meaning into the waste. The same importance, but intensified, marks the
appearance of every human figure. The two white-draped riders passing
single file up the red slope to that ring of tents on the ridge have a
mysterious and inexplicable importance: one follows their progress with
eyes that ache with conjecture. More exciting still is the encounter of
the first veiled woman heading a little cavalcade from the south. All
the mystery that awaits us looks out through the eye-slits in the
grave-clothes muffling her. Where have they come from, where are they
going, all these slow wayfarers out of the unknown? Probably only from
one thatched _douar_[A] to another; but interminable distances unroll
behind them, they breathe of Timbuctoo and the farthest desert. Just
such figures must swarm in the Saharan cities, in the Soudan and
Senegal. There is no break in the links: these wanderers have looked on
at the building of cities that were dust when the Romans pushed their
outposts across the Atlas.

[Footnote A: Village of tents. The village of mud-huts is called a
_nourwal_.]



III

EL-KSAR TO RABAT

A town at last--its nearness announced by the multiplied ruts of the
trail, the cactus hedges, the fig-trees weighed down by dust leaning
over ruinous earthen walls. And here are the first houses of the
European El-Ksar--neat white Spanish houses on the slope outside the old
Arab settlement. Of the Arab town itself, above reed stockades and brown