Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/105

Rh we occasionally saw small Arab farms with their vineyards, olives and pomegranates surrounding their adobe barns and houses. These plantations have an interesting defence against the free-ranging cattle in the hedges of the twining and twisted bushes of a thorny plant that is carefully searched for and gathered by the natives for use in their sheltering enclosures around their tents, fields and lambs. A jackal or wild dog cannot penetrate or jump over these hedges, once they are well grown, and even a man can work his way through this veritable barbed wire with only the greatest difficulty and an even greater noise.

Soon the train began to descend through a broken, hilly country, bringing us down from the altitudes around Tlemsen, which is slightly over two thousand five hundred feet above the sea, to the little town of Lalla Marnia with its mosques, chapels and kubbas, at less than twelve hundred feet. The town is situated in a large plain cut by irrigation canals that bring to it water from distant mountain springs. Near it lies Nedroma, where the sultans of the magnificent dynasty of the Almohades had their abode. West of Lalla Marnia the train again began to scramble up the heights, until it reached the plateau of Angad, just over two thousand feet in elevation.

Then we passed the last station in western Algeria, Zouj el-Beghal, and soon crossed the frontier into Morocco to draw up at the border station of Ujda. As the conductor had informed us that we should have to undergo a strict examination by the customs officials, we were soon following the black porters who had our luggage and my arms on their shoulders to the examination