expected the contrast; and it may have coloured all my after experiences.
I descended from the desert train at Ludd, which had all the look
of a large camp in the desert; appropriately enough perhaps,
for it is the traditional birthplace of the soldier St. George.
At the moment, however, there was nothing rousing or romantic
about its appearance. It was perhaps unusually dreary; for heavy
rain had fallen; and the water stood about in what it is easier
to call large puddles than anything so poetic as small pools.
A motor car sent by friends had halted beside the platform;
I got into it with a not unusual vagueness about where I
was going; and it wound its way up miry paths to a more rolling
stretch of country with patches of cactus here and there.
And then with a curious abruptness I became conscious that
the whole huge desert had vanished, and I was in a new land.
The dark red plains had rolled away like an enormous nightmare;
and I found myself in a fresh and exceedingly pleasant dream.

I know it will seem fanciful; but for a moment I really felt as if I
had come home; or rather to that home behind home for which we
are all homesick. The lost memory of it is the life at once
of faith and of fairy-tale. Groves glowing with oranges rose behind
hedges of grotesque cactus or prickly pear; which really looked
like green dragons guarding the golden apples of the Hesperides.
On each side of the road were such flowers as I had never seen
before under the sun; for indeed they seemed to have the sun in them
rather than the sun on them. Clusters and crowds of crimson anemones
were of a red not to be symbolised in blood or wine; but rather
in the red glass that glows in the window dedicated to a martyr.
Only in a wild Eastern tale could one picture a pilgrim or
traveller finding such a garden in the desert; and I thought