And on this scene the sun casts his final rays of gold and red. As the shades of night draw in, quiet reigns once more; the men collect round the blazing camp-fire, and in its light we see the outline of their dark forms seated cross-legged, as they eat out of the common bowl or take turns at the bubbling narghile; to one side the mules are tethered in two lines forming a half square; a muleteer is grooming them, and one hears the rattle of his scraper and the ever tinkling bell. The cook is stirring our evening meal in a pot on the fire outside our tent. Hassan fetches our rugs and spreads them on the ground; we lie down and he covers us over with his sheepskin cloak. "Rahat" (Rest), he says, and lifts his hands over us as if pronouncing a blessing. Then he sits down beside us and lights a cigarette. "Bourda ehe," he goes on, describing the universe with a sweep of his hand. "Kimse yok" (It is well here--there is no one). "Is Allah here?" asks X. "Allah is here," he answers with simple reverence, "Allah is everywhere"; and we all lie motionless under the stars, unwilling to probe the silence by the sound of uttered thoughts. The murmur of the men's voices gradually dies away as, one by one, they doze off; a jackal cries in the distance; a star falls down to earth. The day is over, and in this land of the Oriental there is no thought of the morrow.
The passive silence of sleep; the active silence of communing souls; the silence of night--all fitful expressions of the one great Silence brooding over all, be one asleep or awake, by night and by day, in desert places and in busy haunts of men.
It burst upon us all at once, Palmyra, in the desert--a chaos of golden pillars in the glow of the setting sun. We had been riding all day towards an indefinite shape on the horizon; slowly it had resolved itself into a barrier of yellow rock with dark lines becoming distinguishable against it. We had passed through the patches of rising corn, making green holes in the brown desert; we had wound through the gardens of pomegranate and plantations of palm trees and turned the corner of the ugly konak which barred the ruins from our view; and there it lay, the desert-girt city, in the unutterable lonely magnificence of its reckless confusion.