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4 In Moroccorush-roofed huts in a blue stockade ofcactus, or a hundred or two nomad tentsof black camel's hair resting on walls ofwattled thorn and grouped about aterebinth-tree and a well.Between these nomad colonies lies thebled, the immense waste of fallow land andpalmetto desert: an earth as void of lifeas the sky above it of clouds. The sceneryis always the same; but if one has thelove of great emptinesses, and of the playof light on long stretches of parched earththe encounter of the first veiled womanheading a little cavalcade from the south.All the mystery that awaits us looks outthrough the eye-slits-in the grave-clothesmuffling her. Where have they comefrom, where are they going, all these slowwayfarers out of the unknown? Probablyonly from one thatched douar* to another;but interminable distances unrollbehind them, they breathe of Timbuctooand the farthest desert. Just such figuresmust swarm in the Saharan cities, in theThe part of Morocco visited by Mrs. Wharton.and rock, the sameness is part of the enchantment.In such a scene every landmarktakes on an extreme value. Formiles one watches the little white dome ofa saint's grave rising and disappearingwith the undulations of the trail; at lastone is abreast of it, and the solitary tomb,alone with its fig-tree and its broken wellcurb,puts a meaning into the waste.The same importance, but intensified,marks the appearance of every humanfigure. The two white-draped riderspassing single file up the red slope to thatring of tents on the ridge have a mysteriousand inexplicable importance: one followstheir progress with eyes that achewith conjecture. More exciting still isSoudan and Senegal. There is no breakin the links: these wanderers have lookedon at the building of cities that were dustwhen the Romans pushed their outpostsacross the Atlas. .IIIEL-KSAR TO RABATA TOWN at last—its nearness announcedby the multiplied ruts of the trail, the cactushedges, the fig-trees weighed down bydust leaning over ruinous earthen walls.And here are the first houses of theEuropean El-Ksar—neat white Spanish* Village of tents. The village of mud-huts is called anourwal.