ntally but few degrees from the three-year-old
weather-beaten donkey which minced along in front of her, also loaded
with faggots. The woman had strips of rough leather bandaged round her
legs to protect them from thorns. Her feet were bare. Her husband
sauntered last of all, presumably looking after the donkey: he had no
load. Another time the donkey also might be exempt, while the woman was
still burdened; and the man, when asked why, if he would not carry the
load himself, he did not at least put it upon the donkey, would reply,
"Because it is too heavy for the ass."

A little farther on and a magnificent Riffi passed us, walking along at a
smart pace into the city, his face "old oak" colour, framed in a turban
of dark red-brown strings of wool. He wore a chocolate-coloured jellab,
embroidered at the edge with white, and sewn with tufts of red, violet,
yellow, and green-coloured silks: a tall, wiry fellow, with a back like a
ram-rod, a thin face, and keen, defiant eyes. The light glittered on his
long, brass-plated Riffi gun: a red leather pouch full of bullets hung at
his side. He was a great contrast to the labourer who passed us
afterwards, also bound for the city--an old and grizzled monkey-faced
man, with his head tied round with a ragged red cloth gun-case. His
jellab hung in tatters, but he also carried a gun, and by a string a
brace of partridges and a wild duck, which "bag," after some bargaining,
became ours for the sum of one-and-sixpence.

Among the brown jellabs and varied turbans European clothes were forcibly
out of their place: a people like the Moors, childlike, patriarchal,
whose lives embody one of the oldest and perhaps best ideas of a simple
existence, may well hate the sight, on the face of their select country,
of prosaic tailoring and hideous head-gear. The traveller in his boots,
where boots are things unknown, passes the muffled women with their
silent gait, the picturesque ruffians with their swinging stride, and is
unable to help feeling not at home and something of a blot on the
landscape.

The lane we wandered up had been, and was still in places, a watercourse,
and we struggled along the steep chasms gouged out of the soft soil, and
clambered over rocks which had withstood the torrent.

By-and-by a red door intervened on our left, fitted into an imposing
whitewashed arched gateway, with a mounting-block on each side, and the
great brass ring-shaped knocker in the middle of the door w