Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/314

298 slipped by the Berber villages, black duars and gleaming kubbas, picturesque zaouias and the poorly tilled lands of the natives, where a pair of under-fed donkeys or an exhausted camel were dragging a prehistoric wooden plough fitted with a small iron share and where the crop depended entirely upon the will of Allah.

We saw French railways, well-laid roads, carefully built wells and reservoirs, modern hospitals and schools, motor-buses and streams of private cars, radio aerials, beautiful parks, artistic monuments and theaters—and interspersed everywhere among these old caravan routes and strings of tramping camels, padding the sands in stately rhythm and carrying their imperious heads well up and forward as pointing the way to some goal of grave import. We came upon heaps of stones near forgotten tombs and upon wells and springs of delicious water whose masonry the centuries had crumbled. Messengers, speeding with important news, passed us on the way; the tops of beautiful trees looked down upon us from behind the walls of immense and charming gardens, to which a white man may never yet have had access; beautiful palaces hid themselves away in tortuous and narrow streets, sheltering within them a life that had for centuries been led according to the law of the Koran.

In another spot the metallic voice of a gramophone would be luring the tired colonist to a cinema, while from a minaret hard by the muezzin would be summoning the Faithful to prayer and pronouncing in holy zeal the ninety-nine blessed names of Allah.

Scorching heat by day and cold blasts by night; a mirage shimmering in the transparent, almost limitless