n the desert one rides like the Arab, and it would
be ridiculous to go away to the Sahara hanging on to a snaffle like
an Irishman out hunting.

So he mounted, and the cavalcade started amid much noise and dust,
which followed it until it turned from the road into the scrub. A
heavy dew had fallen during the night, and it glittered like silver
rain, producing a slight mirage, which deceived nobody, but which
prevented Owen from seeing what the country was like, until the sun
shone out. Then he saw that they were crossing an uncultivated
rather than a sterile plain, and the word "wilderness" came up in
his mind, for the only trees and plants he saw were wildings, wild
artichokes, tall stems, of no definite colour, with hairy fruits;
rosemary, lavender and yellow broom, and half-naked bushes stripped
of their foliage by the summer heat, covered with dust; nowhere a
blade of grass--an indurated plain, chapped, rotted by stagnant
waters, burnt again by the sun. And they rode over this plain for
hours, the horses avoiding the baked earth, choosing the softer
places where there was a litter of leaves or moss. Sometimes the
cavalcade divided into twos and threes, sometimes it formed into a
little group riding to the right or left, with Owen and his dragoman
in front, Owen trying to learn Arabic from the dragoman, the lesson
interrupted continually by some new sight: by a cloud of thistledown
hovering over a great purple field, rising and falling, for there
was not wind enough to carry the seed away; by some white vapour on
the horizon, which his dragoman told him was the smoke of Arabs
clearing the scrub.

"A primitive method, and an easy one, saving the labour of billhook
and axe." About nine o'clock he saw some woods lying to the
north-west. But the horses' heads were turned eastward to avoid an arm
of a great marsh, extending northward to the horizon. It was then
that, wearying of trying to get his tongue round certain Arabic words,
he rode away from his dragoman, and tried to define the landscape as a
painter would; but it was all too vast, and all detail was lost in
the vastness, and all was alike. So, abandoning the pictorial, he
philosophised, discovering the fallacy of the old saying that we owe
everything to the earth, the mother of all. "We owe her very little.
The debt is on her side," he muttered. "It is we who make her so
beautiful, finding in the wilderness a garden and a statue in a
marble block. Man is every