Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/340

324 covered with minute thorns and some of them bearing small, yellow flowers. My knife could penetrate them, in spite of their hardness, due to saturation with chalk and magnesium salts. Colonel Pariel told me that their proper description is "Anabasis," though the French commonly call them "cauliflowers"—and, really, they rather closely resemble them.

The Anabasis is the flower of the Sahara and marked very distinctly the beginning of the sands. Marvelously patterned little ridges and kopjes revealed the handiwork of the swirling winds, while the gradually receding face of the mountain bore evidence of the stronger cunents from the south and southeast that carried myriads of silicious missiles to wear it away. Great rows of rocks at times stretched across the plain, resembling the ancient ruins of some long-forgotten civilization. Among these and the giant Anabasis, jackals and fennecs (Fennecus zerda) range, while vipers of all the varieties known in this latitude seemed to be basking there.

The fennec resembles a small fox but has large ears with long white hair inside them. It is quick, energetic and cautious, and the Arabs assert that it will climb trees. It seems to me that this characteristic of the animal must be derived from some feline strain in its ancestry, a possibility which is suggested also by the fact that fennecs play with their prey for a long time before killing it and also maintain great cleanliness in their surroundings.

Finally we reached a low, rocky pass, Teniet Zerga, resembling an immense gate. At the further end the road turned and brought us abruptly out of the pass above a large, deep valley with a single opening toward the south.