d and watched it go bumping away over the rough, desert road,
pieces of which had been gnawed off by a late flood, as a cake is bitten
round the edge by a greedy child.

They had had enough of motor-cars for that day, up there on the hill!
The Caid was glad when the sound died. The machine was no more suited to
his country, he thought, than were the men of Europe who tore about the
world in it, trying to interfere in other people's business.

"El hamdou-lillah! God be praised!" he whispered, as the yellow
automobile vanished from sight and Maieddine came out from the cluster
of black tents in the yellow sand.

XXVI

Next day, Lella M'Barka was well enough to begin the march again. They
started, in the same curtained carriage, at that moment before dawn
while it is still dark, and a thin white cloth seems spread over the
dead face of night. Then day came trembling along the horizon, and the
shadows of horses and carriage grew long and grotesquely deformed. It
was the time, M'Barka said, when Chitan the devil, and the evil Djenoun
that possess people's minds and drive them insane, were most powerful;
and she would hardly listen when Victoria answered that she did not
believe in Djenoun.

In a long day, they came to Bou-Saada, reaching the hidden oasis after
nightfall, and staying in the house of the Caid with whom Stephen and
Nevill had talked of Ben Halim. Lella M'Barka was related to the Caid's
wife, and was so happy in meeting a cousin after years of separation,
that the fever in her blood was cooled; and in the morning she was able
to go on.

Then came two days of driving to Djelfa, at first in a country strange
enough to be Djinn-haunted, a country of gloomy mountains, and deep
water-courses like badly healed wounds; passing through dry river-beds,
and over broken roads with here and there a bordj where men brought
water to the mules, in skins held together with ropes of straw. At last,
after a night, not too comfortable, spent in a dismal bordj, they came
to a wilderness which any fairytale-teller would have called the end of
the world. The road had dwindled to a track across gloomy desert, all
the more desolate, somehow, because of the dry asparto grass growing
thinly among stones. Nothing seemed to live or move in this world,
except a lizard that whisked its grey-green length across the road, a
long-legged bird which hopped gloomily out of the way, or a few ragged
black and white sheep with nobody t