I could write for hours on the lustfulness of moving Swiftly.

This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought.

It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed.

Half a calamity is better than a whole one.

Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven.

I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed's coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do.

We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.