from this superb height the traveller first beholds the desert,
out of which the great conquest came.

Every one has heard the great story of the Greeks who cried aloud
in triumph when they saw the sea afar off; but it is a stranger
experience to see the earth afar off. And few of us, strictly speaking,
have ever seen the earth at all. In cultivated countries it
is always clad, as it were, in green garments. The first sight
of the desert is like the sight of a naked giant in the distance.
The image is all the more natural because of the particular formation
which it takes, at least as it borders upon the fields of Egypt,
and as it is seen from the high places of Cairo. Those who have seen
the desert only in pictures generally think of it as entirely flat.
But this edge of it at least stands up on the horizon, as a line
of wrinkled and hollow hills like the scalps of bald men; or worse,
of bald women. For it is impossible not to think of such repulsive
images, in spite of real sublimity of the call to the imagination.
There is something curiously hostile and inhuman about the first
appearance of the motionless surges of that dry and dreadful sea.
Afterwards, if the traveller has happened to linger here and there
in the outposts of the desert, has seen the British camp at Kantara
or the graceful French garden town of Ismalia, he comes to take
the desert as a background, and sometimes a beautiful background;
a mirror of mighty reflections and changing colours almost as strange
as the colours of the sea. But when it is first seen abutting,
and as it were, advancing, upon the fields and gardens of humanity,
then it looks indeed like an enemy, or a long line of enemies;
like a line of tawny wild beasts thus halted with their heads lifted.
It is the feeling that such vain and sterile sand can yet make
itself into something like a mountain range; and the traveller