It explains something of the super-human hopes that fill the desert prophets concerning the future; it explains something also about their barbarous indifference to the past.
We think of the desert and its stones as old; but in one sense they are unnaturally new.

They are unused, and perhaps unusable.
They might be the raw material of a world; only they are so raw as to be rejected.

It is not easy to define this quality of something primitive, something not mature enough to be fruitful.
Indeed there is a hard simplicity about many Eastern things that is as much crude as archaic.

A palm-tree is very like a tree drawn by a child--or by a very futurist artist.

Even a pyramid is like a mathematical figure drawn by a schoolmaster teaching children; and its very impressiveness is that of an ultimate Platonic abstraction.
There is something curiously simple about the shape in which these colossal crystals of the ancient sands have been cast.
It is only when we have felt something of this element, not only of simplicity, but of crudity, and even in a sense of novelty, that we can begin to understand both the immensity and the insufficiency of that power that came out of the desert, the great religion of Mahomet.
In the red circle of the desert, in the dark and secret place, the prophet discovers the obvious things.