For the westerner there are no half-way measures in the desert.
He may have been born in the glamour of the East and have lived the best part of his life with the vast stretches of sand around him, and yet have heard no voice calling in the noonday, nor seen the slender hand beckoning in the shadows of dawn and dusk. He may come from the counting-house upon holiday bent, with guide book in hand and passage booked for the return journey to the city, yet see the spirit of the desert, remote, mysterious, beckoning him out of all the merry, personally conducted crowd.
He will either follow the beckoning figure with hungry heart until he falls, to die, clutching at its robes which slip ever from between his fingers, or he will return to the counting-house to pass his life in a great longing which will never be appeased.
In either case, he will have answered the call of the desert to his own undoing.[1]
[1] Instances have been known where Europeans have ridden out into the desert upon seeing it for the first time, and have not been seen or heard of since.
Helen Raynor and Ralph Trenchard sat looking out across the Robaa-el-Khali, or Empty Desert, or the Red Desert, as it is called by the Arabs on account of the colour of its sands.
She sat with her hand in his, watching the strange effect the wind from the north has upon this desert, which rolls away to the horizon in great, sandy ridges, and of which no one has explored the heart. When this wind blows gently, it skims the surface of the great ridges and lifts the topmost layer of the sand, carrying it down into the hollows and up on to the crests for mile after mile, until the desert looks like an ocean of great, glittering billows surging towards the distant horizon.
“The sky seems to be covered with a transparent, diamond-encrusted veil,” whispered Helen, as she lifted her face to the moon, and smiled when the man she loved drew her to him and kissed her.