Luckily there are other things to think about.
At the first turn out of Tangier, Europe and the European
disappear, and as soon as the motor begins to dip
and rise over the arid little hills beyond the last
gardens one is sure that every figure on the road will
be picturesque instead of prosaic, every garment graceful
instead of grotesque. One knows, too, that there
will be no more omnibuses or trams or motorcyclists,
but only long lines of camels rising up in brown friezes
against the sky, little black donkeys trotting across
the scrub under bulging pack-saddles, and noble draped
figures walking beside them or majestically perching
on their rumps. And for miles and miles there
will be no more towns—only, at intervals
on the naked slopes, circles of rush-roofed huts in
a blue stockade of cactus, or a hundred or two nomad
tents of black camel’s hair resting on walls
of wattled thorn and grouped about a terebinth-tree
and a well.
[Illustration: map of Morocco]
Between these nomad colonies lies the bled,
the immense waste of fallow land and palmetto desert:
an earth as void of life as the sky above it of clouds.
The scenery is always the same; but if one has the
love of great emptinesses, and of the play of light
on long stretches of parched earth and rock, the sameness
is part of the enchantment. In such a scene every
landmark takes on an extreme value. For miles
one watches the little white dome of a saint’s
grave rising and disappearing with the undulations
of the trail; at last one is abreast of it, and the
solitary tomb, alone with its fig-tree and its broken
well-curb, puts a meaning into the waste. The
same importance, but intensified, marks the appearance
of every human figure. The two white-draped riders
passing single file up the red slope to that ring
of tents on the ridge have a mysterious and inexplicable
importance: one follows their progress with eyes
that ache with conjecture. More exciting still
is the encounter of the first veiled woman heading
a little cavalcade from the south. All the mystery
that awaits us looks out through the eye-slits in the
grave-clothes muffling her. Where have they come
from, where are they going, all these slow wayfarers
out of the unknown? Probably only from one thatched
douar[A] to another; but interminable distances
unroll behind them, they breathe of Timbuctoo and
the farthest desert. Just such figures must swarm
in the Saharan cities, in the Soudan and Senegal.
There is no break in the links: these wanderers
have looked on at the building of cities that were
dust when the Romans pushed their outposts across
the Atlas.
[Footnote A: Village of tents. The village
of mud-huts is called a nourwal.]
EL-KSAR TO RABAT
