walls, only a minaret and a few flat roofs are visible. Under the walls
drowse the usual gregarious Lazaruses; others, temporarily resuscitated,
trail their grave-clothes after a line of camels and donkeys toward the
olive-gardens outside the town.

The way to Rabat is long and difficult, and there is no time to visit
El-Ksar, though its minaret beckons so alluringly above the
fruit-orchards; so we stop for luncheon outside the walls, at a canteen
with a corrugated iron roof where skinny Spaniards are serving thick
purple wine and eggs fried in oil to a party of French soldiers. The
heat has suddenly become intolerable, and a flaming wind straight from
the south brings in at the door, with a cloud of blue flies, the smell
of camels and trampled herbs and the strong spices of the bazaars.

Luncheon over, we hurry on between the cactus hedges, and then plunge
back into the waste. Beyond El-Ksar the last hills of the Rif die away,
and there is a stretch of wilderness without an outline till the Lesser
Atlas begins to rise in the east. Once in the French protectorate the
trail improves, but there are still difficult bits; and finally, on a
high plateau, the chauffeur stops in a web of criss-cross trails, throws
up his hands, and confesses that he has lost his way. The heat is mortal
at the moment. For the last hour the red breath of the sirocco has risen
from every hollow into which we dipped, now it hangs about us in the
open, as if we had caught it in our wheels and it had to pause above us
when we paused.

All around is the featureless wild land, palmetto scrub stretching away
into eternity. A few yards off rises the inevitable ruined _koubba_[A]
with its fig-tree: in the shade under its crumbling wall the buzz of the
flies is like the sound of frying. Farther off, we discern a cluster of