e country began to change. At last we were passing out of the endless
desert over which we had travelled for so many hundreds of miles; at
least a thousand, according to our observations and reckonings, which I
checked by those that I had taken upon my eastward journey. Our march,
after the great adventure at the oasis, was singularly devoid of
startling events. Indeed, it had been awful in its monotony, and yet,
oddly enough, not without a certain charm--at any rate for Higgs and
Orme, to whom the experience was new.

Day by day to travel on across an endless sea of sand so remote, so
unvisited that for whole weeks no man, not even a wandering Bedouin of
the desert, crossed our path. Day by day to see the great red sun rise
out of the eastern sands, and, its journey finished, sink into the
western sands. Night by night to watch the moon, the same moon on which
were fixed the million eyes of cities, turning those sands to a silver
sea, or, in that pure air, to observe the constellations by which we
steered our path making their majestic march through space. And yet to
know that this vast region, now so utterly lonesome and desolate, had
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