Page:A Picture-book without Pictures and Other Stories (1848).djvu/100



For upwards of fourteen days the Moon had not shone; now I saw it again, round and bright, standing above the slowly ascending clouds; listen to what the Moon related to me. I followed a caravan from one of the cities of Fez; it made a halt upon one of the salt plains, which glittered like an ice-field, and where one little stretch only was covered with moveable sand. The eldest of the caravan, with his water-flask hanging at his belt, and a bag of unleavened bread around his neck, marked out a square in the sand with his staff, and wrote therein some words of the koran; within this consecrated spot the whole caravan drew up. A young merchant, a child of the sun, as I could see by