If the desert has thus produced a strong physical effect upon the land, its moral effects are even more apparent. We have seen how to the dwellers west of Jordan it was at once an abiding enemy and an ancient home. Shut out from it by the huge trench of the Jordan valley and the barricade of the eastern mountains, the Syrian still feels enough of the desert’s fiery touch to fear it as an enemy. Its wind blasts his crops and its heat drives him from his valleys to the hill country for the breath of life. Every traveller speaks of the “positive weight” of heat that makes men bend low in their saddles. Others besides the Persians are constrained, as Kinglake puts it, to bow down before the sun, whose “fierce will” is most terribly felt in those tracts of the land which the desert has claimed for its own. In the desert there are the same conditions which are to be found in the land, only in extreme forms and without mitigation. It is the place of tempests, fires, and reptiles. These visit the land at times, but they abide in that weird country into whose distances the Syrian may peer from most of his mountain tops. There, too, abide those dark and occult powers of evil in which every Eastern man believes. The magic of the desert--its treacherous mirage, its genii (by no means difficult to imagine in the forms of sandy whirlwinds whose march is strewn with corpses), and its infinite unexplored possibilities of terror--all this is very real to the native imagination. Its inhabitants, too, are uncanny to think of. The true Arabian, whom perhaps they may have met on a journey, with his jade-handled jewelled sword and his shrunken skin; the lunatics who have wandered to its congenial wildness; the anchorites and ascetics whom, like the scapegoat of ancient times, sin has driven forth to its unwalled prison-house,--all these fill in for Syrians the ghastly picture, and its tales of wars and massacres add the last touch of horror.