k gave
shelter from the blaze and heat of the North African day.

Farther inland the bare, sear stretches of brown plain were studded
with dwarf palm, the vast shadowless plateaux were desolate as the great
desert itself far beyond; and the sun, as it burned on them a moment
in the glory of its last glow, found them naked and grand by the sheer
force of immensity and desolation, but dreary and endless, and broken
into refts and chasms, as though to make fairer by their own barren
solitude the laughing luxuriance of the sea-face of the Sahel.

A moment, and the luster of the light flung its own magic brilliancy
over the Algerine water-line, and then shone full on the heights of El
Biar and Bouzariah, and on the lofty, delicate form of the Italian
pines that here and there, Sicilian-like, threw out their graceful
heads against the amber sun-glow and the deep azure of the heavens. Then
swiftly, suddenly, the sun sank; twilight passed like a gray, gliding
shade, an instant, over earth and sea; and night--the balmy, sultry,
star-studded night of Africa,--fell over the thirsty leafage longing for
its dews, the closed flowers that slumbered at its touch, the seared
and blackened plains to which its coolness could bring no herbage, the
massive hills that seemed to lie so calmly in its rest.

Camped on one of the bare stretches above the Mustapha Road was a circle
of Arab tents; the circle was irregularly kept, and the Krumas were
scattered at will; here a low one of canvas, there one of goatskin; here
a white towering canopy of teleze, there a low striped little nest of
shelter, and loftier than all, the stately beit el shar of the Sheik,
with his standard stuck into the earth in front of it, with its heavy
folds hanging listlessly in the sultry, breathless air.

The encampment stretched far over the level, arid earth, and there was
more than one tent where the shadowing folds of the banner marked the
abode of some noble Djied. Disorder reigned supreme, in all the desert
freedom; horses and mules, goats and camels, tethered, strayed among
the conical houses of hair, browsing off the littered straw or the
tossed-down hay; and caldrons seethed and hissed over wood fires, whose
lurid light was flung on the eagle features and the white haiks of the
wanderers who watched the boiling of their mess, or fed the embers
with dry sticks. Round other fires, having finished the eating of their
couscousson, the Bedouins lay full-length; e