time from the sight of men, blotted out like a bird which flies free
from a lighted room into the outside darkness. As though in
compensation for that which it has taken, the desert from time to time
allows new marvels, riven from its vitals, to emerge.

Though death-still, it has a voice which calls ceaselessly to those
human hearts tuned to its messages: hostile and harsh, it draws and
urges; repellent, it profligately awards health and wealth; inviting,
it kills. And always it keeps its own counsel; it is without peer in
its lonesomeness, and without confidants; it heaps its sand over its
secrets to hide them from its flashing stars.

You see the bobbing ears of a pack-animal and the dusty hat and stoop
shoulders of a man. They are symbols of mystery. They rise briefly
against the skyline, they are gone into the grey distance. Something
beckons or something drives. They are lost to human sight, perhaps to
human memory, like a couple of chips drifting out into the ocean.
Patient time may witness their return; it is still likely that soon
another incarnation will have closed for man and beast, that they will
have left to mark their passing a few glisteningly white bones,
polished untiringly by tiny sand-chisels in the grip of the desert
winds. They may find gold, but they may not come in time to water.
The desert is equally conversant with the actions of men mad with gold
and mad with thirst.

To push out along into this immensity is to evince the heart of a brave
man or the brain of a fool. The endeavour to traverse the forbidden
garden of silence implies on the part of the agent an adventurous
nature. Hence it would seem no great task to catalogue those human
beings who set their backs to the gentler world and press forward into