[Illustration:  A TRAVELLER ON THE PLAINS]

First and foremost stands out a khalifa, lieutenant of a great country kaid, met midmost Dukala, in a place of level barley fields new cut with the media luna.  Brilliant poppies and irises stained the meadows on all sides, and orchards whose cactus hedges, planted for defence, were now aflame with blood-red flowers, became a girdle of beauty as well as strength.  The khalifa rode a swiftly-ambling mule, a beast of price, his yellow slippers were ostentatiously new, and his ample girth proclaimed the wealthy man in a land where all the poor are thin.  “Peace,” was his salutation to M’Barak, who led the way, and when he reached us he again invoked the Peace of Allah upon Our Lord Mohammed and the Faithful of the Prophet’s House, thereby and with malice aforethought excluding the infidel.  Like others of his class who passed us he was but ill-pleased to see the stranger in the land; unlike the rest he did not conceal his convictions.  Behind him came three black slaves, sleek, armed, proud in the pride of their lord, and with this simple retinue the khalifa was on his way to tithe the newly-harvested produce of the farmers who lived in that district.  Dangerous work, I thought, to venture thus within the circle of the native douars and claim the lion’s share of the hard-won produce of the husbandmen.  He and his little company would be outnumbered in the proportion of thirty or forty to one, they had no military following, and yet went boldly forth to rob on the kaid’s behalf.  I remembered how, beyond Tangier, the men of the hills round Anjera had risen against an unpopular khalifa, had tortured him in atrocious fashion, and left him blind and hideously maimed, to be a warning to all tyrants.  Doubtless our prosperous fellow-traveller knew all about it, doubtless he realised that the Sultan’s authority was only nominal, but he knew that his immediate master, the Basha, still held his people in an iron grip while, above and beyond all else, he knew by the living faith that directed his every step in life, that his own fate, whether good or evil, was already assigned to him.  I heard the faint echo of the greeting offered by the dogs of the great douar into which he passed, and felt well assured that the protests of the village folk, if they ventured to protest, would move him no more than the barking of those pariahs.  The hawks we saw poised in the blue above our heads when small birds sang at sunsetting, were not more cheerfully devoid of sentiment than our khalifa, though it may be they had more excuse than he.

On another afternoon we sat at lunch in the grateful sombre shade of a fig-tree.  Beyond the little stone dyke that cut the meadow from the arable land a negro ploughed with an ox and an ass, in flat defiance of Biblical injunction.  The beasts were weary or lazy, or both, and the slave cursed them with an energy that was wonderful for the time of day.  Even the birds had ceased to sing, the cicadas were silent in the tree tops, and when one of the mules rolled on the ground and scattered its pack upon all sides, the Maalem was too exhausted to do more than call it the “son of a Christian and a Jew.”