He had found himself replying to a question asked of him in Heddington, as to how he knew that there was a God, in the words of a Muslim quoted by his uncle: "As I know by the tracks in the sand whether a Man or Beast has passed there, so the heaven with its stars, the earth with its fruits, show me that God has passed." Again, in reply to the same question, the reply of the same Arab sprang to his lips--"Does the Morning want a Light to see it by ?" As he stood with his flute--his fingers now and then caressingly rising and falling upon its little caverns, his mind travelled far to those regions he had never seen, where his uncle traded, and explored.
Suddenly, the call he had heard in his sleep now came to him in this waking reverie.

His eyes withdrew from the tree at the window, as if startled, and he almost called aloud in reply; but he realised where he was.

At last, raising the flute to his lips, as the eyes of Luke Claridge closed with very trouble, he began to play.
Out in the woods of Beedon he had attuned his flute to the stir of leaves, the murmur of streams, the song of birds, the boom and burden of storm; and it was soft and deep as the throat of the bell-bird of Australian wilds.

Now it was mastered by the dreams he had dreamed of the East: the desert skies, high and clear and burning, the desert sunsets, plaintive and peaceful and unvaried--one lovely diffusion, in which day dies without splendour and in a glow of pain.

The long velvety tread of the camel, the song of the camel-driver, the monotonous chant of the river-man, with fingers mechanically falling on his little drum, the cry of the eagle of the Libyan Hills, the lap of the heavy waters of the Dead Sea down by Jericho, the battle-call of the Druses beyond Damascus, the lonely gigantic figures at the mouth of the temple of Abou Simbel, looking out with the eternal question to the unanswering desert, the delicate ruins of moonlit Baalbec, with the snow mountains hovering above, the green oases, and the deep wells where the caravans lay down in peace--all these were pouring their influences on his mind in the little Quaker village of Hamley where life was so bare, so grave.
The music he played was all his own, was instinctively translated from all other influences into that which they who listened to him could understand.