It is obvious that Wordsworth, when he speaks of only “two voices,” the one “of the sea,” the other “of the mountains”--“each a mighty voice,” quite overlooked the bleakness and silence of the desert. This overpowering blackness that pervades the very soul, creeps through every vent into the bones and chills one to the very marrow. This sublime silence, that speaks to one as the still small voice of God spoke to Moses, and that fills the thinker with even greater awe and veneration than the crashing and rolling thunder. This silence which is of eternity, therefore golden, while speech is of to-day and only silvern, for as Carlyle reminds us: “After speech has done its best, silence has to include all that speech has forgotten or cannot express.” Speaking for myself, who have passed many days of my existence at sea, and many more still in the desert, there is that in the latter which always reminds me of the former. To be sure, the ever restless sea with its almost myriad moods--its calm, its motion, its rippling smiles, its wavy undulations, its heights and depths, its fickleness and treachery, its dazzling beauties, its fierce turbulence--is as unlike the desert, with its grim stiff grandeur and appalling sameness as it well could be: still-- “Tho’ inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us thither.” There is no music in it by day or by night, only the dead still hush of silence. Yet the desert has its aspects, if it has not its moods and contrasts--as singular as they are striking. See, or rather feel it under the fierce and scorching glare of the fiery sun, that almost shrivels you into a mummy; see it also under the softer spell of the silvery orb, when the air is balmy, if not fresh, and you will at once imagine yourself to be in an altogether different and enchanted world. Then again, lose yourself in the desert on a dark night when for once in a way the stars are dim or obscured by clouds, and you will realize as you never before have done, the awesome reality of the sense of loneliness--a feeling which can only be compared to that felt by the hunted criminal hiding in a city, and against whom every man’s hand is raised.