By Desert Ways to Baghdad

by Louisa Jebb Wilkins

CHAPTER XXIII

RETROSPECTIVE

Last night we were dirty, isolated, and free; to-night we are clean, sociable, and trammelled. Last night the setting sun's final message written in flaming signs of gold was burnt into us, and the starry heights carried our thoughts heavenward and made them free as themselves. To-night the sunset passed all unheeded and we gaze, as we retire from the busy rush of the trivial day, at a never-ending, twisting, twirling pattern on the four walls that imprison us, oppressed by the confining ceiling of our room in the Damascus Palace Hotel.

We are no longer princesses whose hands and feet are kissed, whose word is law, sharing the simple hospitality of proud and dignified wayfarers in desert kingdoms. Our word is law according to the depth of our purses, our hands and feet are kissed according to the height of our floor in the hotel. We are no longer in a land where men and women are judged by their capacities for being men and women: the cost of our raiment apportions our rank.

We are now no longer amongst people to whom we say what we mean and are silent when we have nothing to say. We are in surroundings where to say what you mean is an offence, where silence is not understood and looked upon askance as an uncanny visitor. The less we have to say, the more we make an effort to say it; and the more we have to say, the greater the effort to suppress it.

Everything seems unreal or unnecessary, everything is dressed up.

All these people moving about, sitting still, in a hurry, catching trains, eating long dinners, dressing themselves, looking at each other dressed—what does it all mean? Was all this going on when we were in that other world which we have just left, that great silent world where everything was itself and big, and not confused by accessories? Was all this din and bustle going on? It is strange that we should have had no inkling of it, for it seems of so much importance to all these people, idle with a great restlessness; it seems essential to them.

It is hard, too, to realise that that other world still exists out there in the distance, and that it would be quite possible to reach it by merely riding out on a camel. Can it indeed be true that the same sun which lights all these moving streets, these buyers and sellers, these catchers of trains, is lighting the desert out there as imperturbably as it lit us, journeying on after it day after day in the silent places; did it see all these people from its inaccessible height, and, sharing its gifts equally with them and with us, give us no hint of what it was looking down upon? It showed then no more favour to us than to these dwellers in towns, and yet was it not more to us? Were we not more conscious of its innumerable gifts; and did we not receive more from it as a result of our greater appreciation? No bars of windows, no roofy outlines, no sleepy oblivion hid the glory of its first appearance for us. As far as its rays could range, so far, and further, could we see. Not a pale silver thread or wiry line of gold, or faint reflection of its glowing colours on the opposite horizon, was lost to our vision; and, as we rode through the chilly morning air, were we not conscious of every separate ray of warmth as it grew and grew until we were bathed in its delicious heat, and all day it served as our sole guide, indicating direction in boundless space and hour in limitless time. No finger-posts, no winding up of clocks; only this sun with its fixed and unalterable decrees.

The sun, then, we share, although apparently in divers degrees. But was not the moon more for us alone? For they can shut it out from their lives altogether. It, too, looked down upon this city, but not on the noise and chaos of it. As far as it was concerned all the bustlers were dead, buried away in their roofed houses behind their shuttered windows. The silence of night is the moon's heritage, and it exercises its autocratic sway to the full; it admits no disturbing rush or unseemly hurry beneath its gaze. What do they know of you who pull down blinds and light up the gas and dwell in curtained rooms? Accident may cause a benighted traveller to look at you with a passing sense of rest, a casual tossing sleeper may be half conscious of your charm, the weary toiler at the end of a long day may momentarily bless your soothing light, and in so far as they take hold of you they make themselves akin with us out there. But you are not a part of them, as you are a part of us; you do not enter into the very heart of their existence and carry their minds up, night after night, to the realms where you live serene and calm, making us forget the saddle rubs, the parching thirst, the driven sand, the fire that would not light, the kettle that would not boil—all the little near things, the things which matter so much in the day, and which you remind us do not matter at night. But here they matter so much more at night, all shut up with us inside these confining walls—inside these muslin curtains. The darkness and the enclosed space make them assume exaggerated dimensions; all the little trivialities in the room accentuate their importance. We see them cropping up again and again in that blue flower on the wall paper, or running round and round the red coils on the dado. We raise our eyes to heaven and encounter the fixed, inane smile of a painted lady with a wand, seated in a wreath of flowers. We shut our eyes, determined to forget her, but a terrible fascination makes us peep again and again, and always that same inane smile; and when at last the kindly shades of night hide it altogether in darkness, we are still conscious of her only, smiling away there, looking at us while we cannot see her. And all the time outside the steadfast moon and the stars eternally twinkling are telling the same tale that they told out in that other world, but we have shut them out and will not listen to their silent teaching.

In vain the Prophet of the Desert has said: