The essence of the desert was the lonely moving individual, the son of the road, apart from the world as in a grave. These troops, in flocks like slo… - T.E. Lawrence

Their largest manufacture was of creeds: almost they were monopolists of revealed religions. Three of these efforts had endured among them: two of the three had also borne export (in modified forms) to non-Semitic peoples. Christianity, translated into the diverse spirits of Greek and Latin and Teutonic tongues, had conquered Europe and America. Islam in various transformations was subjecting Africa and parts of Asia. These were Semitic successes. Their failures they kept to themselves. The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faiths.

We cut three telegraph wires, and fastened the free ends to the saddles of six riding-camels of the Howeitat. The astonished team struggled far into the eastern valleys with the growing weight of twanging, tangling wire and the bursting poles dragging after them. At last they could no longer move. So we cut them loose and rode laughing after the caravan.

They were incorrigibly children of the idea, feckless and color-blind, for whom body and spirit were forever and inevitably opposed.
The Semitic mind was strange and dark full of depressions and exaltations, lacking in rule, but with more of ardor and more fertile in belief than any other in the world. They were people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the process of infinite courage and variety, and the end nothing. The were unstable as water, and like water would perhaps finally prevail.