It is well known that Mount Atlas and those inhabited lands where there is a sufficient rainfall and every evidence of man’s activity, the Province of Africa, the plateaux which are full of the memories of Rome, end abruptly towards the sun, and are bounded by a sort of cliff which falls sheer upon the desert.  On the summit of this cliff I lay and looked down upon the sand.  It was impressed upon my mind that here was an influence quite peculiar, not to be discovered in any other climate of the world; that all Europe received that influence, and yet that no one in Europe had accepted it save for his hurt.

God forbid that any man should pretend that the material environment of mankind determines the destiny of mankind.  Those who say such things have abandoned the domain of intelligence.  But it is true that the soul eagerly seeks for and receives the impressions of the world about it, and will be moved to a different creed or to a different poetry, according as the body perceives the sea or the hills or the rainless and inhuman places which lie to the south of Europe; and certainly the souls of those races which have inhabited the great zone of calms between the trade winds and the tropics, those races which have felt nothing beneficent, but only something awful and unfamiliar in the earth and sky, have produced a peculiar philosophy.

It is to be remarked that this philosophy is not atheist; those races called Semitic have never denied either the presence or the personality of God.  It is, on the contrary, their boast that they have felt His presence, His unity, and His personality in a manner more pointed than have the rest of mankind; and those of us who pretend to find in the Desert a mere negation, are checked by the thought that within the Desert the most positive of religions have appeared.  Indeed, to deny God has been the sad privilege of very few in any society of men; and those few, if it be examined, have invariably been men in whom the power to experience was deadened, usually by luxury, sometimes by distress.

It is not atheist; but whatever it is, it is hurtful, and has about it something of the despair and strength of atheism.  Consider the Book of Job; consider the Arab Mohammedan; consider the fierce heresies which besieged the last of the Romans in this Province of Africa, and which tortured the short history of the Vandals; consider the modern tragedies which develop among the French soldiers to the north and to the south of this wide belt of sand; and you will see that the thing which the Sahara and its prolongation produce is something evil, or at least to us evil.  There is in the idea running through the mind of the Desert an intensity which may be of some value to us if it be diluted by a large admixture of European tradition, or if it be mellowed and transformed by a long process of time, but which, if we take it at its source and inspire ourselves directly from it, warps and does hurt to our European sense.