If the water-skin was dry and the date-bag empty it smothered and destroyed; but it was life; and to those who ventured into its embrace, obeying the conditions of the sharp adventure, it gave what neither sea, nor green plain, nor high mountain, nor verdant valley could give--a consuming sense of power, which found its way to the deepest recesses of being.
Out upon the vast sea of sand, where the descending sun was spreading a note of incandescent colour, there floated the grateful words: "He remembering His mercy hath holpen His servant Israel; as He promised to our forefathers, Abraham, and his seed for ever." Then the antiphonal ceased; and together the voices of all within the place swelled out in the Gloria and the Amen, and seemed to pass away in ever-receding vibrations upon the desert, till it was lost in the comforting sunset.
As the last note died away, a voice from beneath the palm-tree near the door, deeper than any that had come from within, said reverently: "Ameen-Ameen!" He who spoke was a man well over sixty years, with a grey beard, lofty benign forehead, and the eyes of a scholar and a dreamer.

As he uttered the words of spiritual assent, alike to the Muslim and the Christian religion, he rose to his feet, showing the figure of a man of action, alert, well-knit, authoritative.

Presently he turned towards the East and stretched a robe upon the ground, and with stately beauty of gesture he spread out his hands, standing for a moment in the attitude of aspiration.

Then, kneeling, he touched his turbaned head to the ground three times, and as the sun drew down behind the sharp, bright line of sand that marked the horizon, he prayed devoutly and long.

It was Ebn Ezra Bey.
Muslim though he was, he had visited this monastery many times, to study the ancient Christian books which lay in disordered heaps in an ill-kept chamber, books which predated the Hegira, and were as near to the life of the Early Church as the Scriptures themselves--or were so reputed.
Student and pious Muslim as he was, renowned at El Azhar and at every Muslim university in the Eastern world, he swore by the name of Christ as by that of Abraham, Isaac, and all the prophets, though to him Mahomet was the last expression of Heaven's will to mankind.