VI

THE FACE OF THE DESERT

Going up the Nile is like running the gauntlet before Eternity.  Till one has seen it, one does not realise the amazing thinness of that little damp trickle of life that steals along undefeated through the jaws of established death.  A rifle-shot would cover the widest limits of cultivation, a bow-shot would reach the narrower.  Once beyond them a man may carry his next drink with him till he reaches Cape Blanco on the west (where he may signal for one from a passing Union Castle boat) or the Karachi Club on the east.  Say four thousand dry miles to the left hand and three thousand to the right.

The weight of the Desert is on one, every day and every hour.  At morning, when the cavalcade tramps along in the rear of the tulip-like dragoman, She says:  ’I am here——­just beyond that ridge of pink sand that you are admiring.  Come along, pretty gentleman, and I’ll tell you your fortune.’  But the dragoman says very clearly:  ’Please, sar, do not separate yourself at all from the main body,’ which, the Desert knows well, you had no thought of doing.  At noon, when the stewards rummage out lunch-drinks from the dewy ice-chest, the Desert whines louder than the well-wheels on the bank:  ’I am here, only a quarter of a mile away.  For mercy’s sake, pretty gentleman, spare a mouthful of that prickly whisky-and-soda you are lifting to your lips.  There’s a white man a few hundred miles off, dying on my lap of thirst—­thirst that you cure with a rag dipped in lukewarm water while you hold him down with the one hand, and he thinks he is cursing you aloud, but he isn’t, because his tongue is outside his mouth and he can’t get it back.  Thank you, my noble captain!’ For naturally one tips half the drink over the rail with the ancient prayer:  ‘May it reach him who needs it,’ and turns one’s back on the pulsing ridges and fluid horizons that are beginning their mid-day mirage-dance.

At evening the Desert obtrudes again—­tricked out as a Nautch girl in veils of purple, saffron, gold-tinsel, and grass-green.  She postures shamelessly before the delighted tourists with woven skeins of homeward-flying pelicans, fringes of wild duck, black spotted on crimson, and cheap jewellery of opal clouds.  ‘Notice Me!’ She cries, like any other worthless woman.  ’Admire the play of My mobile features—­the revelations of My multi-coloured soul!  Observe My allurements and potentialities.  Thrill while I stir you!’ So She floats through all Her changes and retires upstage into the arms of the dusk.  But at midnight She drops all pretence and bears down in Her natural shape, which depends upon the conscience of the beholder and his distance from the next white man.

You will observe in the Benedicite Omnia Opera that the Desert is the sole thing not enjoined to ’bless the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever.’  This is because when our illustrious father, the Lord Adam, and his august consort, the Lady Eve, were expelled from Eden, Eblis the Accursed, fearful lest mankind should return ultimately to the favour of Allah, set himself to burn and lay waste all the lands east and west of Eden.