Our next lesson was in horsemanship. Our escorting soldier was as nearly ubiquitous as it was in the nature of man and horse to be. A distant caravan of camels showed sharp against the sky. He had flashed up to them, interrogated them, and was back, beating up our rear, and again in front, indicating the track we were to pursue; for Khalil had abandoned responsibility, and was frankly asleep on the top of a pile of baggage. Even the "majnoon" had wearily desisted from his ambitions, and had retired to the rear with his humbler companions.
If that strange world had seemed weird and visionary in the morning twilight, it was even more so under the moon, where the silent sand cities cast long shadows of a blackness so intense as to be comparable only to those of electric light. Indeed, this Oriental moonlight has nothing of that quality of softness—the half-revealing, half-concealing gleams, to which we are accustomed in the West. It is hard, clear, metallic. It is a peculiarity, perhaps, of this Syrian atmosphere that outlines appear so sharp that they lose, apparently, in solidity; in what artists call "the round," so that the distant view of Jerusalem, for example, has the effect of stage scenery, of an absolute lack of perspective, which makes it extraordinarily difficult to compare distances. Tonight, for instance, when a vista between the sand hills allowed us to perceive the village of Jericho, it seemed inconceivable that we should not reach it in a few minutes, and yet it was already after eleven o'clock before the splash of our horses' feet in the water, told us that we were crossing the brook Cherith.
At this point our soldier disappeared, flashed out of sight—his kind intention, as we soon found, being to arouse the haj, the solitary occupant of the hotel, and apprise him of our arrival. We had not to wait long before the gates were opened and the barking of the dogs exchanged for a kindly welcome. They were old friends, degenerate descendants of some far-away mastiff, and still more distant collie, who had made _mésalliances_ with some son or daughter of the soil, and left traces of another race, much as we trace the Crusader in the blue eyes and fair hair, of which specimens remain, here and there, in almost every village in Syria.