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.
There are valleys and ravines that the craziest smugglers do not care to
refuge in at certain times of the year; as there are rest-houses where
one's native servants will not stay because they are challenged on their
way to the kitchen by sentries of old Soudanese regiments which have
long gone over to Paradise. And of voices and warnings and outcries
behind rocks there is no end. These last arise from the fact that men
very rarely live in a spot so utterly still that they can hear the
murmuring race of the blood over their own ear-drums.
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