near the ruins of the Phenician colony of Mehedyia. Just north of
Kenitra we struck the trail, branching off eastward to a European
village on the light railway between Rabat and Fez, and beyond the
railway-sheds and flat-roofed stores the wilderness began, stretching
away into clear distances bounded by the hills of the Rarb,[A] above
which the sun was rising.

[Footnote A: The high plateau-and-hill formation between Tangier and
Fez.]

Range after range these translucent hills rose before us, all around the
solitude was complete. Village life, and even tent life, naturally
gathers about a river-bank or a spring; and the waste we were crossing
was of waterless sand bound together by a loose desert growth. Only an
abandoned well-curb here and there cast its blue shadow on the yellow
_bled_, or a saint's tomb hung like a bubble between sky and sand. The
light had the preternatural purity which gives a foretaste of mirage: it
was the light in which magic becomes real, and which helps to understand
how, to people living in such an atmosphere, the boundary between fact
and dream perpetually fluctuates.

The sand was scored with tracks and ruts innumerable, for the road
between Rabat and Fez is travelled not only by French government motors
but by native caravans and trains of pilgrims to and from the sacred
city of Moulay Idriss, the founder of the Idrissite dynasty, whose tomb
is in the Zerhoun, the mountain ridge above Volubilis. To untrained eyes
it was impossible to guess which of the trails one ought to follow; and
without much surprise we suddenly found the motor stopping, while its
wheels spun round vainly in the loose sand.