Myself: “What other danger can there be?”
He answered that many who saw the desert learnt more than they desired to learn.
I knew very well what he meant for I had heard many men maintain that what was eternal must be changeless, and that what was changeless must be dead. And I had noted how men who had travelled widely were more simple in the Faith if they had chiefly known the sea; but if they had chiefly known the desert, more subtle and often emptied of the Faith at last: the Faith dried up out of them as the dews are dried up out of the sand on the edges of the Sahara in the brazen mornings. But these men, speaking in Christendom, had affected me little; here, so near the waste places where men cannot live, alone with such a companion, I felt afraid.
We walked along together slowly for a few paces; his sentences were shorter than my replies, and were spoken low, and full of what he and his call wisdom, but I, despair. We discussed together in these brief moments the chief business of mankind. It was a power much greater than his words that put my mind into a turmoil, though his words were careful and heavy.... He told me that the day was better than the night. The daylight was a curtain and a cheat, but when it was gone you could see the dreadful hollow.
Myself: “In Sussex, which is my home, if a man were asked which was the more beneficent, he would say ‘the night.’”
“In Sussex,” he answered gently (as though he knew the Downs) “mists and kind airs continue the veil of the day.” He said that in the desert the stars were terrible to man, and as he spoke of the endless distances I remembered the old knowledge (but this time alive with conviction) how great nations, as they advance with unbroken records and heap up experience, and test life by their own past, and grow to judge exactly the enlarging actions of men, see at last that there is no Person in destiny, and that purpose is only in themselves. Their Faiths turn to legend, and at last they enter that shrine whose God has departed and whose Idol is quite blind.
We had not talked thus for twenty minutes when we stopped at the edge of a little wood, and, as his way was not mine, he made to return. We both turned back to look at the plain below us, and the salt dull valley and the dead town: the broken columns and the long streets of Timgad, made small by the distance and all in one group together. I looked at him as he stood there and the fantastic thought half took me that he had known the city while it was yet loud with men. When he had left me the oppression of his awful intensity and of his fixed unnatural reason began to fade. I saw him go into a secchia; I saw him again upon the further side swinging powerfully down the slope. He crossed another fold of land, he showed upon the crest beyond, and after that I did not see him again.
|The Walk to the Desert|
Then I turned and went up into Atlas, and as I went I was in two minds, but at last tradition conquered and I was safe in my own steadfast instincts, settling back as settles back with shorter and shorter oscillations some balanced rock which violence has disturbed. The vast shoulder of Aurès seemed worthy indeed of awe, but not of terror. I made a companion of the snow, and I was glad to remember how many living things moved under the forest trees.
So I continued for three days seeing many things, and drawing them till I came to the south side where the streams go down to be lost at last in the sand, and till I saw before me the sandstone ridge red and bare, and from its summit looked out upon a changing landscape, which dried and flattened and became the true desert where miles and miles away a line quite hard and level marked the extreme horizon. On this summit I lay in the shelter of a rock (for it was bitterly cold and a violent wind blew off the snows of Aurès) and looked a long time southward upon the country which is the prison-wall of our race.