voluptuous, and you remember that the desert is not all ascetic, but has a strain of splendour in its history, and has seen other sights than solitary trains of camels and a white-bearded old Shekh cantering upon a donkey. Turning your back upon the West and the palms, and looking eastward, you recall that Arabian historians relate the pious pilgrimage of Haroun El Rashid and Zobeide over the eastern region of this same desert, from Bagdad to Mecca. They performed the journey upon foot, those pious pilgrims, but they were royally attended, and a carpet was unrolled before them as they went, so that the way was but one long pavilion, a gorgeous gallery, cloud-frescoed, sun-goldened, moon-mellowed, and for wall the shining infinitude of the horizon, painted by imagination and peopled by religious faith, at will. At every stage of the progress, a castle was erected, magnificently furnished, and a million and fifty thousand dynars were disbursed in gifts. This story has the true flavour of the "Arabian Nights." But El Fasy, most romantic of historians, strings a rosary of such pearls. He relates that when the mother of the last of the Abassides made the Mecca pilgrimage, in the year 631 of the Hegira, about 1243 of our era, her caravan numbered not less than one hundred and twenty thousand camels. In the year 97 of the same epoch, a Sultan took with him nine hundred camels for his wardrobe alone. Another, long before Haroun El Rashid, spent thirty million dirhems upon the journey, building fine houses at every station, and furnishing them splendidly, erecting mile-stones the whole way; and, exquisite Epicurean, freighted hundreds of camels with snow to cool his sherbet. Haroun El Rashid might no longer reign in imagination as the oriental Epicurus, although he did perform the pilgrimage nine times, should the name of this Sybarite transpire. And his chance is farther threatened by the Sultan, who, in 719, carried with him five hundred camels for sweetmeats and confectionery, and two hundred and eighty for pomegranates, almonds and other fruits. In his travelling larder, also, there were a thousand geese and three thousand fowls. Indeed, as we stop to lunch, and the commander hands us the bread, cheese, and dates, which are our morning refreshment, we seriously consider whether the romances of the Arabian Nights are not veritable history. "Or the veritable history a romance of the Arabian Nights," says the cold-blooded Pacha. As we lunched, we noted the little blue blossoms that grew among the flinty stones, cheering as the odours of land that breathe around the seamen. For we constantly spoke of coasting along the green, and putting out to the desert as voyagers speak of the ocean. And here for the first time, you feel the full force of the name, "ship of the desert," applied to the camel. For not only is he the means of navigation, but his roll is like that of a vessel, and his long, flexible neck like a pliant bowsprit. The resemblance was strengthened and fixed for ever by the younger of the unhappy German Moguls, who, with the air of a man who had not slept, and to whom the West-Oestlicher Divan was of small account, went off in the grey dawn, sea-sick upon his camel. I fear, that to the lambent eyes of Khadra, when lunch was over and we brought our sulky brutes to the ground again, and resumed our way, I, contemplating the scene through blue wire-gauze goggles, was not a purely oriental object. I had no suspicion of it, I confess, until I saw the Pacha bind his around his eyes. But after a single glance at him, I removed my own and braved the burning sun. And away we went again, the little Hamed with his quick, short steps, pulling us over the desert. Away we went again, lost in silence and in dreams. You are there in Arabia, though they call it the Syrian desert. You shall see Jerusalem, and dimly along the horizon, the crescented minarets of Damascus quiver in the tremulous air of Hope. Your dreams of boyhood, your elder hopes were worth the trusting, for this eastern sun daily proves their truth. And you, friend of mine, while you turn my pages, even now dreaming and hoping as I dreamed and hoped, turning with feverish fingers the pages of others,-scorn the scoffer, and believe in the beauty and mystery of the East. The picturesque and nameless charms that haunt your fancy of the Orient, shall be experienced. Here you shall be thrilled with that sense of lofty and primeval freedom which shall throb ever after through the limited life that we must lead. For the Orson in you, the savage man, the spirit that loves the rock, and the waste, and the boundless horizon, with what we call mere human, sensuous love; the spirit that dwindles cities and their extremest possibility before the grandeur and repose of a wilderness lying in the twilight of tradition,—which seizes the manly and noble among young men, and drags them to the mountains |