"It is useless to plant anything: the earth is dead."

"No, it is not dead, it is only dry."

"But I tell you, it is dead. In summer the earth is always dead: see here." And the Arab who spoke stooped and picked up a rock-like clod, that he had hewn with his pickaxe from the trench at his feet. It looked dead enough certainly; the Algerian soil in August is much the same in texture as a well-trodden highway. But it is only waiting.

"It is the very same earth that it is in winter," I replied; "all it wants is water, and water you must give it."

With an Oriental's laconic patience, though all unconvinced, the man went on with the digging of his trench, and the planting therein of acacia clippings to make a new thorn hedge where it had been broken down.

And with a new hope in God my own words came back to me as I turned away. "It is not dead: it is only dry."

For of all the soils in the world our Moslem soil in Algiers seems the most barren, while friend and foe repeat the same words: "It is useless to plant anything: the earth is dead."

But in the face of both—in the face of the hosts of darkness who take up the words and fling them at us with a stinging taunt—we affirm in faith:

"No, it is not dead. It is only dry."

Dry: that we know sorrowfully well; it cannot be otherwise. It is dry soil because Islam has come nearer doing "despite to the Spirit of grace" than any other religion; it is, as has been truly said, the one anti-Christian faith, the one of openly avowed enmity to the Cross of Christ, the one that deliberately tramples under foot the Son of God.

It is dry also because in the religion itself there is something searing, blighting, as with a subtle breath of hell. This is true of the lands where it has laid hold, and true of the hearts,—it is dry.

Dry soil, not dead soil. If you were out here in Algiers and could see and know the people, you would say so too. The next best thing is to bring you some of their faces to look at that you may judge whether the possibilities have gone out of them yet or not: women faces and girl faces, for it is of these that I write. Will you spend five minutes of your hours to-day in looking—just looking—at them, till they have sunk down into your heart? Are they the faces of a dead people? Do you see no material for Christ if they had a chance of the Water of Life? These are real living women, living to-day, unmet by Him.

To begin with, the first glance will show their intelligence. Get an average ignorant Englishwoman of the peasant class to repeat a Bible story that she has never heard before. She will dully remember one or two salient facts. Go up to a mountain village here and get a group of women and talk to them, and choose one of them to repeat to the others what you have said. You will feel after a sentence or two that your Arabic was only English put into Arabic words; hers is sparkling with racy idiom. More than that, she is making the story live before her hearers: a touch of local color here—a quaint addition there. It is all aglow. And this a woman who has sat year after year in her one garment of red woollen drapery, cooking meals and nursing children, with nothing to stimulate any thoughts beyond the day's need.

And their powers of feeling: do their faces look as if these have been crushed out by a life of servitude? Not a bit of it. No European who has not lived among them can have any idea of their intensity: love, hate, grief, reign by turns. Anger and grief can take such possession of them as to bring real illness of a strange and undiagnosable kind. We have known such cases to last for months; not unfrequently they end fatally; and more than one whom we have met has gone stone-blind with crying for a dead husband who probably made things none too easy while he lived.

And then their will power: the faces tell of that too. The women have far more backbone than their menkind, who have been indulged from babyhood; their school of suffering has not been in vain. In the beautiful balance of God's justice, all that man has taken from them in outward rights has been more than made up in the qualities of endurance and sacrifice that stand, fire-tried, in their character.

And down beyond these outward capacities, how about their spirit-nature? It may be hard to believe at home, but it is a fact that just as the parched ground of August is the very same as the fertile earth of spring, so these souls are the very same as other souls. God is "the God of the spirits of all flesh." "He hath made of one blood all the inhabitants of the earth." For impressionableness on the Divine side, they are as quick as in enlightened lands: I think, quicker. It is only that as soon as the impression is made "then cometh the devil" with an awful force that is only now beginning to be known in Christian countries, and there is not enough of the Holy Spirit's power to put him to flight. There will be when the showers come!

As yet the soil is dry: the womenkind are a host of locked-up possibilities for good and sadly free possibilities for evil.

The dark side lies in untrueness born of constant fear of the consequence of every trifling act, moral impurity that steeps even the children—wild jealousy that will make them pine away and die if a rival baby comes. Their minds are rife with superstition and fertile in intrigue.

And while all this has full play, unchecked and unheeded, the latent capacities for serving God and man are wasting themselves in uselessness, pressed down by the weight of things. There is something very pathetic in watching the failing brain-power of the girls. Until fourteen or fifteen years they are bright, quick at learning; but then it is like a flower closing, so far as mental effort goes, and soon there is the complaint: "I cannot get hold of it, it goes from me." Once grown up, it is painful to see the labor with which they learn even the alphabet. Imagination, perception, poetry remain, and resourcefulness for good and evil, but apart from God's grace, solid brain power dies. Probably in the unexplored question of heredity lies the clue; for at that age for generations the sorrows and cares of married life have come and stopped mind development till the brain has lost its power of expansion as womanhood comes on. Life is often over, in more senses than one, before they are twenty.

The story comes before me of three warm-hearted maidens who a few years ago belonged to our girls' class: the eldest came but seldom, for she was toiling over shirtmaking for the support of her mother and sister. This sister and a friend made up the trio.

Their mothers were "adherents"—we had hoped at one time more than adherents, but compromise was already winning the day: the daughters had open hearts towards the Lord, all of them in a child-like way.

Where are they now?

They came to marriageable age, and Moslem etiquette required that they should marry. We begged the mothers to wait a while and see if some Christian lads were not forthcoming: but no, fashion binds as much in a Moslem town as in the West End of London.

The eldest girl was carried out fainting from her home to be the wife of a countryman. He was good to her: his mother became madly jealous. Within two years the bride fell into a strange kind of decline; when death came there were symptoms showing that it was from slow poison.

The second to marry was the little friend. At her wedding feast those who had forced the marriage on, drugged her with one of their terrible brain-poisons. The spell worked till she could not bear the sight of us, and hated and denounced Christ.

It wore itself out after a few months and light and love crept back. We went away for the summer. Before we returned she had been put to death by her husband. Through the delirium of the last day and night her one intelligible cry was "Jesus"; so the broken-hearted mother told us. She was an only child.

The third is still alive, a mere girl. She has been divorced twice already from drunken, dissolute husbands. Long intervals of silent melancholy come upon her, intense and dumb, like threatening brain-trouble. She was playful as a kitten five years ago.

Poor little souls—crushed every one of them at sixteen or seventeen under the heel of Islam. Do you wonder that we do not consider it an elevating creed?

And yet they have gone under without tasting the bitterest dregs of a native woman's cup; for (save a baby of the eldest girl's who lived only a few weeks) there were no children in the question. And the woman's deepest anguish begins where they are concerned. For divorce is always hanging over her head. The birth of a daughter when a son had been hoped for, an illness that has become a bit tedious, a bit of caprice or counter-attraction on the husband's part—any of these things may mean that he will "tear the paper" that binds them together, and for eight francs the kadi will set him free. This means that the children will be forced from the mother and knocked about by the next wife that comes on the scene; and the mother-heart will suffer a constant martyrdom from her husband if only divorce can be averted. The Algerian women may claim the boys till seven and the girls till ten or twelve; the countrywomen have no claim after the little life becomes independent of them for existence.

Look at the awful and fierce sadness of this face: more like a wild creature than a woman.[D] She has probably been tossed from home to home until she is left stranded, or wrecked on rocks of unspeakable sin and shame: for that is how it ends, again and again.

Turn from her: we cannot have her to be the last. Look once more at a girl, untroubled as yet. If you want to see what the women could be if but the social yoke of Islam were loosed from their shoulders, study the little maidens upon whom it has not yet come. Take one of them if you can get hold of her—even a stupid one, as this one may be with all her soft grace—let her expand for a few weeks in an atmosphere of love and purity. Watch the awakening: it is as lovely a thing as you could wish to see, outside the kingdom of God.

And if this budding and blossoming can come with the poor watering of human love, what could it be with the heavenly showers, in their miracle-power of drawing out all that there is in the earth that they visit. Oh the capacities that are there! The soil is "only dry."

And in the very fact of its utter dryness lies our claim upon God. "I will make the shower to come down in his season; there shall be showers of blessing," is His promise. The "season" for the showers in these southern lands, is the time of utmost drought. It is not in July when the gold lingers in the grass, but in September when the tangle of the spring has sunk to ashen gray, ready to crumble at a touch—it is then that we know the rains are nearing. God's "season" comes when all has gone down to despair.

So we look round on our Moslem field, and triumph in the dryness that is so like death, for it shows that we need not have long to wait.

But a great fight is fought overhead in the natural world out here before the rains are set free: the poor dry lands seem to wrestle against the one thing that they need. Before the clouds burst there will come days—weeks, perhaps, off and on—of fierce sirocco, hurling them back as they try to gather. Sometimes they seem on the point of breaking, and a few drops may get through the heavy air, then back go the clouds, leaving the brassy glare undimmed. On the fight goes, and gets only harder and harder, till suddenly the victory is won. The south wind drops, or shifts to the west, and the clouds, laden now with their treasure, mass themselves in the east; then the wind wheels to the east and gets behind them, and in an hour or less, unresisted, they are overhead; unresisted, the windows of heaven are opened, and the rain comes down in floods with a joyful splash, drenching the earth to its depths, and calling to life every hidden potentiality.

A fight like that lies before us in the lands of Islam. It has begun even now; for we have seen again and again the clouds gather and swept back, leaving a few drops at best, and these often quickly dried. They are not yet full of rain, so they do not empty themselves upon the earth.

And it is not from this side that they can be stored: it is not the thirsty earth that can fill them. They travel from afar, where ocean, river, and lake can breathe their vapors upward, swept unseen by the wind that bloweth where it listeth, to the parched places. We need you, in the far-off, Spirit-watered lands to store the showers. You may be but a roadside pool, but your prayer-breath may go up to be gathered in God's clouds and break in His "plentiful rain." When the clouds are full He will still the sirocco blast of evil that fights it back, and it will come down with the sudden swift ease that marks the setting in of the rains here, year by year.

Do we believe that each heaven-sent prayer brings the cloud-burst nearer? That one last cry of faith, somewhere, will set it free? Do we act as if we believed it? Shall we give ourselves to hasten it?

And when it comes, we shall see the latent possibilities awake, and the latent powers assert themselves, and the people of Moslem countries, men and women, show what they can be and do for Him and in His kingdom. For, thank God, they are not dead lands, they are "only dry."