Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/123

Rh an honor which the poor dabb owes to the fact that the number of rings in its tail counts the magic twenty-one.

This well-inhabited bit of desert soon lay far behind us, and we were once more surrounded by the great spiritless waste, monotonous and dead. The hopeless landscape it made was only occasionally enlivened by a file of laden camels appearing on the horizon or by the square walls of a military blockhouse with a solitary sentinel looking out from the tower.

Finally, after some further hours on the plain, we nosed our way into the gullies and ravines of the Ghiata range, where we again discovered water in the river-beds—water in the form of almost invisible rivulets hiding away between and underneath the rocks and stones, just as if it were trying to avoid its enemy, the sun.

We made our next stop at the custom-house for Tasa, a large town which lay hidden behind the mountains. While our chauffeur was changing a tire, we took advantage of the opportunity to go for a stroll and were no more than started, before we were held up by the curious sight of lizards running straight up and all about the walls of the custom-house. They were from six to eight inches long, had grayish-brown skins and carried long finger-like toes, fitted with disproportionately large adhesive pads. They were the so-called "wall-gecko," or Tarentola Maviretanica, and were looked upon by the natives as a most useful ally, in that they hunted flies, midges, spiders and other insects. On the other hand, when the colonists in the northern part of the Oran district introduced apiculture, these same geckos became very obnoxious, inasmuch as they killed the bees. It is a