lancholy. The gay bazaars, the gaily-painted houses, the flowers and
flute-playing of North Africa, are found in her Mediterranean ports, in
contact with European influences. The farther west she extends, the more
she becomes self-contained, sombre, uninfluenced, a gloomy fanatic with
her back to the walls of the Atlantic and the Atlas. Color and laughter
lie mostly along the trade-routes, where the peoples of the world come
and go in curiosity and rivalry. This ashen crowd swarming gloomily
through the dark tunnels represents the real Moghreb that is close to
the wild tribes of the "hinterland" and the grim feudal fortresses of
the Atlas. How close, one has only to go out to Sefrou on a market-day
to see.

Sefrou is a military outpost in an oasis under the Atlas, about forty
miles south of Fez. To most people the word "oasis" evokes palms and
sand; but though Morocco possesses many oases it has no pure sand and
few palms. I remember it as a considerable event when I discovered one
from my lofty window at Bou-Jeloud.

The _bled_ is made of very different stuff from the sand-ocean of the
Sahara. The light plays few tricks with it. Its monotony is wearisome
rather than impressive, and the fact that it is seldom without some form
of dwarfish vegetation makes the transition less startling when the
alluvial green is finally reached. One had always half expected it, and
it does not spring at a djinn's wave out of sterile gold.

But the fact brings its own compensations. Moroccan oases differ one
from another far more than those of South Algeria and Tunisia. Some have
no palms, others but a few, others are real palm-oases, though even in
the south (at least on the hither side of the great Atlas) none spreads
out a dense uniform roofing of metal-blue fronds like the date-oases of
Biskra or Tozeur. As for Sefrou, which Foucauld called the most
beautiful oasis of Morocco, it is simply an extremely fertile valley
with vineyards and orchards stretching up to a fine background of
mountains. But the fact that it lies just below the Atlas makes it an
important market-place and centre of caravans.

Though so near Fez it is still almost on the disputed border between the
loyal and the "unsubmissive" tribes, those that are _Blad-Makhzen_ (of
the Sultan's government) and those that are against it. Until recently,
therefore, it has been inaccessible to visitors, and even now a strongly
fortified French post dominates the height above th