ragoman and
camel-driver, and retiring a few yards from their perpetual chatter to
gaze at the heavens in what _you_ imagine to be the approved style, to
the accompaniment of correct gasps, after which, finding you have left
your cigarettes behind, you look at your wrist watch and wait another
five minutes, until you can with decency saunter back to your
camel-driver with the feeling of something quite well done, and the
unuttered hope in your mind that everyone would not have gone to bed on
your return.

No! it means, when wearied from long travel you call a halt, perhaps
just before the dawn, when the very stars seem to commune with you.

Leaving your servants to pitch your tent, urge your camel to the
distance when the clattering of pans, and the jar of inter-domestic
feud shall not assail your hearing, then urge your camel to its knees,
and set you down at a distance so that the pungent odour of the beast
shall not assail your nostrils, and then removing little by little the
outer covering of the worries and pin-pricks which have made the
passing of the day unbearable, give way to your soul, or second self,
or whatever you call that which causes you to joy in the coming of the
spring, and to mourn when the fire refuses to heat but a portion of the
room in winter.

For this is what happened to Jill, the English girl, as she sat on her
cushions in the Egyptian desert, and has nothing to do with
table-turning, or ten-and-six-penny visions in Maida Vale, or
whisperings, or touchings in a conveniently darkened room; neither must
you put it down to magnetism or hypnotism, or any of those "isms" which
we, of a glacier-born country and a machine-made life, so irreverently
tag on as terms descriptive to all that which we cannot label and place
upon a museum shelf, or conveniently start by motor power.

A long dissertation on the Eastern's power of concentration, love of
meditation, and utter detachment from self, would doubtlessly prove
wearisome in the extreme, neither for a true explanation thereof can
help be got from highly or lowly born native. Without movement for
hours he will sit or squat, as becomes his station, staring, as we
should say, vacantly into space, in reality seeing and hearing that
which others, blinded by material enjoyment, can never hope to
visualise or hear.

Jill afterwards tried to explain the outcome of this, her first step in
the meadows of meditation, which she took without help and witho