Neither Ship,
Prairie, Nor Forest Gives That Silence.
I went out to find it once, when
our steamer tied up and the rest of them had gone to see a sight, but I
never dared venture more than a mile from our funnel-smoke.
At that
point I came upon a hill honey-combed with graves that held a multitude
of paper-white skulls, all grinning cheerfully like ambassadors of the
Desert. But I did not accept their invitation. They had told me that all
the little devils learn to draw in the Desert, which explains the
elaborate and purposeless detail that fills it. None but devils could
think of etching every rock outcrop with wind-lines, or skinning it down
to its glistening nerves with sand-blasts; of arranging hills in the
likeness of pyramids and sphinxes and wrecked town-suburbs; of covering
the space of half an English county with sepia studies of interlacing
and recrossing ravines, dongas, and nullahs, each an exposition of much
too clever perspective; and of wiping out the half-finished work with a
wash of sand in three tints, only to pick it up again in silver-point on
the horizon's edge. This they do in order to make lost travellers think
they can recognise landmarks and run about identifying them till the
madness comes. The Desert is all devil-device - as you might say 'blasted
cleverness' - crammed with futile works, always promising something fresh
round the next corner, always leading out through heaped decoration and
over-insistent design into equal barrenness.
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