sense of recognising the kindred points of heaven and home.
Even the exception to this rule is an exception at once terrible
and touching. There is one house that the Moslem does build
like a house and even a home, often with walls and roof and door;
as square as a cottage, as solid as a fort. And that is his grave.
A Moslem cemetery is literally like a little village. It is a village,
as the saying goes, that one would not care to walk through at night.
There is something singularly creepy about so strange a street
of houses, each with a door that might be opened by a dead man.
But in a less fanciful sense, there is about it something profoundly
pathetic and human. Here indeed is the sailor home from sea,
in the only port he will consent to call his home; here at last
the nomad confesses the common need of men. But even about this
there broods the presence of the desert and its dry bones of reason.
He will accept nothing between a tent and a tomb.

The philosophy of the desert can only begin over again.
It cannot grow; it cannot have what Protestants call progress
and Catholics call development. There is death and hell
in the desert when it does begin over again. There is always
the possibility that a new prophet will rediscover the old truth;
will find again written on the red sands the secret of the obvious.
But it will always be the same secret, for which thousands
of these simple and serious and splendidly valiant men will die.
The highest message of Mahomet is a piece of divine tautology.
The very cry that God is God is a repetition of words, like the
repetitions of wide sands and rolling skies. The very phrase is like
an everlasting echo, that can never cease to say the same sacred word;
and when I saw afterwards the mightiest and most magnificent
of all the mosques of that land, I found that its inscriptions