cut deep into the swaying world of level plateaux and undulating hills.
It moves about too; he never found it in the same place twice--like an
arm of the Desert that shifted with the changing lights. Here he watched
dawns and sunsets, slept through the mid-day heat, and enjoyed the
unearthly colouring that swept Day and Night across the huge horizons.
In solitude the Desert soaked down into him. At night the jackals cried
in the darkness round his cautiously-fed camp fire--small, because wood
had to be carried--and in the day-time kites circled overhead to inspect
him, and an occasional white vulture flapped across the blue. The weird
desolation of this rocky valley, he thought, was like the scenery of the
moon. He took no watch with him, and the arrival of the donkey boy an
hour after sunrise came almost from another planet, bringing things of
time and common life out of some distant gulf where they had lain
forgotten among lost ages.

The short hour of twilight brought, too, a bewitchment into the silence
that was a little less than comfortable. Full light or darkness he could
manage, but this time of half things made him want to shut his eyes and
hide. Its effect stepped over imagination. The mind got lost. He could
not understand it. For the cliffs and boulders of discoloured limestone
shone then with an inward glow that signalled to the Desert with veiled
lanterns. The misshappen hills, carved by wind and rain into ominous
outlines, stirred and nodded. In the morning light they retired into
themselves, asleep. But at dusk the tide retreated. They rose from the
sea, emerging naked, threatening. They ran together and joined
shoulders, the entire army of them. And the glow of their sandy bodies,
self-luminous, continued even beneath the stars. Only the moonlight
drowned it. For the moonrise over the Mokattam Hills brought a white,
grand loveliness that drenched the entire Desert. It drew a marvellous
sweetness from the sand. It shone across a world as yet unfinished,