Every one has heard the great story of the Greeks who cried aloud in triumph when they saw the sea afar off; but it is a stranger experience to see the earth afar off.  And few of us, strictly speaking, have ever seen the earth at all.  In cultivated countries it is always clad, as it were, in green garments.  The first sight of the desert is like the sight of a naked giant in the distance.  The image is all the more natural because of the particular formation which it takes, at least as it borders upon the fields of Egypt, and as it is seen from the high places of Cairo.  Those who have seen the desert only in pictures generally think of it as entirely flat.  But this edge of it at least stands up on the horizon, as a line of wrinkled and hollow hills like the scalps of bald men; or worse, of bald women.  For it is impossible not to think of such repulsive images, in spite of real sublimity of the call to the imagination.  There is something curiously hostile and inhuman about the first appearance of the motionless surges of that dry and dreadful sea.  Afterwards, if the traveller has happened to linger here and there in the outposts of the desert, has seen the British camp at Kantara or the graceful French garden town of Ismalia, he comes to take the desert as a background, and sometimes a beautiful background; a mirror of mighty reflections and changing colours almost as strange as the colours of the sea.  But when it is first seen abutting, and as it were, advancing, upon the fields and gardens of humanity, then it looks indeed like an enemy, or a long line of enemies; like a line of tawny wild beasts thus halted with their heads lifted.  It is the feeling that such vain and sterile sand can yet make itself into something like a mountain range; and the traveller remembers all the tragedies of the desert, when he lifts up his eyes to those accursed hills, from whence no help can come.

But this is only a first glimpse from a city set among green fields; and is concerned rather with what the desert has been in its relation to men than with what the desert is in itself.  When the mind has grown used to its monotony, a curious change takes place which I have never seen noted or explained by the students of mental science.  It may sound strange to say that monotony of its nature becomes novelty.  But if any one will try the common experiment of saying some ordinary word such as “moon” or “man” about fifty times, he will find that the expression has become extraordinary by sheer repetition.  A man has become a strange animal with a name as queer as that of the gnu; and the moon something monstrous like the moon-calf.  Something of this magic of monotony is effected by the monotony of deserts; and the traveller feels as if he had entered into a secret, and was looking at everything from another side.  Something of this simplification appears, I think, in the religions of the desert, especially in the religion of Islam.  It explains something of the super-human hopes that fill the desert prophets concerning the future; it explains something also about their barbarous indifference to the past.