There are they who yet remember, when the depot’s forty jaws
Through iron teeth that chatter to the tramping of a throng
Spew out the crushed commuter in obedience to laws
That all accord observance and that all agree are wrong;
When rush and din and hubbub stir the too responsive vein
Till head and heart are conquered by the hustle roaring by
And the sign looks good that glitters on the temple gate of Gain, —
“There are spaces just as luring where the leagues untrodden lie!”

There are they who yet remember ’mid the fever of exchange,
When the hot excitement throttles and the millions make or break,
How a camel’s silent footfall on the ashen desert range
Swings cushioned into distances where thoughts unfettered wake,
And the memory unbidden plucks an unconverted heart
Till the glamour goes from houses and emotion from the street,
And the truth glares good and gainly in the face of ’change and mart: 
“There are deserts more intensive.  There are silences as sweet!”

“Ready for anything!  If I weaken, tie me on the camel!”

There are camels and camels—­more kinds than there are of horses.  The Bishareen of the Sudan is not a bad beast, but compared to the Bikaniri there are no other desert mounts worth a moment’s consideration.  Fleet as the wind, silent as its own shadow, enduring as the long hot-season of its home, the trained Bikaniri swings into sandy distances with a gait that is a gallop really—­the only saddle-beast of all that lifts his four feet from the ground at once, seeming to spurn the very laws of gravity.

They are favored folk who come by first-class Bikaniri camels, for the better sort are rare, hard held to, and only to be bought up patiently by twos and ones.  Fourteen of them in one string, each fit that instant for a distance-race with death itself, was perhaps the best proof possible of Yasmini’s influence on the country-side.  They were gathered for her and held in readiness by men who loved her and detested Gungadhura.

Normally the drivers would have taken a passenger apiece, and seven of the animals would have been ample; but this was a night and a dawn when speed was nine-tenths of the problem, and Yasmini had spared nothing—­no man, no shred of pains or influence,—­and proposed to spare no beast.

They rode in single file, each man with a led camel ridden by a woman, except that Yasmini directed her own mount and for the most part showed the way, her desert-reared guide being hard put to keep his own animal abreast of her.  There is a gift—­a trick of riding camels, very seldom learned by the city-born; and he, or she, who knows the way of it enjoys the ungrudged esteem of desert men all the way from China to Damascus, from Peshawar to Morocco.  The camels detect a skilled hand even more swiftly than a horse does and, like the horse, do their best work for the rider who understands.  So the only sound, except for a gurgle now and then, and velvet-silent footfalls on the level sand, was the grunts of admiration of the men behind.  They had muffled all the camel-bells.