About nine o'clock
And they rode over this plain for hours , the horses avoiding the baked earth , choosing the softer places where there was a litter of leaves or moss . Sometimes the cavalcade divided into twos and threes , sometimes it formed into a little group riding to the right or left , with Owen and his dragoman in front , Owen trying to learn Arabic from the dragoman , the lesson interrupted continually by some new sight : by a cloud of thistledown hovering over a great purple field , rising and falling , for there was not wind enough to carry the seed away ; by some white vapour on the horizon , which his dragoman told him was the smoke of Arabs clearing the scrub . `` 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 .