Anstice never forgot that first day's ride over the desert sand. They had started early, very shortly, indeed, after daybreak, and by the time the sun was fully risen they were already some miles on their way.
It was a heavenly morning, the dry and glittering air full of that peculiar, crisp sparkle which mounts to one's head like champagne. The sand shone and twinkled in the yellow sunshine with an almost dazzling effect, and the pale blue sky had not yet taken on the pitiless ultramarine hue which comes with the brazen noon.
The horses, too, seemed alive to the exhilarating quality of the air. They curvetted and danced over the sand, tossing their arched necks and lifting their feet daintily as though they were conscious of the beauty and fitness of their own motion.
"By Jove, Sir Richard, life is worth living on a morning like this!" Anstice threw back his head and inhaled large draughts of the intoxicating, sun-warmed air. "Why on earth do we herd in cities when there are glorious tracts of desert land where one might pitch one's tent! I declare I wish I were a nomad myself!"
"You feel like that?" Sir Richard looked a trifle wistfully at the younger man, envying him his superior youth and more robust physique. "For my part I confess to a distrust of the desert. It seems to me as though there were a blight on these huge tracts of sand, as though the Creator had regretted their creation, yet was too perfect a Worker to try, by altering the original purpose of His handiwork, to turn them into something for which they were not intended."
He paused, pulling up his horse and turning in his saddle to survey the yellow and brown waste over which they had come.
"I suppose, as an Englishman whose forbears have always clung to the soil, I find more pleasure in beholding an English landscape," he said, with a smile which was half apologetic. "The ideal of making two blades of grass spring where there was but one before may not be a very exalted one, but I confess I see more beauty in a field of grain waving under the August sun, than in these acres of yellow sand, and the thought of a perpetual summer, with never the soft grey tones of an autumn sky or the crisp frostiness of a winter's morning--well, it doesn't appeal to my John Bull soul!"
He laughed, ashamed of his vehemence, and the horses sprang gaily forward, glad to be moving again after even so brief a halt.