Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/492

480 abhorrence by the Howadji, as indeed the camel species at large seems to be; for he regards them as "strange demoniac animals," and describes, apparently with a shudder, their amorphous and withered frame, and their level-lidded, unhuman, and repulsive eyes. The name, "ship of the desert," he accepts, however, and dilates upon, as suggestively true. The strings of camels perpetually passing through the streets of Cairo, threading the murmurous city life with the desert silence, he likens to mariners in tarpaulins and pea-jackets, who roll through the streets of seaports and assert the sea. And in the desert itself, not only is the camel the means of navigation, but his roll is like that of a vessel, and his long, flexible neck like a pliant bowsprit.

The Howadji found MacWhirter's neck too long and flexible by half, when, in his first desert days, he thought to alter the direction of the beast by pulling the halter (instead of touching the side of his neck with a stick), and found, to his consternation, that he only drew the long neck quite round, so that the "great stupid head was almost between his knees, and the hateful eyes stared mockingly at his own." The weariness and tedium of this kind of locomotion are vividly described—its continuous rock, rock—jerk, jerk—till you are sick of the thin, withered slip of a tail in front, and the gaunt, stiff movement of the shapeless, tawny legs before you—while the sluggish path trails through a defile of glaring sand, whose sides just contemptuously obstruct your view, and exasperate you because they are low and of no fine outline. Wearied and fevered in the desert of Arabia, the sun becomes Mandragora, and you sleep. And lo! the pomp of a wintry landscape dazzles your awaking: the sweeps and drifts of the sand-hills among which you are winding, have the sculpturesque grace of snow. Up rises a seeming lake, circled with low, melancholy hills, bare, like the rock-setting of mountain tarns; and over the whole broods the death of wintry silence. The Howadji's picture of Jerusalem, the "Joy of the whole Earth," is comparatively tame. The Bethlehem grotto forms a high-coloured piece—"gorgeous with silver and golden lamps, with vases and heavy tapestries, with marbles and ivories—dim with the smoke of incense, and thick with its breath. In the hush of sudden splendour it is the secret cave of Ala-ed-deen, and you have rubbed the precious lamp." The Jordan winds imposing through these pages—the "beautiful, bowery Jordan"—its swift, turbid stream eddying through its valley course, defying its death with eager motion, and with the low gurgling song of living water: fringed by balsam poplars, willows, and oleanders, that shrink from the inexorable plain behind it, and cluster into it with trembling foliage, and arch it with green, as if tree and river had sworn forlorn friendship in that extremity of solitude. The Dead Sea lies before us like molten lead; lying under the spell, not of Death, but of Insanity—for its desolation is not that of pure desert, and that is its awfulness. The Vale of Zabulon comes in triumphant relief: flowers set, like stars, against the solemn night of foliage; the broad plain flashing with green and gold, state-livery of the royal year; the long grasses languidly overleaning winding watercourses, indicated only by a more