ised from all the
instability of life; the geological splendour of the world before the
creation.

Oh, the sunset this evening! Never have we seen so much gold poured out
for us alone around our lonely camp. Our camels, wandering beyond our
tents, and strangely enlarged against the vacant horizon, have gold on
their heads, on their legs, on their long necks; they are all edged with
gold.

And then night comes, the limpid night with its stillness. If at this
moment one goes away from the camp and loses sight of it, or even
separates oneself from the little handful of living creatures strayed in
the midst of dead space, in order to feel more absolutely alone in the
nocturnal vacancy, one has an impression of terror in which there is
something religious. Less distant, less inaccessible than elsewhere, the
stars blaze in the depths of the cosmic abysses; and in this desert,
unchangeable and untouched by time, from which one looks at them, one
feels oneself nearer to conceiving their inconceivable infinity; one has
almost the illusion of sharing in their starry duration, their starry
impassibility.

_II.--The Habitation of Solitude_

_March 1._ After climbing two days in snow, thunder, and tempest, we see
at last, amid the dim, cloudy peaks of granite, the tall ramparts and
the cypress trees of the convent of Sinai. Alas! how silent, sinister,
and chill appears the holy mountain, whose name alone still flames for
us in the distance. It is as empty as the sky above our heads.

Trembling with the cold in our thin, wet burnous, we alight from our
camels, that suffer and complain, disquieted by the white obscurity, the
lashing wind, the strange, wild altitude. For twenty minutes we clamber
by lantern light among blocks and falls of granite, with bare feet that
slip at every step on the snow. Then we reach a gigantic wall, the
summit of which is lost in darkness, and a little low door, covered with
iron, opens. We pass in. Two more doors of a smaller kind lead through a
vaulted tunnel in the rampart. They close behind us with the clang of
armour, and we creep up some flights of rough, broken stairs, hewed out
of the rock, to a hostel for pilgrims at the top of the great fortress.

Some hospitable monks in black robes, and with long hair like women,
hasten to cheer us with a little hot coffee and a little lighted
charcoal, carried in a copper vase. Everything has an air of nonchalant
wretchedness and Oriental dilapidation