'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 be
chased on still swifter camels, and since the wells are few and known,
the game is to get ahead of them and occupy their drinking-places.
But they may skip a well or so, and do several days' march in one. Then
their pursuer must take e'en greater risks and make crueller marches
that the Law may be upheld. The one thing in the Law's favour is that
hashish smells abominably - worse than a heated camel - so, when they
range alongside, no time is lost in listening to lies. It was not told
to me how they navigate themselves across the broken wastes, or by what
arts they keep alive in the dust-storms and heat. That was taken for
granted, and the man who took it so considered himself the most
commonplace of mortals. He was deeply moved by the account of a new
aerial route which the French are laying out somewhere in the Sahara
over a waterless stretch of four hundred miles, where if the aeroplane
is disabled between stations the pilot will most likely die and dry up
beside it. To do the Desert justice, she rarely bothers to wipe out
evidence of a kill. There are places in the Desert, men say, where even
now you come across the dead of old battles, all as light as last year's
wasps' nests, laid down in swaths or strung out in flight, with, here
and there, the little sparkling lines of the emptied cartridge-cases
that dropped them.
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