sides
the big and bare truths, like giant bones, that the Moslem has
found there; there is, so to speak, an obverse of the obvious.
And to suggest what I mean I must go back again to the desert and
the days I spent there, being carted from camp to camp and giving
what were courteously described as lectures. All I can say is that if
those were lectures, I cannot imagine why everybody is not a lecturer.
Perhaps the secret is already out; and multitudes of men in evening dress
are already dotted about the desert, wandering in search of an audience.
Anyhow in my own wanderings I found myself in the high narrow house
of the Base Commandant at Kantara, the only house in the whole
circle of the horizon; and from the wooden balustrade and verandah,
running round the top of it, could be seen nine miles of tents.
Sydney Smith said that the bulbous domes of the Brighton Pavilion
looked as if St. Paul's Cathedral had come down there and littered;
and that grey vista of countless cones looked rather as if the
Great Pyramid had multiplied itself on the prolific scale of the herring.
Nor was even such a foolish fancy without its serious side; for though
these pyramids would pass, the plan of them was also among the mightiest
of the works of man; and the king in every pyramid was alive.
For this was the great camp that was the pivot of the greatest campaign;
and from that balcony I had looked on something all the more
historic because it may never be seen again. As the dusk fell
and the moon brightened above that great ghostly city of canvas,
I had fallen into talk with three or four of the officers at the base;
grizzled and hard-headed men talking with all the curious and almost
colourless common sense of the soldier. All that they said was objective;
one felt that everything they mentioned was really a thing
and not merely a thought; a thing like a post or a palm-tree. I
think there is something in this of a sympathy between the English
and the Moslems, which may have helped us in India and elsewhere.
For they mentioned many Moslem proverbs and traditions,
lightly enough but not contemptuously, and in particular another
of the proverbial prophecies about the term of Turkish power.
They said there was an old saying that the Turk would never depart
until the Nile flowed through Palestine; and this at least
was evidently a proverb of pride and security, like many such;
as who should say until the sea is dry or the sun rises in the we