Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/241

Rh the other in a menacing threat toward the sky, towered over the palms at a distance of some thirty odd miles to the south. In the months of September and October the summits are constantly shrouded in heavy clouds, so that only the dark, blue wall of the mountainsides is to be seen. But this evening above the rocks the very tops of the ranges glimmered marvelously in their brilliant white sheen of snow and ice. Even as we watched, the purity of the snows began to yield to the delicate pink hues which the rays of the setting sun tinted them. After a moment this gave way in turn to the gray tones that rose up out of the darkening valleys, before they were all engulfed in the returning masses of enveloping clouds. The phenomenon lasted for only a few moments, during which it was, however, magnificent in its grandeur and beauty of contrasts.

Although I had been so weak in Rabat from the fever contracted at Meknes that the doctor ordered me away to the mountains at once, I had little conception of what the change to this air and these surroundings could mean. I had been in Marrakesh but a little while, when I felt that all people ill in body and spirit would do well to go there, where in the shadow of the palms, in the beautiful parks, within the calm of the pantheon of the Saadian sherifs or the tomb of Yusuf ibn Teshufin and near the vivifying fountains of water coming down from the snowy summits of the Atlas, illness and pain are banished not only from the body but from the spirit, unless it be some sweet sadness or longing as light and wavering as the desert mirage, as gentle as the voice of the water In the fountains of Sidi Hassan. And this is the reason why