"My God!" he repeated. "I understand." He turned his head and looked back at the curtain which divided him from his friend. "Carden, old fellow, I understand what you gave your life to make me understand." And his heart beat with a great love and a greater gratitude as he parted the curtain and went out into the desert. He did not once turn to look back, else might he have seen a speck on the horizon, moving at the incredible speed with which a camel can race as it slithers across the sands.
CHAPTER XXXIV
"In Rama was there a voice heard . . . Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they were not."
ST. MATTHEW, II.
"Hugh!"
As she called to her son from her high seat upon the camel the woman was the only living thing to be seen in the desert. In her simplicity, her colouring, her solitude, she was biblical; she might have been a woman of the Old Testament asking for succour or sanctuary at the tent of Abraham pitched between Beth-el and Hai; she might have been a woman fleeing from the wrath of Moses, who gave unto sin its strength when, out of sheer solicitude for the soul-welfare of the masses, he made laws about things to which in the innocence of their hearts they had, up till then, never given two thoughts.
Leave that corner piece of pasture unhedged, and it's odds on that not a single soul will tramp or want to tramp over it, from one year's end to another; hedge it, close it with padlocked gate, prop up the warning re trespassers and see if you don't find a wide track of footprints across it in the morning.
Yes; the picture was biblical.
Rebecca must have worn exactly the same fashioned clothes as this woman, and doubtless Leah had become pink-eyed through the tears of vexation she had shed over the ancestral humped quadruped she had ridden; and most certainly Lot's wife, Ruth, Solomon's wives and appendages, Jezebel, and every other woman mentioned in the Bible once watched just such a dawn rise across just such a desert.
We change our fashions, our fixed opinions, the colour of our hair and the pattern of our socks when the fancy seizes us, but neither time nor man has changed the desert—so far. Thank heaven for it, there is still one place left in which we can go to die or be re-born—in seemly solitude.