It was far hotter there among the Kanya than outside, for the dark-hued stones absorbed heat and radiated it fiercely. The desert's visage had taken on a sinister, forbidding expression; almost as though it resented intrusion--as though it had surrounded some shrine of secret horror with flame-hot, laming obstacles. The only vegetation consisted of a few low, gnarled, bitter-looking shrubs. What an apprenticeship to inimical conditions these eremites of the vegetable world must have undergone to enable them to save their scanty leaves alive,--rooted, as they were, in a pinch of brick-like soil lying in narrow spaces between glowing spheres of stone, and lacking rain, as they did, for periods of years at a stretch. Their strength must have been as much greater than that of the oak as the oak's is greater than that of a willow sapling. Did these shrubs ever flower, I wondered. Perhaps, once in a thousand years, a miracle was wrought on them as it was on Aaron's rod. Only one could I identify-- even so far as the genus went. It was a kind of Rhus; the dark-green, reticulated, trifid leaf--naked and deeply veined above and covered with down beneath,--was quite typical. For what unspeakable cosmic sin was that titanic and seemingly eternal punishment inflicted,--that withdrawal of living water from a region built up and, no doubt, filled with abounding organic fecundity by the craft of its strong, creative hand? Did multitudes of those fearsome monsters of the prehistoric sea, which there swayed beneath the moon, gasp out their lives on that sun-blasted tract when the great cataclysm befel? Did a livid network of their colossal bones lie there for unthinkable ages until the slow attrition of wind and changing temperature transmuted them into that dust which vainly tried to scale the immutable heavens in the car of the sand-spout? Did the unanealed spirits of those long-dead creatures still people that haunted solitude which made day more terrifying than midnight? Were the landscapes of the mirage simulacra of those bounding an inland sea in which the dragon and the kraken lived and multiplied? Was the thrilling fear, which read menace in my own shadow, akin to that "terror of noon" which gripped the heartstrings of the shepherd of Mount-Ida,--when he knew, by the rustling of the brake that Pan was near? I hastened away--back to where the desert wore a friendlier face,--to where old Prince was executing a kind of solemn dance before the "taaibosch" to which he was tethered,--lifting his feet constantly, one at a time, in a vain attempt to cool them. He welcomed me with a whinny of relief. Perhaps the spirits of the Kanya had been filling him, too, with indefinable dread. So the saddle was replaced, and I resumed my pilgrimage on foot, the old horse pacing stolidly after me.