re. The shops are closing; it must
needs be late.

The road is Levantine in its general character; and we should have no
clear notion of the place did we not see in our rapid, noisy passage
signs that recall us to the land of the Arabs. People pass dressed in
the long robe and tarboosh of the East; and some of the houses, above
the European shops, are ornamented with mushrabiyas. But this blinding
electricity strikes a false note. In our hearts are we quite sure we are
in the East?

The road ends, opening on to darkness. Suddenly, without any warning,
it abuts upon a void in which the eyes see nothing, and we roll over
a yielding, felted soil, where all noise abruptly ceases--it is the
_desert_! . . . Not a vague, nondescript stretch of country such as in
the outskirts of our towns, not one of the solitudes of Europe, but the
threshold of the vast desolations of Arabia. _The desert_; and, even if
we had not known that it was awaiting us, we should have recognised it
by the indescribable quality of harshness and uniqueness which, in spite
of the darkness, cannot be mistaken.

But the night after all is not so black. It only seemed so, at the first
moment, by contrast with the glaring illumination of the street. In
reality it is transparent and blue. A half-moon, high up in the heavens,
and veiled by a diaphanous mist, shines gently, and as it is an Egyptian
moon, more subtle than ours, it leaves to things a little of their
colour. We can see now, as well as feel, this desert, which has opened
and imposed its silence upon us. Before us is the paleness of its sands
and the reddish-brown of its dead rocks. Verily, in no country but Egypt
are there such rapid surprises: to issue from a street flanked by shops
and stalls and, without transition, to find this! . . .

Our horses have, inevitably, to slacken speed as the wheels of our
carriage sink into the sand. Around us still are some stray ramblers,
who presently assume the air of ghosts, with their long black or white
draperies, and noiseless tread. And then, not a soul; nothing but the
sand and the moon.

But now almost at once, after the short intervening nothingness, we
find ourselves in a new town; streets with little low houses, little
cross-roads, little squares, all of them white, on whitened sands,
beneath a white moon. . . . But there is no electricity in this town, no
lights, and nobody is stirring; doors and windows are shut: no movement
of any kind, and th