living spirit of
Allah is ever present. Here, then, I prostrate me and read a few
Chapters of MY Holy Book. After which I resign myself to my eternal
Mother and the soft western breezes lull me asleep. Yea, and even like
my poor brother Moslem sleeping on his hair-mat in a dark corner of
his airy Mosque, I dream my dream of contentment and resignation and
love.

"See the ploughman strutting home, his goad in his hand, his plough on
his shoulder, as if he had done his duty. Allah be praised, the
flowers in the terrace-walls are secure. That is why, I believe, my
American brother Thoreau liked walls with many gaps in them. The sweet
wild daughters of Spring can live therein their natural life without
being molested by the scythe or the plough. Allah be praised a hundred
times and one."

CHAPTER IX

SIGNS OF THE HERMIT

Although we claim some knowledge of the Lebanon mountains, having
landed there in our journey earthward, and having since then, our
limbs waxing firm and strong, made many a journey through them, we
could not, after developing, through many readings, Khalid's spiritual
films, identify them with the vicinage which he made his Kaaba. On
what hill, in what wadi, under what pines did he ruminate and
extravagate, we could not from these idealised pictures ascertain. For
a spiritual film is other than a photographic one. A poet's lens is
endowed with a seeing eye, an insight, and a faculty to choose and
compose. Hence the difficulty in tracing the footsteps of Fancy--in
locating its cave, its nest, or its Kaaba. His pine-mosque we could
find anywhere, at any altitude; his vineyards, too, and his glades;
for our mountain scenery, its beauty alternating between the placid
and the rugged--the tame terrace soil and the wild, forbidding
majesty--is allwhere almost the same. But where in these rocky and
cavernous recesses of the world can we to-day find the ancient Lebanon
troglodyte, whom Khalid has seen, and visited in his hut, and even
talked with? It is this that forces us to seek his diggings, to trace,
if possible, his footsteps.

In the K. L. MS., as we have once remarked and more than once hinted,
we find much that is unduly inflated, truly Oriental; much that is
platitudinous, ludicrous, which we have suppressed. But never could we
question the Author's veracity and sincerity of purpose. Whether he
crawled like a zoophyte, soared like an eagle, or fought, like Ali,
the giants of the lower worl