whereon no life might show itself for ages yet to come. He was alone
then upon an empty star, before the creation of things that breathed and
moved.

What impressed him, however, more than everything else was the enormous
vitality that rose out of all this apparent death. There was no hint of
the melancholy that belongs commonly to flatness; the sadness of wide,
monotonous landscape was not here. The endless repetition of sweeping
vale and plateau brought infinity within measurable comprehension. He
grasped a definite meaning in the phrase "world without end": the
Desert had no end and no beginning. It gave him a sense of eternal
peace, the silent peace that star-fields know. Instead of subduing the
soul with bewilderment, it inspired with courage, confidence, hope.
Through this sand which was the wreck of countless geological ages,
rushed life that was terrific and uplifting, too huge to include
melancholy, too deep to betray itself in movement. Here was the
stillness of eternity. Behind the spread grey masque of apparent death
lay stores of accumulated life, ready to break forth at any point. In
the Desert he felt himself absolutely royal.

And this contrast of Life, veiling itself in Death, was a contradiction
that somehow intoxicated. The Desert exhilaration never left him. He was
never alone. A companionship of millions went with him, and he _felt_
the Desert close, as stars are close to one another, or grains of sand.

It was the Khamasin, the hot wind bringing sand, that drove him in--with
the feeling that these few days and nights had been immeasurable, and
that he had been away a thousand years. He came back with the magic of
the Desert in his blood, hotel-life tasteless and insipid by comparison.
To human impressions thus he was fresh and vividly sensitive. His being,