themselves down a hole. As for rats, they seemed to be everywhere,
and at home everywhere, with the adders and with the rabbits; any
hole was good enough for the rat. The lizards were larger and uglier
than the English variety, and Owen never could bring himself to look
upon them with anything but disgust--their blunt head, the viscous
jaws exuding some sort of scum; and he left them to continue their
eternal siesta in the warm sand.

That evening, after passing through a succession of hills and narrow
valleys, the caravan entered the southern plain, an immense
perspective of twenty or thirty miles; and Owen reined up his horse
and sat at gaze, watching the dim greenness of the alfa-grass
striped with long rays of pale light and grey shadows. But the
extent of the plain could not be properly measured, for the sky was
darkening above the horizon.

"The rainy season is at hand," Owen said; and he watched the clouds
gathering rapidly into storm in the middle of the sky. Now and
again, when the clouds divided, a glimpse was gotten of a range of
mountains, seven crests--"seven heads," the dragoman called them,
and he told Owen the name in Arabic. These mountains were reached
the following day, and, after passing through numberless defiles,
the caravan debouched on a plain covered with stones, bright as if
they had been polished by hand--a naked country torn by the sun, in
which nothing grew, not even a thistle. In the distance were hills
whose outline zigzagged, now into points like a saw, and now into
long sweeping curves like a scythe; and these hills were full of
narrow valleys, bare as threshing-floors. The heat hung in these
valleys, and Owen rode through them, choking, for the space of a long
windless day, in which nothing was heard except the sound of the
horses' hooves and the caw of a crow flying through the vague
immensity.

But the ugliness of these valleys was exceeded by the ugliness of the
marsh at whose edge they encamped next day--a black, evil-smelling
marsh full of reeds and nothing more. The question arose whether
potable water would be found, and they all went out, Owen included,
to search for a spring.

After searching for some time one was found in possession of a number
of grey vultures and enormous crows, ranged in a line along the
edges, and in the distance these seemed like men stooping in a hurry
to drink. It was necessary to fire a gun to disperse these sinister
pilgrims. But in the Sahara