e silence, at first, is like that of the surrounding
desert. It is a town in which the half-light of the moon, amongst so
much vague whiteness, is diffused in such a way that it seems to come
from all sides at once and things cast no shadows which might give them
definiteness; a town where the soil is so yielding that our progress
is weakened and retarded, as in dreams. It seems unreal; and, in
penetrating farther into it, a sense of fear comes over you that can
neither be dismissed nor defined.

For assuredly this is no ordinary town. . . . And yet the houses,
with their windows barred like those of a harem, are in no way
singular--except that they are shut and silent. It is all this
whiteness, perhaps, which freezes us. And then, too, the silence is
not, in fact, like that of the desert, which did at least seem natural,
inasmuch as there was nothing there; here, on the contrary, there is
a sense of innumerable presences, which shrink away as you pass but
nevertheless continue to watch attentively. . . . We pass mosques in
total darkness and they too are silent and white, with a slight bluish
tint cast on them by the moon. And sometimes, between the houses, there
are little enclosed spaces, like narrow gardens, but which can have no
possible verdure. And in these gardens numbers of little obelisks rise
from the sand--white obelisks, it is needless to say, for to-night
we are in the kingdom of absolute whiteness. What can they be, these
strange little gardens? . . . And the sand, meanwhile, which covers the
streets with its thick coatings, continues to deaden the sound of our
progress, out of compliment no doubt to all these watchful things that
are so silent around us.

At the crossings and in the little squares the obelisks become more
numerous, erected always at either end of a slab of stone that is about
the length of a man. Their little motionless groups, posted as if on the
watch, seem so little real in their vague whiteness that we feel tempted
to verify them by touching, and, verily, we should not be astonished if
our hand passed through them as through a ghost. Farther on there is a
wide expanse without any houses at all, where these ubiquitous little
obelisks abound in the sand like ears of corn in a field. There is
now no further room for illusion. We are in a cemetery, and have been
passing in the midst of houses of the dead, and mosques of the dead, in
a town of the dead.

Once emerged from this cemetery