X.

Mirage.

HENRY MAUNDRELL having been shut out all night from a Shekh's house in Syria, during a pelting rain, revenged himself the next morning by recording that the three great virtues of the Mohammadan religion are a long beard, prayers of the same standard, and a kind of Pharisaical superciliousness.

Our uninvited guest, the Shekh's father, possessed those virtues in perfection. Enjoying our escort, eating our food, warming himself at our fire, the testy old gentleman evidently thought that our infidel presences cumbered the earth, and soiled by contact his own Muslim orthodoxy. He was therefore perpetually flinging himself upon his little donkey and shambling toward the horizon, with a sniff of disgust, to air his virtue from further contagion in the pure desert atmosphere. We were as continually overhauling him turned up against a windsheltered sand bank and, in meditative solitude, smoking our choice Latakia.

It was our daily amusement to watch the old Ishmael, whose mind and life were like the desert around us, putting contemptuously away from us upon his tottering

donkey, his withered ankles and clumsy shoes dangling along over the sand-away from us, stately travellers upon MacWhirter and El Shiraz, for whom Shakspeare sang, and Plato thought, and Raphael painted, and to whom the old Ishmael's country, its faith and its history, were but incidents in the luxury of Life.

Yet Ishmael maintained the balance well, and never relaxed his sniffing contempt for the Howadji, who, in turn, mused upon the old man, and figured the strange aspect of his mind.

Like a bold bare landscape it must have been, or rather like the skeleton of a landscape. For Ishmael was not true Bedoueen enough to have clothed the naked lines and cliffs of his mind with the verdure of romantic reverie. At evening he did not listen to the droning talk of the other Arabs over the fire, but curled himself up in his blankets, and went to sleep. By day he sought solitude and dozed in his own smoke, and whenever he spoke it was in the querulous tone of soured old age.

His whole life had been a monotonous tale endlessly repeated. From Cairo to Gaza,-from Gaza to Cairo. As a boy, tugging the caravan along, with the halter drawn over his shoulder. As a man, in supreme command, superintending the whole. As a grandsire, cantering away from infidel dogs to smoke their tobacco. tranquilly in the sun. Life must have been a mystery to Ishmael could he have ever meditated it, and the existence of a western world, Christians, and civilization, only explained by some vague theory of gratuitous tobacco for the Faithful.

As I watched his bright young grandson Hamed, leading the train, I could not but ruefully reflect that the child is father of the man, and foresee that he would only ripen into an Ishmael, and smoke the ungrown Latakia of Howadji yet unborn.

But through all speculations and dreams and jokes and intermittent conversation-for you are naturally silent upon the desert-your way is still onward over the sand, and Jerusalem and Damascus approach slowly, slowly, two and a half miles an hour.

In the midst of your going, a sense of intense weariness and tedium seizes your soul. Rock, rock—jerk, jerk upon the camel. You are sick of the thin withered slip of a tail in front, and the gaunt, stiff movement of the shapeless, tawny legs before you, and you vainly turn in your seat for relief from the eyes of Khadra :—vainly, for the curtains of the palanquin are drawn; the warm morning sunlight has been Mandragora to her, and she is sleeping.

The horizon is no longer limitless, and of an ocean grandeur. The sluggish path trails through a defile of glaring sand, whose sides just contemptuously obstruct your view, and exasperate you because they are low, and of no fine outline. Switzerland has vanished to-day, and the Arabia that chokes your eye is Arabia Felix no longer. Your brow flushes and your tongue is parched, and leering over the rim of the monotonous defile, Fever points at you, mockingly, its long, lank finger, and scornfully, as to a victim not worth the wooing. Suffocated in the thick, hot air, the sun smites you, and its keen arrows

dart upward, keener, from the ground. The drear silence, like a voice in Nightmare, whispers "You dared to tempt me;" and with fresh fury of shining, and a more stifling heat, the horrors of the mid-desert encompass you.

But in the midst of your weariness and despair, more alluring than the mirage of cool lakes and green valleys to the eye of the dying Bedoueen, a voice of running water sings through your memory,-the sound of streams. gurgling under the village bridge at evening, and the laughter of boys bathing there,-yourself a boy, yourself plunging in the deep, dark coolness, and so, weary and fevered in the desert of Arabia, you are overflowed by the memory of your youth, and to you, as to Khadra, the sun has been Mandragora and you are sleeping.

You cannot tell how long you sleep and doze. You fancy, when your eyes at length open, that you are more deeply dreaming.

For the pomp of a wintry landscape dazzles your awaking. The sweeps and drifts of the sand hills among which you are winding, have the sculpturesque grace of snow. They descend in strange corrugations to a long level lake-a reach of water frozen into transparent blue ice, streaked with the white sifted snow that has overblown it. The seeming lake is circled with low, melancholy hills. They are bare, like the rock-setting of solitary mountain tarns. The death of wintry silence broods over the whole, but the sky is cloudless, and the sun sits supreme over the miraculous landscape. Vainly you rally your thoughts, and smile at the perfect mirage. Its lines do not melt in your smiles, and the spectacle becomes

more solemn in the degree that you are conscious of the delusion. Never, upon its eternal Alpine throne,-never, through the brief, brilliant days of New England December, was winter more evident and entire.

And when you hear behind you, sole sound in the desert, the shrill tenor of the Armenian's camel-driver, chanting in monotonous refrain songs whose meaning you can only imagine, because Khadra draws aside the curtains to listen, and because you have seen that the tall, swarthy Syrian is enamored of Khadra,-then it is not Arabia, nor Switzerland, nor New England, but a wintry glade of Lapland, and a solitary singing to his reindeer.

This is not a dream, nor has leering Fever touched you with his finger, but it is a mystery of the desert. You have eaten an apple of the Hesperides. For the Bedoueen poets have not alone the shifting cloud-scenery to garnish their romances, but thus, unconsciously to them, the forms of another landscape and of another life than theirs, are marshalled before their eyes, and their minds are touched with the beauty of an unknown experience.

In this variety of aspect, in endless calm, the desert surpasses the sea. It is seldom an unbroken level, and from the quality of its atmosphere, slight objects are magnified, and a range of mounds will often masque as a group of goodly hills. Even in the most interrupted reaches, the horizon is rarely a firm line, but the mirage breaks it, so that the edge of the landscape is always quivering and uncertain.

Pleasant, after the wild romance of such a desert day -romance, which the sun in setting, closes-to reach the