Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/303

Rh magical powers. The eyes, which discern the coming of the sun while it is still night, form talismans for prophets, while the brain, when mixed with aloes and vanilla and wrapped in jackal skins, renders a man invisible and inaudible to others.

As we journeyed northward, we came again into a well-peopled and fertile district, where both the main road and the infiltrating arteries carried ever-increasing streams of camel caravans and native riders. Finally the mass of a rocky promontory protruded itself into the sea, and beyond it we beheld the rocky shores on which the former Portuguese stronghold and colony of Safi lay. Though it was abandoned by the invaders in the middle of the sixteenth century, the old citadel of Keshla, with its cyclopean walls, still dominates and menaces the place.

We had no more than reached the hotel before I received the very welcome announcement that Monsieur Maurice Le Glay was awaiting me in the salon. Maurice Le Glay! For me the sound of this name was a whole symphony. That he was the French Administrator of a large district around Safi and one of the keenest political minds in this part of Maghreb meant little or nothing to me as I hurried to meet him, for I knew another Le Glay, a writer whose manner of thinking and impressionability opened to him the romance of the land and the hidden tragedies of its people. I had read some of his works depicting the Berbers and their life and had found them brilliant and illuminating. I think of him as a musician—his Moroccan novels are like the low notes of a violin in the night-time, when everything around is chained in sleep and an invisible sadness seems to be drawing the