n the open hillside, upon a great bare space worn brown by
cycles of Tuesday markets, the prevailing colour brown and white,
hundreds of mules, hundreds of Arabs, the sight was one not to be
forgotten.

We dismounted, and followed Omar into the thick of the fray, surrounded
at once by a staring and interested crowd. It was an extraordinary scene.
Streets were formed by rows upon rows of little mud cubicles, thatched
over, inside which, on a mud shelf, the vendor sat, with his goods spread
out for sale round him. Slippers were being mended; blacksmith's work was
being done; cottons and stuffs were selling, sugar, groceries of all
sorts, brand-new slippers and new clothes, vegetables and meat. Meat was
the centre of the whirlpool, and round the carcases and shapeless joints
the largest crowd: it hung on upright stakes and branches stuck in the
ground, and the effect was that of a nightmare wood, in which the weird
trees were bearing gory and dreadful fruit. It was all life and stir,
that bare hillside; and by half-past one o'clock the whole thing had
melted away, and there was no sign of a human being moving.

Mulai Omar was well known in Sok-el-Tleta, his wife's relatives living
there: because he was a saint his clothes and slippers were kissed by
every one who met us as we rode along to our camp beyond the Tuesday
Market. We passed women and children digging for ayerna root: the corn
not being yet ripe, they were short of food. The root of this weed,
though eatable, is most unwholesome, and unless carefully prepared,
people grow thinner and more yellow upon it daily.

But all our interest in a few moments was focussed upon a most imposing
ruin, a real Windsor Castle of a rudimentary type, which commanded a
hilltop on a table-land on the right, great walls rearing themselves up
to the sky, towers defending every corner, a turreted gate-house the
entrance, and the whole loop-holed, grim-looking enough. Obviously the
kaid who built such a kasbah was a great man: his garden, a beautiful
overgrown wilderness, gone like his castle to rack and ruin, lay below at
Sok-el-Tleta, wisely situated, for vegetation would have been badly
exposed upon the hilltop.

About twenty-seven years ago the kaid who built the kasbah--chiefly by
forced labour on the part of all the country people for miles round,
though skilled workmen came from Mogador and were paid--was attacked by
the Arab tribes from end to end of his province of Shedma, an