The hurrying pilgrim to the slow-stepped yield;
The rapid courser in the rear remains,
While the slow camel still its step maintains.”
The Gulistān.
Everyone, it has been said, has his own Sahara. For many of us perhaps the geography lessons of childhood left an impression of an ocean of shifting sand, sometimes separated from the sea by a narrow strip of cultivated land, sometimes extending to the very shore, from which majestic lions, appropriate lords of the inhospitable desert, gaze pensively at the setting sun. If we had the misfortune to be born half a century or more ago, the maps of Africa of the period, with their vast interior emptiness, suggested to our youthful imagination that this unpleasant region extended over the greater part of the continent, the elephant taking the place of the lion in the more southern portions.
THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE SAHARA
“So geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er unhabitable downs