At First There Was A Mere Moving Speck On The Horizon.
My
party of course became all alive with excitement, and there were
many surmises.
Soon it appeared that three laden camels were
approaching, and that two of them carried riders. In a little
while we saw that one of the riders wore the European dress, and at
last the travellers were pronounced to be an English gentleman and
his servant. By their side there were a couple, I think, of Arabs
on foot, and this was the whole party.
You, you love sailing; in returning from a cruise to the English
coast you see often enough a fisherman's humble boat far away from
all shores, with an ugly black sky above and an angry sea beneath.
You watch the grizzly old man at the helm carrying his craft with
strange skill through the turmoil of waters, and the boy, supple-
limbed, yet weather-worn already, and with steady eyes that look
through the blast, you see him understanding commandments from the
jerk of his father's white eyebrow, now belaying and now letting
go, now scrunching himself down into mere ballast, or baling out
death with a pipkin. Stale enough is the sight, and yet when I see
it I always stare anew, and with a kind of Titanic exultation,
because that a poor boat with the brain of a man and the hands of a
boy on board can match herself so bravely against black heaven and
ocean. Well, so when you have travelled for days and days over an
Eastern desert without meeting the likeness of a human being, and
then at last see an English shooting-jacket and his servant come
listlessly slouching along from out of the forward horizon, you
stare at the wide unproportion between this slender company and the
boundless plains of sand through which they are keeping their way.
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