directed his every step in life, that his own fate, whether good or evil,
was already assigned to him. I heard the faint echo of the greeting
offered by the dogs of the great douar into which he passed, and felt well
assured that the protests of the village folk, if they ventured to
protest, would move him no more than the barking of those pariahs. The
hawks we saw poised in the blue above our heads when small birds sang at
sunsetting, were not more cheerfully devoid of sentiment than our khalifa,
though it may be they had more excuse than he.

On another afternoon we sat at lunch in the grateful sombre shade of a
fig-tree. Beyond the little stone dyke that cut the meadow from the arable
land a negro ploughed with an ox and an ass, in flat defiance of Biblical
injunction. The beasts were weary or lazy, or both, and the slave cursed
them with an energy that was wonderful for the time of day. Even the birds
had ceased to sing, the cicadas were silent in the tree tops, and when one
of the mules rolled on the ground and scattered its pack upon all sides,
the Maalem was too exhausted to do more than call it the "son of a
Christian and a Jew."

[Illustration: THE MID-DAY HALT]

Down the track we had followed came a fair man, of slight build, riding a
good mule. He dismounted by the tree to adjust his saddle, tighten a
stirrup thong, and say a brief prayer. Then, indifferent to the heat, he
hurried on, and Salam, who had held short converse with him, announced
that he was an emissary of Bu Hamara the Pretender, speeding southward to
preach the rising to the Atlas tribes. He carried his life in his hands
through the indifferently loyal southern country, but the burden was not
heavy enough to trouble him. Bu Hamara, the man no bullets could injure,
the divinely directed one, who could call the dead from their pavilion in