To those who have never been outside the confines of civilization, it is not logically possible even to guess at the extraordinary influence--a fascination amounting to witchery--that the silence and solitude of the desert exercises over one. Yet if I were asked to define the essence and subtlety of this influence, I could but answer that it is indefinable; all the same a glamour that, like the force of gravity, is irresistible. Free and open like the sea (but fresh only at night), it is not the witchery of the soft blue sky, for the sky of the desert is hard and steely; it is not the fierce white heat of the fervid sun that melts into the very marrow of one’s bones; but rather is it the soothing magic of the moon at night, under the brilliant canopy of the heavens, when the earth, cooling rapidly, is lulled into eternal silence, that one falls under the magic spell of its wondrous influence. But even the glamour of the moon is out-glamoured by the darkness of the night under whose funereal pall even the great suns and planets hide their diminished heads. There is in the darkness and the silence of the night a mystery and a profundity that arouses the sluggish, even the stagnant consciousness of the dullard--that much more so attracts the quickening soul of the mystic and visionary, which springs to it with the same eager avidity that a lean and hungry trout leaps at the first fly which he sees after a long and enforced abstinence. It is in this darkness and silence of the night, rather than in the fierce glare of the midday sun, that the fear of the great Infinite comes to man. For if we but think of it, what a spectre-teeming spectacle is night. We hear strange, weird sounds. We know not whence they come or whither they go. Or it may be that all around us is as the silence of the grave--of eternal death. We see the evening star looming large like a great world on fire. The blue of the sky looms black. The stars seem to speak to us; the whole scene is impressive--a sight for the gods. In the desert, however, and to the earnest thinker whose centre of gravity is God, night is something more than a mere spectacle--a something greater, grander and more terrifying than a simple impression--a feeling deeper and sublimer even than a conviction: a revelation of the Unseen Unknown which is all the time behind that which he sees and knows.