"A primitive method, and an easy one, saving the labour of billhook
and axe." About nine o'clock he saw some woods lying to the
north-west. But the horses' heads were turned eastward to avoid an arm
of a great marsh, extending northward to the horizon. It was then
that, wearying of trying to get his tongue round certain Arabic words,
he rode away from his dragoman, and tried to define the landscape as a
painter would; but it was all too vast, and all detail was lost in
the vastness, and all was alike. So, abandoning the pictorial, he
philosophised, discovering the fallacy of the old saying that we owe
everything to the earth, the mother of all. "We owe her very little.
The debt is on her side," he muttered. "It is we who make her so
beautiful, finding in the wilderness a garden and a statue in a
marble block. Man is everything." And the words put the thought into
his mind that although they had been travelling for many hours they
had not yet seen a human being, nor yet an animal. Whither the Arabs
had gone the dragoman could not tell him; he could only say they came
to this plain for the spring pasture; their summer pastures were
elsewhere, and he pointed to an old olive, brown and bent by the
wind, telling Owen it was deemed a sacred tree, to which sterile
women came to hang votive offerings.
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