once been familiar to the feet of long-forgotten men who had trod the
sands we walked, and dug the wells at which we drank.

Armies had marched across these deserts, also, and perished there. For
once we came to a place where a recent fearful gale had almost denuded
the underlying rock, and there found the skeletons of thousands upon
thousands of soldiers, with those of their beasts of burden, and among
them heads of arrows, sword-blades, fragments of armour and of painted
wooden shields.

Here a whole host had died; perhaps Alexander sent it forth, or perhaps
some far earlier monarch whose name has ceased to echo on the earth.
At least they had died, for there we saw the memorial of that buried
enterprise. There lay the kings, the captains, the soldiers, and the
concubines, for I found the female bones heaped apart, some with the
long hair still upon the skulls, showing where the poor, affrighted
women had hived together in the last catastrophe of slaughter or of
famine, thirst, and driven sand. Oh, if only those bones could speak,
what a tale was theirs to tell!

There had been cities in this desert, too, where once were oases, now
overwhelmed, except perhaps for a sand-choked spring. Twice we came
upon the foundations of such places, old walls of clay or stone, stark
skeletons of ancient homes that the shifting sands had disinterred,
which once had been the theatre of human hopes and fears, where once men
had been born, loved, and died, where once maidens had been fair, and
good and evil wrestled, and little children played. Some Job may have
dwelt here and written his immortal plaint, or some king of Sodom, and
suffered the uttermost calamity. The world is very old; all we Westerns
learned from the contemplation of these wrecks of men and of their works