rpiece of a
peculiarly modern kind. Loti leaves to other writers the
task of depicting the Bedouin. The spectacle of nature in
her wildest and severest mood was what he went out to see;
and he employs all the resources of his incomparable
genius for description in painting the vacant immensity of
the Arabian wilderness. Tired and distracted by the whirl
and fever of life in Paris, Loti set out, like Tancred, in
Beaconsfield's romance on a pilgrimage from Sinai to
Calvary to recover the faith he had lost in civilisation.

_February 22, 1894._ All about us was the empty infinitude; the twilight
desert swept by a great cold wind; the desert that rolled, in dull, dead
colours, under a still more sombre sky which, on the circular horizon,
seemed to fall on it and crush it.

Sitting under the palm-tree of the Oasis of Moses, half an hour's march
from the Red Sea, surrounded by our camels and camel-men, we stared at
the desert, and the emotion and the ecstasy of solitude came over us. We
longed to plunge headlong into the dim, luring immensity, to run with
the wind blowing over the desolate dunes. So we ran, and reaching the
heights, we looked down on a larger wilderness, over which trailed a
dying gleam of daylight, fallen from the yellow sky through a rent made
by the wind in the cloudy veil. But so sinister was the desert in the
winter wind, that from some remote, ancestral source of feeling a
strange melancholy welled up and mingled with our desire for the
solitude. In it was the instinctive fear which makes the sheep and
cattle of the green lands retrace their steps at the sight of regions
over which hangs the shadow of death.

But under our tent, lighted and sheltered from the wind, we recovered
our gaiety of mood. There was the novelty of our first meal in the
desert to excite us, and the pleasure of packing up our ridiculous
European costumes, and dressing ourselves in the more useful and far
more decorative burnous and veils of the sheiks of Arabia.

All the next three days we travelled through a waterless waste,
following a vague trace which, in the course of ages, men and beasts
have made in the dry sand. Far in front the sky-line danced in the heat.
The sand around was strewn with greyish stones; everything was grey,
grey-red or grey-yellow. Here and there was a plant of a pale green,
with an imperceptible flower, and the long necks of the camels bent and
stretched trying to crop it.

Littl