remembers all the tragedies of the desert, when he lifts up his eyes
to those accursed hills, from whence no help can come.

But this is only a first glimpse from a city set among green fields;
and is concerned rather with what the desert has been in its relation
to men than with what the desert is in itself. When the mind has
grown used to its monotony, a curious change takes place which I
have never seen noted or explained by the students of mental science.
It may sound strange to say that monotony of its nature becomes novelty.
But if any one will try the common experiment of saying some ordinary
word such as "moon" or "man" about fifty times, he will find
that the expression has become extraordinary by sheer repetition.
A man has become a strange animal with a name as queer as that of the gnu;
and the moon something monstrous like the moon-calf. Something
of this magic of monotony is effected by the monotony of deserts;
and the traveller feels as if he had entered into a secret,
and was looking at everything from another side. Something of this
simplification appears, I think, in the religions of the desert,
especially in the religion of Islam. It explains something of the
super-human hopes that fill the desert prophets concerning the future;
it explains something also about their barbarous indifference
to the past.

We think of the desert and its stones as old; but in one sense
they are unnaturally new. They are unused, and perhaps unusable.
They might be the raw material of a world; only they are so raw
as to be rejected. It is not easy to define this quality of
something primitive, something not mature enough to be fruitful.
Indeed there is a hard simplicity about many Eastern things that is
as much crude as archaic. A palm-tree is very like a tree drawn