ABSTRACT
THE DESERT I T is impossible to speak of the cities of Arabia without turning aside, for a brief moment, to consider those strange nomads, the true Arabs of the desert, who
made of its wilderness theit transitory home. The country that they inhabit is, for the most part, lacking in actual beauty; it has not often that wide prospect, stretching out to a far horizon, that one associates with the idea of the waste places of the earth. Tlie strip of desert that runs through the eastern border of Palestine and that is merged in that of Arabia proper is monotonous, but often shut in rather than open as to the view. The sand is pale in colour, it abounds in stones, sometimes it is covered with slabs of black basalt ; very often scanty grass and abundant brushwood grow somehow without moisture. When the ground is undulating, as it often is, the nearer hillocks shut in the prospect, but when it opens out, as of course it often does, there is much of the charm that comes from a wide view over an extensive plain, fringed, perhaps, with distant hills. Among the scrub that grows freely in the sand are many wild flowers; I remember chiefly pale flowers sudi as mauve orchids and anemones. In the middle of the dav, when there was a hot haze abroad, there were mi~ages seen, the distance took on the appearance of lakes fringed with palm trees or a strip of sea coast with a lighthouse.
