Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/292

276 While I was looking about I flushed a flock of partridges and scared up something else in the brush lhat made off with so much noise that I inferred it must have been a boar.

A little farther on we stopped for a few moments to feast our eyes on a beautiful panorama which lay spread before us. The mountains parted here, forming a great valley down which the road wound to Tagadirt el-Bour, that lay hidden from us by an intervening forest of sandaracs. The mountain tops were bathed with light-suffused fog and lighter sunny mists. Above us stretched skyward the highest summits of the Atlas with snow in the crevices and on their northern slopes. In the great, sweeping circle formed by these rugged crags I was told that one might readily come upon a panther hunting mountain-sheep.

"We are now well up in the real High Atlas," Captain Deverre observed.

As he spoke, I recalled and discussed with him some of the facts communicated to me by Monsieur Orthlieb, the French political administrator for this district. From time immemorial this expanse of mountains has been divided between three powerful, feudal princely families, the Glawi, Gundafi and Mtugi, which have often fought with the sultans and which were related to both the Almoravide and Saadite dynasties. They are the so-called "Masters of the Mountains," or the great caids, with whom even the sultans do not like to meddle but ever strive to maintain the best relations. The rulers of Rabat and Fez had always to remember that, at the first sign from these Masters of the Mountains, the mountaineers