone then with an inward glow that signalled to the Desert with veiled lanterns.  The misshappen hills, carved by wind and rain into ominous outlines, stirred and nodded.  In the morning light they retired into themselves, asleep.  But at dusk the tide retreated.  They rose from the sea, emerging naked, threatening.  They ran together and joined shoulders, the entire army of them.  And the glow of their sandy bodies, self-luminous, continued even beneath the stars.  Only the moonlight drowned it.  For the moonrise over the Mokattam Hills brought a white, grand loveliness that drenched the entire Desert.  It drew a marvellous sweetness from the sand.  It shone across a world as yet unfinished, whereon no life might show itself for ages yet to come.  He was alone then upon an empty star, before the creation of things that breathed and moved.

What impressed him, however, more than everything else was the enormous vitality that rose out of all this apparent death.  There was no hint of the melancholy that belongs commonly to flatness; the sadness of wide, monotonous landscape was not here.  The endless repetition of sweeping vale and plateau brought infinity within measurable comprehension.  He grasped a definite meaning in the phrase “world without end”:  the Desert had no end and no beginning.  It gave him a sense of eternal peace, the silent peace that star-fields know.  Instead of subduing the soul with bewilderment, it inspired with courage, confidence, hope.  Through this sand which was the wreck of countless geological ages, rushed life that was terrific and uplifting, too huge to include melancholy, too deep to betray itself in movement.  Here was the stillness of eternity.  Behind the spread grey masque of apparent death lay stores of accumulated life, ready to break forth at any point.  In the Desert he felt himself absolutely royal.

And this contrast of Life, veiling itself in Death, was a contradiction that somehow intoxicated.  The Desert exhilaration never left him.  He was never alone.  A companionship of millions went with him, and he felt the Desert close, as stars are close to one another, or grains of sand.