And especially among all these symptoms of the philosophy from which they suffer is their manner of comprehending the nature of creation.  Of creation in any form they are afraid; and the infinite Creator is on that account present to them almost as though He were a man, for when we are afraid of things we see them very vividly indeed.  On this account you will find in the legends of the men of the Desert all manner of fantastic tales incomprehensible to us Europeans, wherein God walks, talks, eats, and wrestles.  Nor is there any trace in this attitude of theirs of parable or of allegory.  That mixture of the truth, and of a subtle unreal glamour which expands and confirms the truth, is a mixture proper to our hazy landscapes, to our drowsy woods, and to our large vision.  We, who so often see from our high village squares soft and distant horizons, mountains now near, now very far, according as the weather changes:  we, who are perpetually feeling the transformation of the seasons, and who are immersed in a very ocean of manifold and mysterious life, we need, create, and live by legends.  The line between the real and imaginary is vague and penumbral to us.  We are justly influenced by our twilights, and our imagination teaches us.  How many deities have we not summoned up to inhabit groves and lakes—­special deities who are never seen, but yet have never died?

To the men of the Desert, doubt and beauty mingled in this fashion seemed meaningless.  That which they worship they see and almost handle.  In the dreadful silence which surrounds them, their illusions turn into convictions—­the haunting voices are heard; the forms are seen.

Of two further things, native to us, their starved experience has no hold; of nationality (or if the term be preferred, of “The City”) and of what we have come to call “chivalry.”  The two are but aspects of one thing without a name; but that thing all Europeans possess, nor is it possible for us to conceive of a patriotism unless it is a patriotism which is chivalric.  In our earliest stories, we honour men fighting odds.  Our epics are of small numbers against great; humility and charity are in them, lending a kind of magic strength to the sword.  The Faith did not bring in that spirit, but rather completed it.  Our boundaries have always been intensely sacred to us.  We are not passionate to cross them save for the sake of adventure; but we are passionate to defend them.  In all that enormous story of Rome, from the dim Etrurian origins right up to the end of her thousand years, the Wall of the Town was more sacred than the limits of the Empire.

The men of the Desert do not understand these things.  They are by compulsion nomad, and for ever wandering; they strike no root; their pride is in mere expansion; they must colonise or fail; nor does any man die for a city.

As I looked from the mountain I thought the Desert which I had come so far to see had explained to me what hitherto I had not understood in the mischances of Europe.  I remained for a long while looking out upon the glare.