uarter of a mile away.
For mercy's sake, pretty gentleman, spare a mouthful of that prickly
whisky-and-soda you are lifting to your lips. There's a white man a few
hundred miles off, dying on my lap of thirst--thirst that you cure with
a rag dipped in lukewarm water while you hold him down with the one
hand, and he thinks he is cursing you aloud, but he isn't, because his
tongue is outside his mouth and he can't get it back. Thank _you_, my
noble captain!' For naturally one tips half the drink over the rail with
the ancient prayer: 'May it reach him who needs it,' and turns one's
back on the pulsing ridges and fluid horizons that are beginning their
mid-day mirage-dance.

At evening the Desert obtrudes again--tricked out as a Nautch girl in
veils of purple, saffron, gold-tinsel, and grass-green. She postures
shamelessly before the delighted tourists with woven skeins of
homeward-flying pelicans, fringes of wild duck, black spotted on
crimson, and cheap jewellery of opal clouds. 'Notice Me!' She cries,
like any other worthless woman. 'Admire the play of My mobile
features--the revelations of My multi-coloured soul! Observe My
allurements and potentialities. Thrill while I stir you!' So She floats
through all Her changes and retires upstage into the arms of the dusk.
But at midnight She drops all pretence and bears down in Her natural
shape, which depends upon the conscience of the beholder and his
distance from the next white man.

You will observe in the _Benedicite Omnia Opera_ that the Desert is the
sole thing not enjoined to 'bless the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him
for ever.' This is because when our illustrious father, the Lord Adam,
and his august consort, the Lady Eve, were expelled from Eden, Eblis the
Accursed, fearful lest mankind should return ultimately to the favour of
Allah, set himself to burn and lay waste all the lands east and west of
Eden.

Oddly enough, the Garden of Eden is almost the exact centre of all the
world's deserts, counting from Gobi to Timbuctoo; and all that land
_qua_ land is 'dismissed from the mercy of God.' Those who use it do so
at their own risk. Consequently the Desert produces her own type of man
exactly as the sea does. I was fortunate enough to meet one sample, aged
perhaps twenty-five. His work took him along the edge of the Red Sea,
where men on swift camels come to smuggle hashish, and sometimes guns,
from dhows that put in to any convenient beach. These smugglers must