rally kindled in that Back of the
Beyond. There is no need for the traveller to penetrate so far as either
the Sahara or the Sus. Long before he reaches them, and in order to do
so, he must cross the Atlas Mountains by one of the wild passes, and the
great chain of the Atlas is still unsurveyed and practically unknown. Sir
Joseph Hooker and Dr. Ball explored a part of its valleys many years ago:
no one since then has made a satisfactory attempt to learn details. The
chain is supposed to be about thirteen thousand feet high, and it is
about twenty miles from Morocco City; but the character of the lawless
chiefs and tribesmen who inhabit it, so far prevents intrusion and
exploration.

In a few days we were to see it--the mighty, solitary wall, on which the
ancients believed the world to rest, described by Pliny, rising abruptly
out of the plains, snowclad, one of the world's finest sights: the Atlas
had largely brought us to Southern Morocco.

CHAPTER X

ON THE MARCH ONCE MORE--BUYING MULES--A BAD ROAD--FIRST
CAMP--ARGAN-TREES--COOS-COOSOO--A TERRIBLE NIGHT--DOCTORING THE
KHAYLIFA--ROUGHING IT UNDER CANVAS.

CHAPTER X

And all this time you (at home) are drinking champagne (well,
most of it, anyway), and sleeping in soft beds with delicious
white sheets, and smoking Turkish cigarettes, and wearing clean
clothes, with nice stiff collars and shirt-cuffs, and having
great warm baths in marble bath-rooms and sweet-smelling soap . . .
and sitting side by side at table, first a man and then a
woman--the same old arrangement, I suppose--knives to the right
and forks to the left, as usual.

THE hot desert wind in Mogador showed no signs of changing: there was no
enlivening sun, and the sad white seaport could only charm in a morbid
manner: to be out under the skies, in the open, away from the city and
sealed houses and the _eyes_, was a thing to be sought after, and that
quickly. Southern Morocco is like the East in that it is all eyes. The
watchful East--it may be lazy, but nothing escapes its eyes. They gleam
between the folds of the veil; they look from out of a smooth face, mild
and yet as little to be read as the deep sea. And who knows what lies at
the bottom of those quiet pools?

There need be no waste of time in Morocco, even as there is no
convention: having decided to start--_start_. The 31st of March saw us
away, leaving Mogador with the intention of march