nting voices are heard; the forms are seen.

Of two further things, native to us, their starved experience has no
hold; of nationality (or if the term be preferred, of "The City") and of
what we have come to call "chivalry." The two are but aspects of one
thing without a name; but that thing all Europeans possess, nor is it
possible for us to conceive of a patriotism unless it is a patriotism
which is chivalric. In our earliest stories, we honour men fighting
odds. Our epics are of small numbers against great; humility and charity
are in them, lending a kind of magic strength to the sword. The Faith
did not bring in that spirit, but rather completed it. Our boundaries
have always been intensely sacred to us. We are not passionate to cross
them save for the sake of adventure; but we are passionate to defend
them. In all that enormous story of Rome, from the dim Etrurian origins
right up to the end of her thousand years, the Wall of the Town was more
sacred than the limits of the Empire.

The men of the Desert do not understand these things. They are by
compulsion nomad, and for ever wandering; they strike no root; their
pride is in mere expansion; they must colonise or fail; nor does any man
die for a city.

As I looked from the mountain I thought the Desert which I had come so
far to see had explained to me what hitherto I had not understood in the
mischances of Europe. I remained for a long while looking out upon the
glare.

But when I came down again, northward from the high sandstone hill, and
was in the fields again near running water, and drinking wine from a cup
carved with Roman emblems, I began to wonder whether the Desert had not
put before my mind, as they say it can do before the eye of the
traveller, a mirage. Is there such an influence? Are there such men?

THE DEPARTURE

Once, in Barbary, I grew tired of unusual things, especially of palms,
and desired to return to Europe and the things I knew; so I went down
from the hills to the sea coast, and when after two days I had reached
the railway, I took a train for Algiers and reached that port at
evening.

From Algiers it is possible to go at once and for almost any sum one
chooses to any part of the world. The town is on a sharp slope of a
theatre of hills, and in the quiet harbour below it there are all sorts
of ships, but mostly steamships, moored with their sterns towards the
quay. For there is no tide here, and the ships can lie quite stil