I
Cruelty was the word I took with me on my first walk into the Desert, but at the end of ten hours spent in its silent spaces I rejected it as utterly unjustified. The glow of the majestic Desert sunset was on the Mokattam Hills behind Helouan, making them burn inwardly with strange fiery torches of their own, and the limestone ridges, so curiously eroded by the wind-borne sand of centuries, nodded fantastic heads towards the old Pyramids far off across the Nile. There was a first star in the east. The short twilight came rushing up. Presently the jackals would begin to whine and howl. The touch of cold was in the air, and in half-an-hour these many thousand-leagued wastes of African sands would be at their old, silent vigil of counting the stars. No living thing besides myself was in sight, and the light wind that whipped with a noise of running water against the desolate cliffs of the ancient gorges (Wadis) brought no trace of human sound upon its wings. And again I sought the word—the word that should replace this “cruelty” everyone had dinned into my ears. But for a time in vain. Cruelty is in sea and mountains, in great forests, too, as also in the air—where prey is the essence of existence; almost, indeed, in our own kind as well. But here, in this lifeless, barren, windswept region that covers half a continent with a grandeur too simple to marry with even simplest words, it could not, in my own mind at least, find justification. It was, in a sense, too human, too deliberately and consciously human. The terror was here, that terror I had been warned to look for, especially after dusk, and it was beyond question a terror gigantic and overwhelming. But neither was that the word I sought which should sum up the greater mass of the vivid impressions this awful Desert lays like a spell upon the heart and mind. There was something far more penetrating, sweeter and infinite than either cruelty or terror—more subtle, delicate and true. And then the word came suddenly to me of its own accord. Few who know the Desert will agree, least of all those who know its perils at close quarters, and have read into it the emotions of their own severe personal experience. For what rushed into me as the vital key-word that summed up a thousand amazing impressions can only be expressed by a term that one has really no right to apply to inanimate Nature—tenderness. I found myself continually thinking, as I walked home among these sculptured, threatening physiognomies the driven sand has carved in the bewildering hills and ridges—thinking of the wee white flowers I found in the savage bed of the Wadi Hof, tiny, little spotless faces that shone, unawed, amid the waste of ruin and loneliness; thinking, too, of the vivid green plant, bursting with succulent juice, the camels eat; of that prickly, thorny bush, with soft eyes of blue among its sharpness, they devour, too, as if it were meadow grass; of occasional wild geraniums, and of a spear-shaped, dainty yellow flower that grows singly upon a soil of muddy, sunbaked sand that sounds like solid concrete underneath one’s boots. Of many others, too, more exquisite than any forest flowers, more radiant and gentle than those that even grow in watered gardens. Their names I do not know; the wild geranium is probably no geranium at all; but the names the Arab boy has subsequently given me are perhaps as accurate as his answer when I asked him what the numerous kites could possibly find by way of food—“leetle roses”! The tenderness, however, was there, for it forced itself upon me. The very heat and light and wind are tender; it is an incongruous, queer marriage of appalling desolation in a ruined world with a tenderness that the contrast renders infinitely sweet. A giant holds a fairy by the fingertip—yet somehow it is her tenderness that wields the greater spell. For it runs, soft as little children, through the ruin, an enormous tenderness, unfathomable, even inexplicable, modifying beyond description the monstrous element it has so strangely mated. This, and an endless, ineffable peace became for me the passwords to the desert that begins at Helouan and stretches through many thousand miles down to the great Sahara itself. And Helouan, this little oasis of the Arabs, is an admirable place to enter it; so easily accessible—half-an-hour from Cairo—and living close against its very lips. You may go twenty days on camels, with great expense and trouble and discomfort, yet not see anything more marvellous, more bewilderingly grand and beautiful, than you shall see on a humble Egyptian donkey within an hour’s ride of your cosy, up-to-date hotel.