all.  “We owe her very little.  The debt is on her side,” he muttered.  “It is we who make her so beautiful, finding in the wilderness a garden and a statue in a marble block.  Man is everything.”  And the words put the thought into his mind that although they had been travelling for many hours they had not yet seen a human being, nor yet an animal.  Whither the Arabs had gone the dragoman could not tell him; he could only say they came to this plain for the spring pasture; their summer pastures were elsewhere, and he pointed to an old olive, brown and bent by the wind, telling Owen it was deemed a sacred tree, to which sterile women came to hang votive offerings.  Owen reined up his horse in front of it, and they resumed their journey, meeting with nothing they had not met with before, unless, perhaps, a singular group of date-palms gathered together at one spot, forerunners of the desert, keeping each other company, struggling for life in a climate which was not theirs.

At eleven o’clock a halt was made in the bed of a great river enclosed within steep mudbanks, now nearly as dry as the river they had crossed in the morning; only a few inches of turbid water, at which a long herd of cattle was drinking when they arrived; the banks planted with great trees, olives, tamarisks, and masticks.  At three o’clock they were again in the saddle, and they rode on, leaving to the left an encampment (the dragoman told Owen the name of the tribe), some wandering horses, and some camels.  The camels, who appeared to have lost themselves, did not gallop away like the horses, but came forward and peaceably watched the cavalcade passing, absent-minded, bored ruminants, with something always on their minds.  The sobriety of these animals astonished him.  “They’re not greedy, and they are never thirsty.  Of what do they remind me?” And Owen thought for a while, till catching sight of their long fleecy necks, bending like the necks of birds, and ending in long flexible lips (it was the lips that gave him the clue he was seeking), he said, “The Nonconformists of the four-footed world,” and he told his joke to his dragoman, without, however, being able to make him understand.

“These Arabs have no sense of humour,” he muttered, as he rode away.

The only human beings he saw on that long day’s journey were three shepherds—­two youths and an old man; the elder youth, standing on a low wall, which might be Roman or Carthaginian, Turkish or Arabian (an antiquarian would doubtless have evolved the history of four great nations from it), watched a flock of large-tailed sheep and black goats, and blew into his flageolet, drawing from it, not music, only sounds without measure or rhythm, which the wind carried down the valley, causing the sheep-dog to rise up from the rock on which he was lying and to howl dismally.  Near by the old man walked, leaning on the arm of the younger brother, a boy of sixteen.  Both wore shepherd’s garb—­tunics fitting tight to the waist, large plaited hats, and sandals cut from sheep-skin.  The old man’s eyes were weak and red, and he blinked them so constantly that Owen thought he must be blind; and the boy was so beautiful that one of the Arabs cried out to him, in the noble form of Arab salutation: