Slowly but surely the ground now began to rise, and the sand to grow firmer. A caravan of camels glided stealthily by, bells tinkling, pilgrims reciting the Kurán, and the drivers singing to their camels a deeply melodious song called _Hodi_, which has on them the effect of a goad, urging them on to a brisk unchanging pace. To this accompaniment a camel will cover a great distance without stopping, the general belief being that the camel gets drunk with the sweet burden of the _Hodi_ song. Overnight, long after sunset, my Harbi driver himself began to sing aloud in the gathering darkness, asking God to protect him from the goblins of the wilderness, and always in a lugubrious minor key, as if he was going to weep. But ever and anon we heard an original song set to the music of the desert, wild as the wastes, elusive as the winds, as revealing and obscure as the tuneless solitudes from whose heart it would seem to spring--a song that broke through melody, and added its tameless burden to the music of the spheres. On cultured Europeans these untutored outbursts would have an uncanny effect, causing the centuries to roll back to the days of their barbarian ancestry, and awakening within them, perhaps, one of those haunting dream-memories of birth far back in the misty past, of an anterior existence in keeping with the strains of incoherent minstrelsy when men, labouring under the burdens of consciousness, sang as the spirit moved them, knowing nothing of the laws of counterpoint and harmony. Such a song was sung by Seyyid ’Alí as we left Heddah, a song written by a famous Sufí writer-- “My sorrow is Sorrow; my companion is Sorrow; my mate is Sorrow; Where’er I go there’s none to care for me but Sorrow; My Sorrow does not let me sleep alone at night; Well done, my mate! bravo, my mate! hurrah, my Sorrow!” The surrounding hills caught the intonation in their ragged arms and flung it back into the dim-lit sea of eddying sand, echoing and re-echoing the word “Sorrow!” Then my own Arab driver, carried beyond himself, raised his voice in the self-same song, and soon the whole caravan burst out, crying, “Well done, my mate! bravo, my mate! hurrah, my Sorrow,” the hills repeating the last word. Wagner, the one master who has given us the music of the sea and the stars, of the winds and the streams, and of all the vague yearnings that torment the human heart, would have understood us, would perhaps have played the part of echo on his return to civilisation, would certainly have joined in the chorus of that wild Arabian air attuned to Arabia’s barren though luminous solitudes.