; a green parrot nodded
to us from a bower of pink almond blossom.

We wandered round the sleepy, silent courtyard, and in and out the
chequered greenery, hot with windless, sun-filled air, back through the
black-and-white courts, until at last the great outside door shut upon
Fatima, her tea party, and the eternal mysticism of the East:--we were
without the gates of Paradise, and in an atmosphere of rude realism once
more.

Soon after that afternoon of many calls with Miss Banks, a day up in the
Anjera Hills, to the north of Tetuan, gave some idea of the strip of
country which lay between us, and the sea, and Gibraltar. This country
possessed the fascination of being little known. No one troubled to go up
there, except its own wild inhabitants. Our own Consul had never been.
The missionaries had not climbed so high, nor so far, this side the
river.

Now the Tetuan _sok_ (market) is greatly dependent upon the country
people belonging to the Beni Salam tribe, who live up in the Anjeras; and
from the flat white roof of our garden-house we had watched through a
pair of glasses on market mornings, strings of women, winding by a
precipitous path down the hillside, which is abrupt and mountainous,
themselves dropping as it were from an upper world. They scrambled slowly
down, one after the other, descending many hundreds upon hundreds of
feet; then filed slantwise over the slopes, right into the rocky
Mussulman cemetery, across that, and thence into the city by the
Bab-el-M`kabar.

The relations of these tribesmen between themselves and the city are more
or less friendly, and it is comparatively safe to wander about the
mountains as long as the "enemy," as the Moors call the sun, has not set.
We were most anxious to visit the country whence these market-goers came,
appearing first upon the crest-line, then against the rough hillside,
like a string of industrious white ants crawling down the wall of a
house; therefore we engaged a youth with a downy beard and hairy legs and
the big grey donkey--the most active of his race--and set off one morning
at half-past nine, prepared to climb into a Top World, like Jack of the
Beanstalk, by means of a path which was less smooth "going" than his
supernatural ladder.

There was a strong north-west wind, and it was hardly an occasion for
"aloft"; but there was no haze; the clouds were scudding away to South
Australia; it was a day for a view.

Taking the broken road towards the cit