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The motion of the camel, which is represented as very wearisome, we found to be soothing. The monotonous swing made me intolerably drowsy in the still, warm mornings, and the dragomen tell tales of Howadji who drop asleep as they ride, and who, losing their balance, break arms, legs and necks, in their fall to the ground. The tedium of camel-riding is its sluggishness, for although the beasts can trot so that sultans and caliphs have despatched expresses in eight days from Cairo to Damascus, yet the trot of the usual travelling camel is very hard. The Pacha's El Shiraz had a sufficiently pleasant trotting gait ; but MacWhirter's exertions in that kind shook my soul within me.

Yet with all this, the effect of the motion of the camel, separated from his awkward and ridiculous form and its details, is stately and dignified; so much so, indeed, that the imagination would select him, first, as the bearer of a dignitary in a pageant. Covered with long sweeping draperies, which should conceal him entirely, and his rounded hump spread with heavy carpets, he presents a moving throne for a caliph or a sultan, in his desert progress, of dignity unsurpassed. The rider sits supreme

above the animal, and over the earth, and the long languid movement harmonises with the magnificent monotony of the scene.

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When the sun rose, our caravan was quietly making its two-and-a-half miles an hour. advanced not more rapidly than a small boy's walking, for at the head of the train, with the halter of the forward camel drawn over his shoulder, marched the young Hamed, an Arab boy of ten years, whose father was the Shekh and presiding genius of the caravan, and whose white-headed grandfather ambling by our sides upon a little donkey which he quite enveloped and concealed in his flowing garments, was our uninvited guest. There were two or three other men as assistants, all friends or relatives of the Shekh, and we went forward, a quiet family party, in the fresh March morning.

We had encamped upon the verge of the desert, and leaving the green land as we started, our route now lay parallel with the line of green, and not more than a quarter of a mile away from it. Yet that line was distinct as the shore from the sea, and we renewed upon the desert the vision of the Nile landscape.

Our western horizon was an endless forest of palms, with which mingled occasional minarets. The east was a hard level line of monotonous gray. My eyes clung to the greenness and beauty of the river, although in the clear daylight, the awfulness

of the desert was gracious and beautiful also. Under our feet, and as far eastward as we could see, the ground was like a beach of firm gravel. Never was the desert, even when we were in it fairly and far, so much desert to the imagination as near Cairo, never so glaringly appalling as the yellow Libyan and Arabian wastes that girdled the greenness of the Nile.

When we went, during the Cairo days, to the petrified forest, a few miles from the city in the wilderness, I dreaded the desert, as in the languid and voluptuous embrace of Como, I dreaded the snowy Switzerland that rose severe from its northern extremity. Standing among the petrifactions, they were puerile and tame. I only saw and felt the desert, and no more heeded the sight we came to see, than a general meditating the various chances of the impending battle, heeds the banquet at which he sits.

You have stood upon the sea-shore before you sailed, and imagination with an eye more glittering than the ancient mariner's, fascinated hope and fear, with tales more wonderful than his. Friends

and foes were daily going to sea, and the ocean was but a thoroughfare between the continents. The horizon was white with sails that canopied men, smoking, and sea-sick, and gaming, and

tortured with ennui, and longing for land. The sea was trite. Some mercantile friends even went up the side of the ship, with a hand-bag and an umbrella, to go to England or France, as you had stepped upon a Hudson steamer for an evening at West Point. But for all that, before you sailed, the sea was awful; mysterious and strange as death, although friends die daily, and Sinbad saw nothing which you might not see, Columbus sought no Cathay that you might not reach.

More mysterious, if possible, than the ocean to the untravelled, is the desert before you mount El Shiraz and MacWhirter. It is a sea of sand to the fancy, a waste of blowing, soft, yellow, glaring sand, utterly soul-consuming, without trees, without water, whereon the bones of men and camels bleach together, and the whirring sand, inexorable as the sea, hides as surely its own devastations. Such, in fierce midsummer, is the arid heart of Sahara.

But the Arabian desert is a more comely monster, though a monster still. For the death of the desert is more awful than the life of the sea, as silence is more terrible than sound. And when experience takes the tale from imagination, not less glittering, although different, is its eye; not less fascinating the closes of its strain; and experience, like the mariner, leaves you a sadder and a wiser man.

CHAPTER VI.

THE DESERT BLOSSOMS.

THE caravan plodded on. The morning and the silence deepened. The stillness was not tranquillising, but exciting. My restless eyes roved around the horizon, and presently discovered another train behind us. It advanced more rapidly than our own; and, at length, a grave old man was visible, with a venerable beard and a cheerful countenance, riding upon a white mare. Immediately behind him, two huge palanquins rolled from side to side on the backs of camels.

Was it not plain to see that the lithe figure leaning from the first palanquin to survey the strangers was the beautiful daughter of the grave old man, and that her unveiled face confirmed the suspicion of his dark turban (for Christians may wear no other), that this was no Muslim, but an Armenian caravan ?

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