this Eastern gate,
if any, entered whatever made and changed the world. Whatever else
this narrow strip of land may seem like, it does really seem,
to the spirit and almost to the senses, like the bridge that may have
borne across archaic abysses the burden and the mystery of man.
Here have been civilisations as old as any barbarism; to all
appearance perhaps older than any barbarism. Here is the camel;
the enormous unnatural friend of man; the prehistoric pet.
He is never known to have been wild, and might make a man fancy
that all wild animals had once been tame. As I said elsewhere,
all might be a runaway menagerie; the whale a cow that went swimming
and never came back, the tiger a large cat that took the prize
(and the prize-giver) and escaped to the jungle. This is not
(I venture to think) true; but it is true as Pithecanthropus and
Primitive Man and all the other random guesses from dubious bits
of bone and stone. And the truth is some third thing, too tremendous
to be remembered by men. Whatever it was, perhaps the camel saw it;
but from the expression on the face of that old family servant,
I feel sure that he will never tell.

I have called this the other side of the desert; and in another
sense it is literally the other side. It is the other shore
of that shifting and arid sea. Looking at it from the West
and considering mainly the case of the Moslem, we feel the desert
is but a barren border-land of Christendom; but seen from
the other side it is the barrier between us and a heathendom far
more mysterious and even monstrous than anything Moslem can be.
Indeed it is necessary to realise this more vividly in order to feel
the virtue of the Moslem movement. It belonged to the desert,
but in one sense it was rather a clearance in the cloud that rests
upon the desert; a rift of pale but clean light in volumes
of vapour rolled on it like smoke from the strange lands beyond.
It conceived a fixed hatred of idolatry, partly because its face was
turned towards the multitudinous idolatries of the lands of sunrise;
and as I looked Eastward I seemed to be conscious of the beginnings
of that other world; and saw, like a forest of arms or a dream full
of faces, the gods of Asia on their thousand thrones.

It is not a mere romance that calls it a land of magic,
or even of black magic. Those who carry that atmosphere to us
are not the romanticists but the realists. Every one can feel
it in the work of Mr. Rudy