head of the dinner-table, that the Moslem world really means when it expects to see a fine man at the head of the house.  Even in the street he is the peacock, coloured much more splendidly than the peahen.  Even when clad in comparatively sober and partly European costume, as outside the cafes of Cairo and the great cities, he exhibits this indefinable character not merely of dignity but of pomp.  It can be traced even in the tarbouch, the minimum of Turkish attire worn by all the commercial classes; the thing more commonly called in England a fez.  The fez is not a sort of smoking cap.  It is a tower of scarlet often tall enough to be the head-dress of a priest.  And it is a hat one cannot take off to a lady.

This fact is familiar enough in talk about Moslem and oriental life generally; but I only repeat it in order to refer it back to the same simplification which is the advantage and disadvantage of the philosophy of the desert.  Chivalry is not an obvious idea.  It is not as plain as a pike-staff or as a palm-tree.  It is a delicate balance between the sexes which gives the rarest and most poetic kind of pleasure to those who can strike it.  But it is not self-evident to a savage merely because he is also a sane man.  It often seems to him as much a part of his own coarse common sense that all the fame and fun should go to the sex that is stronger and less tied, as that all the authority should go to the parents rather than the children.  Pity for weakness he can understand; and the Moslem is quite capable of giving royal alms to a cripple or an orphan.  But reverence for weakness is to him simply meaningless.  It is a mystical idea that is to him no more than a mystery.  But the same is true touching what may be called the lighter side of the more civilised sentiment.  This hard and literal view of life gives no place for that slight element of a magnanimous sort of play-acting, which has run through all our tales of true lovers in the West.  Wherever there is chivalry there is courtesy; and wherever there is courtesy there is comedy.  There is no comedy in the desert.

Another quite logical and consistent element, in the very logical and consistent creed we call Mahometanism, is the element that we call Vandalism.  Since such few and obvious things alone are vital, and since a half-artistic half-antiquarian affection is not one of these things, and cannot be called obvious, it is largely left out.  It is very difficult to say in a few well-chosen words exactly what is now the use of the Pyramids.  Therefore Saladin, the great Saracen warrior, simply stripped the Pyramids to build a military fortress on the heights of Cairo.  It is a little difficult to define exactly what is a man’s duty to the Sphinx; and therefore the Mamelukes used it entirely as a target.  There was little in them of that double feeling, full of pathos and irony, which divided the hearts of the primitive Christians in presence of the great pagan