Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/239

 CHAPTER XVII

MAGICIANS OF THE MARKET-PLACE

AYING good-bye to our friends, Monsieur Urbain ^ Blanc and Monsieur Leroy, we set out once more along the coast road to Casablanca, but remained only two days in this port that holds little interest for a student of the real life of Morocco and turned inland again toward Marrakesh, the Berber capital and the "Paris of Maghreb."

Through a fertile and well-cultivated country we made our way to the river of Umm er-Rbi'a, beyond which the fields, pastures and large villages, like Ber Reshid, Settat and Ben Abbu, disappeared and left us surrounded by a stony, barren and sometimes totally dead desert, where one meets nothing but the occasional camel caravans, automobiles, lizards and scorpions. This landscape, so tiring in its sameness, stretched itself to the foot of the Jebilet range, through which we ran along a winding road that brought us out through a narrow cleft from where we had our first view of Marrakesh, not really of the town itself but of the oasis surrounding it on all sides except from the south, where the old Berber capital reaches right up to the edge of the desert that unrolls itself from the foot of the Atlas range. We could,