ich might once have formed the bed of some vast stream. Semsar lay
where the waters should have struck the rock beneath as they fell: a more
sheltered village could not be, facing south-east. The cliff above is
still riddled with the remains of an old silver-mine, worked years ago by
the Portuguese: the ladders and scaffolding inside have fallen to pieces,
and after penetrating along dark tunnels on hands and knees for a certain
distance an open shaft intervenes, and further exploration is impossible.

Semsar, nestled into its crevice, takes more or less the local brown; but
among the thatched huts, rising one above the other like an uneven pile
of mud terraces, a few walls were whitewashed, and of course a white
village mosque stood guard over all on the top of a hillock. There is
something a trifle "animal" in these villages, rough clusters of
bee's-comb or ant-heaps or beavers' lodgings as they might be, assuming
exactly the shade of their surroundings, as nests the colour of their
hiding-places, or as the kh[=a]ki-coloured sand-lizard, desert-lark, and
sand-grouse of the great Sahara take on the yellow-ochre tone of that
desert.

A friend belonging to Mr. Bewicke's soldier had ridden out behind us. He
owned a garden at hand, and asked if we would go in and look at it. We
stooped low under a white stone doorway, an imposing structure,
invariably the entrance to every garden: the door generally painted
Reckitt's blue, and kept locked with a key eight inches long, while on
each side of the gateway the cane fence is tumbling to pieces and
offering useful gaps to marauders--a curious inversion of the rule in
Spain, where to this day they bar the window heavily and leave the door
open.

Though to all appearance the owner was a hard-working Moor, the garden at
any rate bore no great signs of expenditure of labour. We found ourselves
in an overgrown wilderness of orange-trees, peaches, pears, figs, plums,
damsons, cherries, white mulberries, quinces, jasmine, all overgrown and
stabbed by the interloping prickly pear--a good fruit, too, in its way,
and a "useful beast" as a hedge.

Half of his oranges were always stolen, the owner said; the remaining
half brought him in from sixty to ninety shillings a year, selling
perhaps at a shilling or two the thousand. He had evidently not the
capital to get the half of what such fruitful soil could give with
Gibraltar at hand for export, nor the means of securing to himself any
mo