would come to
him that if he turned the universe upside-down, nothing would happen.
The high heavens would be made of golden sand and the limitless earth of
bright blue--that would be all the difference; nothing would tumble
about, for there was nothing to tumble; nothing would be standing on its
head, for there was nothing which had a head to stand on. God's world
was as it had been before the creation of man.

Since his _Hijrah_, as Freddy called his flight from the valley, he had
ceased to think about his own standing on his head. He had accepted the
fact that a man must work out his own life as truly as he must work out
his own salvation. To be a weak copy of Freddy would be contemptible; it
would be better to be an out-and-out failure and drifter for the rest of
his days. As a failure he would at least be living the life he best
understood, the life which to him seemed fuller than the lives lived by
successful materialists.

For the whole three days in the desert he had scarcely passed a living
creature; it was the most desolate journey he had ever taken. Some
portions of the great desert are much more barren than others, more
extraordinarily desolate. The whole thing, of course, depends upon the
all-important water. One writer's words explain the matter
concisely--"there are two kinds of desert in Egypt, the desert of sand,
which is only desert because it is left without water, and the desert
which is desert because nothing profitable will grow there."

Probably the country over which Michael had travelled belonged to the
last type of desert. There had been wonderful effects of light and shade
and strange changes in the colour of the sand and rocks, owing to
geological reasons. Sometimes such strange effects that he found it hard
to believe, from a distance, that there were not bright carpets or gay
flowers spread on the sands.

To the uninitiated it sounds as if such a journey could become
dangerously monotonous and boring, and so it would to the eye or mind
which has not the true desert instinct. Michael's had it. He loved its
passionate intensity of sky and space as a true sailor loves the ocean.
He loved his "ship of the desert," which bore him silently over the
rolling waves of sand, as a Jack Tar loves his ship. He loved the
stories of the desert which his guide told him at night under the
southern stars, as an English Jack Tar loves his fo'c's'e yarns.

Although nothing ever happened, there