And art it is, as surely as painting or music--art that can be tediously learned in a degree, but must be born in you if you are ever to excel at it.
The desert was all red sand now and dreary beyond human power to imagine.

The clouds of dust we kicked up followed us, and even the cloths we kept across our mouths and nostrils did not keep it out.

You felt like a mummy riding a race in hell, and how the camels managed to breathe I can't guess.

The sun on our right hand was just at the angle where it struck your eyes under the _kuffiyi._ But I was the only one who seemed at all distressed by any of those inconveniences; the others accepted them as in the natural order of things, and my camel, realizing how I felt, galloped last in the worst of the dust.
El-Maan itself was a picture of green trees above a mud wall; but we did not visit it, for the station, with its hideous red water-tanks, was a mile and a half to the eastward of the place--a miserable, bleak, unpainted iron roof and buildings, with a place alongside that had once been a Greek hotel.
At present it looked like a camel-mart; but there were dozens of horses there too, gaudily turned out like the camels with red worsted trimmings on saddles and bridles.

And as for the fifty men our five new acquaintances had spoken of, there were a hundred and fifty if one, all herded in groups, each with a rifle over his arm or slung across his shoulder.