The Damascenes lifted their voices in prayer, calling down blessings upon him as he mounted his camel and rode away into the glory of the sunrise.
“How sad,” Almana whispered to her grandfather as they watched him moving swiftly towards the mountains, and “His Eyes” who rode to meet him. “How sad that he should be blind.”
“He is not blind, my daughter,” replied the old man, as he laid his hand upon her head. “There are those who see by the light of the soul, and, verily, our protector is numbered among them.”
CHAPTER VII
“If the moon be with thee thou need’st not mind about the stars.”—Arabic Proverb.
The desert is the cradle of love!
The love of God or the love of solitude, or the love which seeks its soul-mate and finds it, in the immensity of the sands. There is no room for doubt in the minds of those who love and who pass their days together in the desert’s great spaces. If the love is that which endureth, which floods cannot drown nor many waters quench, which looks ever towards the horizon where the light is born heralding the day, then will the desert be as a book filled with much wisdom; a book in which the handwriting is visible only to those who radiate the love which sees the mountain peak above the swirl of mist; the truth of the dream in which, blindly, we stumble and fall, until enlightenment comes to us so that we rise once more and reach the end of the road at last.
The desert is a background against which love blazes as a torch or shines with the glimmer of the rushlight; a journey into it either fills the mind with the wonder of God or overwhelms the traveller, when the novelty has passed, with a crushing sense of boredom; the sunset, the sunrise, and the stars are either the thoughts of the Creator, or merely a means by which to mark the passing of the endless hours; whilst the stillness, silence, and far horizon teach life’s wayfarers the stupendous lesson of Eternity or fill the gregarious globe-trotter with a deep longing for the noise and bustle of great cities.