Oddly enough, the Garden of Eden is almost the exact centre of all the world’s deserts, counting from Gobi to Timbuctoo; and all that land qua land is ‘dismissed from the mercy of God.’  Those who use it do so at their own risk.  Consequently the Desert produces her own type of man exactly as the sea does.  I was fortunate enough to meet one sample, aged perhaps twenty-five.  His work took him along the edge of the Red Sea, where men on swift camels come to smuggle hashish, and sometimes guns, from dhows that put in to any convenient beach.  These smugglers must be chased on still swifter camels, and since the wells are few and known, the game is to get ahead of them and occupy their drinking-places.

But they may skip a well or so, and do several days’ march in one.  Then their pursuer must take e’en greater risks and make crueller marches that the Law may be upheld.  The one thing in the Law’s favour is that hashish smells abominably—­worse than a heated camel—­so, when they range alongside, no time is lost in listening to lies.  It was not told to me how they navigate themselves across the broken wastes, or by what arts they keep alive in the dust-storms and heat.  That was taken for granted, and the man who took it so considered himself the most commonplace of mortals.  He was deeply moved by the account of a new aerial route which the French are laying out somewhere in the Sahara over a waterless stretch of four hundred miles, where if the aeroplane is disabled between stations the pilot will most likely die and dry up beside it.  To do the Desert justice, she rarely bothers to wipe out evidence of a kill.  There are places in the Desert, men say, where even now you come across the dead of old battles, all as light as last year’s wasps’ nests, laid down in swaths or strung out in flight, with, here and there, the little sparkling lines of the emptied cartridge-cases that dropped them.

There are valleys and ravines that the craziest smugglers do not care to refuge in at certain times of the year; as there are rest-houses where one’s native servants will not stay because they are challenged on their way to the kitchen by sentries of old Soudanese regiments which have long gone over to Paradise.  And of voices and warnings and outcries behind rocks there is no end.  These last arise from the fact that men very rarely live in a spot so utterly still that they can hear the murmuring race of the blood over their own ear-drums.  Neither ship, prairie, nor forest gives that silence.  I went out to find it once, when our steamer tied up and the rest of them had gone to see a sight, but I never dared venture more than a mile from our funnel-smoke.  At that point I came upon a hill honey-combed with graves that held a multitude of paper-white skulls, all grinning cheerfully like ambassadors of the Desert.  But I did not accept their invitation.  They had told me that all the little devils learn to draw in the Desert, which explains the elaborate and purposeless