Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/287

Rh the smallest water-supplies to requisition them for service in their fields and among their palms.

After we had covered about forty miles, we found ourselves winding in among the foot-hills of the first ranges. The contrast with the desert was sudden and most marked, for the earth here, saturated by the water from the snows above, allowed the vegetation to develop itself immediately above the line of the desert. Around the small villages we passed were groves of olive- and fruit-trees together with fields of sorghum and maize. In winding curves the road mounted higher and higher, joining with the others that came up out of the plain to form one of the larger feeders of the great single trunk-route that finally leads up over the Atlas to carry the stream of travel down the other side to Tarudant, Tikirt and the Sudan.

On the summit of the first range we came upon some villages hung on the slope of a ravine, at the bottom of which flowed a shallow, swift mountain stream. Judging from the configuration of the foot-hills, I inferred that it must, of course, be an affluent of the Tensift, which flows near Marrakesh; but I was informed that it disappeared entirely on the plain, seeping down and eventually contributing so much of its water has had not already evaporated to the system of subterranean canals and thus reaching the capital through these strange and unnatural channels. However, toward the end of the rainy period, when the snows and the glaciers in the mountains melt, this river carries such an augmented stream that it breasts the parching heat of the desert and strews its seasonal channel across the plain with