Yet it is not as an enemy, however wonderfully conquered or strenuously held at bay, that the desert appeals most to the Syrian. As he looks eastward to the hills of Moab and dreams of what lies beyond them, there is perhaps more of wistfulness than of terror in his heart. The melancholy note of his music, heard by every camp-fire in the long evenings, is infinitely suggestive as well as pathetic. Where was that note learned if not in black tents pitched in the boundless waste, where man’s littleness, in contrast with the great powers of Nature, oppressed him into prone fatalism, or revealed to him the infinite refuge and comfort of the Everlasting Arms? He whose fathers have sung such songs will not satisfy his soul with the bustle of towns. He will need the desert for retreat, that his confused mind may calm itself down to order and find new revelations of truth. And when the Syrian retreats to the desert he seems rather to be going home than abroad. David and Elijah, Paul and Mohammed, for various reasons, but with the same urgency, betook themselves to the solitude. Jesus Christ himself was driven of the Spirit into the wilderness. If temptation waited them there, and the sense of exile and desertion, it was there also that angels ministered to them; and ancient prophecies were fulfilled in those “streams of spiritual originality which broke forth in the deserts of moral routine” of their times. To their spirit, and to the spirit of all dwellers in the land, the desert is not enemy only, it is home.