Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/75

Rh a group o£ buildings and restaurants clustered around the deep canyon of the Sáfsaf River, that falls from the high plain of Terni above over a series of bounding cascades before it rests for a time in the dark, still lake just near the mouth of the great ravine. Picturesque, threatening red walls of rock, spotted everywhere with bunches of tall grass and bushes, enclose the canyon, across which the French engineers have thrown a railway bridge. Here and there in the cliffs are grottoes, the openings of subterranean galleries and smaller apertures of various sizes. Little streams of water murmur on all sides, and the ceiling drippings are ever forming great stalactites, which range themselves into colonnades of subterranean palaces and temples. But the worthy public shows its usual indifference to Nature's discriminating beauty, for European competes with Arab in scratching names on the rocks and in strewing the whole place with the picnic litter that so often converts a wonderful garden of beauty into a dumping-ground of civilization.

On our way back to town Mahomet pointed out to us little settlements of French colonists at Bréa, Négrier and Safsaf, a little beyond which stood the minaret of Agadir. It is a romantic place, this Agadir; for it was here that one of the Caesars, before the birth of Christ, erected a small fortress and called it Pomaria. Many of the Roman antiquities and fragments of inscriptions which are to be seen in the museum at Tlemsen were found here. At the beginning of the Christian era the Romans withdrew from Africa, leaving behind them the ruins of their towns and fortified posts all the way west to the Atlantic. What was here in this immediate region after the