Piet's head, as he tightened the girth, was under the uplifted saddle-flap. When he dropped the latter and found the snake close to his face he sprang into the air and fled, bounding sideways and every now and then striking his thigh diagonally with the palm of his right hand. It was a most peculiar and uncanny manifestation. I did not see Piet for three days afterwards. Then he emerged from the veld, red-eyed and starving, but once more in his (comparatively) right mind. That night, as his cries grew fainter in the distance, we concluded that we should see no more of him during the trip. Once more our caravan was silently moving over the trackless waste. The desert was now in one of her moods of tenderness,--the air full of soft and subtle scent that was sweeter than myrrh--more grateful than wafts from a garden of spices. A feeling of sadness gripped my heartstrings; I was leaving the mistress I loved--the mistress beneath whose stern, arid, monotonous day-mask I could discern the fair symmetry, the soft and delicately-tinted curves of perfect and eternal youth. How often had I breathlessly watched those features quicken and grow mobile as the defacing sun departed. It was then that the breath of her mouth sought mine; then that her eyes shone softly as the evening star. But it was at full night, when the great dome above us was unvexed by the least trace of day, that the desert's inhabiting soul came forth and transfigured the littleness of my cribbed and cabined spirit. Sometimes for a season she smiled as though she relented, but the smile was not for me. At dawn, when Zephyr and Aurora couched at the hem of her robe, she let me lean against the softness of her bosom. At night she lulled me to sleep and crooned into my ear dream-songs that were great and strong with wisdom gleaned from the most ancient seasons. But when day returned she flung me to the lions of the sun. Should they have mangled me to death the mistress of my worship would not have cared. She was too strong to feel compassion, too lofty to be moved by grief or touched by any regret. My beloved was not mine, tho' I was wholly hers, and the lilies at her breast were petalled with consuming flame. "Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, terrible as an army with banners?" It was the desert. Spinoza's aphorism:--"Those who love God truly must not expect that God will love them in return," roots deep in human experience. The loftiest love is that which gets not nor expects requital. I used to believe that this desert I love hated me. But I thought so no longer. It was not hate nor any other emotion that she felt; she was filled with the divine attribute of infinite indifference.