unfortunately, the evil spirits never appear however, unless unnoticed by
me in the harmless forms of storks, stock-doves, or sparrow-hawks.

[Illustration: NEAR A WELL IN THE COUNTRY]

In this fertile province of the Dukala, in the little-known kingdom of the
victorious Sultan, Mulai Abd-el-Aziz, there are delightful stretches of
level country, and the husbandman's simplest toil suffices to bring about
an abundant harvest. Unhappily a great part of the province is not in
permanent cultivation at all. For miles and miles, often as far as the eye
can see, the land lies fallow, never a farmhouse or village to be seen,
nothing save some zowia or saint's tomb, with white dome rising within
four white walls to stare undaunted at the fierce African sun, while the
saint's descendants in the shelter of the house live by begging from pious
visitors. Away from the fertility that marks the neighbourhood of the
douars, one finds a few spare bushes, suddra, retam, or colocynth, a few
lizards darting here and there, and over all a supreme silence that may be
felt, even as the darkness that troubled Egypt in days of old. The main
track, not to be dignified by the name of road, is always to be discerned
clearly enough, at least the Maalem is never in doubt when stray paths,
leading from nowhere to the back of beyond, intersect it.

At long intervals we pass a n'zala, a square empty space surrounded by a
zariba of thorn and prickly pear. The village, a few wattled huts with
conical roofs, stands by its side. Every n'zala is a Government shelter
for travellers; you may pitch your tent within the four walls, and even if
you remain outside and hire guards the owners of the huts are responsible
for your safety, with their worldly goods, perhaps with their lives. I
have tried the interior of the Moorish n'zalas, where all too frequently
you must lie on unimagined filth, often almost within reach of