"The divine essence?"
"Well, one has to use these words in order to be understood; but you know what I mean, Harding, the mystery lying behind all phenomena, the Breath, esoteric philosophers would say, out of which all things came, which drew the stars in the beginning out of chaos, creating myriads of things or the appearance of different things, for there is only one thing. That is how the mystics talk—isn't it? You know more about them than I do. If to every man some woman represented more of this impulse than any other woman, he would be unable to separate himself from her; she would always be a light in his life which he would follow, a light in the mind—that is what Evelyn is to me; I never understood it before, it is only lately—"
"The desert has turned you into a poet, I see, into a mystic."
"Hardly that; but in the desert there are long hours and nothing— only thought; one has to think, if one isn't a bedouin, just to save oneself from going mad: the empty spaces, the solitude, the sun! One of these days when you have finished your books, I should like to write one with you; my impressions of the desert as I rode from oasis to oasis, seeking Tahar—"
"Who was he?"
"He was the man who had the eagles. Haven't I told you already how—?"
"Yes, yes, Asher, but tell me did you meet Tahar, and did you see gazelles hunted?"
"Yes, and larger deer. My first idea was hawking and we went to a lake. One of these days I must tell you about that lake, about its wild fowl, about the buried city and the heron which was killed. We found it among Roman inscriptions. But to tell of these things—my goodness, Harding, it would take hours!"
"Don't try, Asher. Tell me about the gazelles."
"How we went from oasis to oasis in quest of this man who always eluded us, meeting him at last in Béclère's oasis. But you haven't heard about Béclère's, the proprietor, you might say, of one oasis; he discovered a Roman well, and added thousands of acres; but if I began to tell about Béclère's we should be here till midnight."