But as you sit quietly in the tent door, watching the Armenian camp and the camels, your cheek pales suddenly as you remember Abraham, and that "he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day." Saving yourself, what of the scene is changed since then? The desert, the camels, the tents, the turbaned Arabs, they were what Abraham saw when "he lifted up his eyes and looked, and lo! three men stood by him."

You are contemporary with the eldest history. Your companions are the dusky figures of vaguest tradition. The "long result of Time" is not for

you.

In that moment you have lost your birthright. You are Ishmael's brother. You have your morning's wish. A child of the desert, not for you are Art, and Poetry, and Science, and the glowing roll of History shrivels away.

The dream passes as the day dies, and to the same stars which heard your morning shout of desert praise, you whisper as you close the tent door at evening,

"Better fifty years of Europe, than a cycle of Cathay."

CHAPTER IX.

INTO THE DESERT.

It was not until the fourth day from Cairo that we stretched fairly away from the green land into the open desert.

At one point which, like a cape, extended into the sand, we had crossed the cultivation of the Nile valley, and had rested under the palms-and, O woe! in a treacherous spot of that green way, whether it was angry that we should again return after so fair a start, or whether it was too enamoured of Khadra to suffer her to depart, yet at high noon, in crossing a little stream over which the other camels gallantly passed, the beasts that bore her palanquin tottered and stumbled, then fell mired upon the marge of the stream, and the bulky palanquin, rolling like a foundering ship, gradually subsided into the mud and water, and

the fair Armenian was rescued and drawn ashore by her camel-driver.

The Howadji, who were sauntering leisurely behind, perceiving the catastrophe, crossed the stream rapidly, and gaining the spot, poured out profuse offers of aid and expressions of sympathy, while Khadra looked curiously at them with her large, dreamy eyes, and smiled at the strange sound of their voices.

We halted for a few moments in the wretched little village, and stood out into the desert again in the early afternoon. Pausing at a little canal of Nile water to refill barrels and bottles, the camels were allowed to drink their last draught, until we should reach El Harish.

The desert was a limitless level of smooth, gravelled sand, stretching on all sides among the tufted shrubs, like spacious, well-rolled gardenwalks. It had the air of a boundless garden, carefully kept. "And now," said the Pacha, "begins

the true desert."

Farther and farther fell the palms behind us, and at length the green earth was but a vague western belt—a darkish hedge of our garden. Upon the hard sand the camel-paths were faintly indicated, like cattle-paths upon a sandy field. They went straight away to the horizon, and vanished like a railway track.

The sun lay warm upon my back, and with sudden suspicion I turned to look at him, as a child upon an ogre who is gently urging him on. Forward and forward upon those faint, narrow desert tracks should we pass into the very region of his wrath! Here would he smite us terribly with the splendour of his scorn, and wither and consume these audacious citizens who had come out against him with blue cotton umbrellas!

In that moment, excited as I was by the consciousness of being out of sight of land upon the desert, I laughed a feeble laugh at my own feebleness, and all the tales of exposure and peril in the wilderness that I had ever read, returned with direful distinctness, flooding my mind with awe.

As we advanced, the surface of the desert was somewhat broken, and the ridges of sand were enchanted by the sun and shadow into the semblance of rose-hued cliffs, based with cool, green slopes. It was a simple effect, but of the extremest beauty; and my heart, moved by the sun's pleasant pictures, deemed him no more an ogre.

"Do you see the mirage?" asked the Pacha, turning upon El Shiraz, and pointing to a seeming reach of water.

"Yes; but I admit no mirage which is not perfect deception. That's clearly sand."

"True," returned the Pacha; "but yet it is a very good mirage."

We jogged on until we reached it, and found a fair little lake.

"Yes," said the Pacha, without turning, “that's clearly sand."

At every tuft of shrub the camels tried to browse, and sometimes permitting MacWhirter to tarry and dally with the dry green, I fell far behind the caravan, that held its steady way toward the horizon.

Then returned the sense of solitude, and all the more deeply, because the sky was of that dark, dense blue-from the contrast with the shining sand-which I had only seen among the highest peaks of Switzerland, contrasted with the snow, as on the glacier of the Aar beneath the Finster Aarhorn. In that Arabian day, remembering Switzerland, I lifted my eyes, and, seconded by the sun, I saw the drifts of pure sand, like drifts of Alpine snow. The lines and sweeps were as sharp and delicate, and the dark shadows, whose play is glorious upon this wide race-course of the winds, made the farther ridges like green hills. Then, because the shrubs pushed up so frequently, the desert was but a cultivated country, overdrifted with sand.