It is a village, as the saying goes, that one would not care to walk through at night.
There is something singularly creepy about so strange a street of houses, each with a door that might be opened by a dead man.
But in a less fanciful sense, there is about it something profoundly pathetic and human.

Here indeed is the sailor home from sea, in the only port he will consent to call his home; here at last the nomad confesses the common need of men.

But even about this there broods the presence of the desert and its dry bones of reason.
He will accept nothing between a tent and a tomb.
The philosophy of the desert can only begin over again.
It cannot grow; it cannot have what Protestants call progress and Catholics call development.

There is death and hell in the desert when it does begin over again.

There is always the possibility that a new prophet will rediscover the old truth; will find again written on the red sands the secret of the obvious.
But it will always be the same secret, for which thousands of these simple and serious and splendidly valiant men will die.
The highest message of Mahomet is a piece of divine tautology.
The very cry that God is God is a repetition of words, like the repetitions of wide sands and rolling skies.