eat in a kind of hovering
sense like a pair of wings; and all the secrets of time coming out
of it all, and sort of touching your face like a velvet wind. I
expect you'll think me sentimental, a first-class squash out of the
pumpkin-garden; but it's in the desert, and it gets into you and
saturates you, till you feel that this is a kind of middle space
between the world of cities, and factories, and railways, and
tenement-houses, and the quiet world to come--a place where they
think out things for the benefit of future generations, and convey
them through incarnations, or through the desert. Say, your
ladyship, I'm a chatterer, I'm a two-cent philosopher, I'm a baby;
but you are too much like your grandmother, who was the daughter of
a Quaker like David Pasha, to laugh at me.

I've got a suit of fine chain-armour which I bought of an Arab down
by Darfur. I'm wondering if it would be too cowardly to wear it in
the scrap that's coming. I don't know, though, but what I'll wear
it, I get so scared. But it will be a frightful hot thing under my
clothes, and it's hot enough without that, so I'm not sure. It
depends how much my teeth chatter when I see "the dawn of battle."

I've got one more thing before I stop. I'm going to send you a
piece of poetry which the Saadat wrote, and tore in two, and threw
away. He was working off his imagination, I guess, as you have to
do out here. I collected it and copied it, and put in the
punctuation--he didn't bother about that. Perhaps he can't
punctuate. I don't understand quite what the poetry means, but
maybe you will. Anyway, you'll see that it's a real desert piece.
Here it is:

"THE DESERT ROAD

"In the sands I lived in a hut of palm,
There was never a garden to see;
There was never a path through the desert calm,
Nor a way through its storms for me.

"Tenant was I of a lone domain;
The far pale caravans wound
To the rim of the sky, and vanished again;
My call in the waste was drowned.

"The vultures came and hovered and fled;
And once there stole to my door
A white gazelle, but its eyes were dread
With the hurt of the wounds it bore.

"It passed in the dusk with a foot of fear,
And the white cold mists rolled in;

"And my heart was the heart of a stricken deer,