I have called this the other side of the desert; and in another sense it is literally the other side.  It is the other shore of that shifting and arid sea.  Looking at it from the West and considering mainly the case of the Moslem, we feel the desert is but a barren border-land of Christendom; but seen from the other side it is the barrier between us and a heathendom far more mysterious and even monstrous than anything Moslem can be.  Indeed it is necessary to realise this more vividly in order to feel the virtue of the Moslem movement.  It belonged to the desert, but in one sense it was rather a clearance in the cloud that rests upon the desert; a rift of pale but clean light in volumes of vapour rolled on it like smoke from the strange lands beyond.  It conceived a fixed hatred of idolatry, partly because its face was turned towards the multitudinous idolatries of the lands of sunrise; and as I looked Eastward I seemed to be conscious of the beginnings of that other world; and saw, like a forest of arms or a dream full of faces, the gods of Asia on their thousand thrones.

It is not a mere romance that calls it a land of magic, or even of black magic.  Those who carry that atmosphere to us are not the romanticists but the realists.  Every one can feel it in the work of Mr. Rudyard Kipling; and when I once remarked on his repulsive little masterpiece called “The Mark of the Beast,” to a rather cynical Anglo-Indian officer, he observed moodily, “It’s a beastly story.  But those devils really can do jolly queer things.”  It is but to take a commonplace example out of countless more notable ones to mention the many witnesses to the mango trick.  Here again we have from time to time to weep over the weak-mindedness that hurriedly dismisses it as the practice of hypnotism.  It is as if people were asked to explain how one unarmed Indian had killed three hundred men, and they said it was only the practice of human sacrifice.  Nothing that we know as hypnotism will enable a man to alter the eyes in the heads of a huge crowd of total strangers; wide awake in broad daylight; and if it is hypnotism, it is something so appallingly magnified as to need a new magic to explain the explanation; certainly something that explains it better than a Greek word for sleep.  But the impression of these special instances is but one example of a more universal impression of the Asiatic atmosphere; and that atmosphere itself is only an example of something vaster still for which I am trying to find words.  Asia stands for something which the world in the West as well as the East is more and more feeling as a presence, and even a pressure.  It might be called the spiritual world let loose; or a sort of psychical anarchy; a jungle of mango plants.  And it is pressing upon the West also to-day because of the breaking down of certain materialistic barriers that have hitherto held it back.  In plain words the attitude of science is not only modified; it is now entirely reversed.  I do not say it with mere pleasure; in some ways I prefer our materialism to their spiritualism.  But for good or evil the scientists are now destroying their own scientific world.