In Morocco

we set out from Rabat

ubi

b to peach-colour in the eastern glow. Dawn is the romantic hour in Africa. Dirt and dilapidation disappear under a pearly haze, and a breeze from the sea blows away the memory of fetid markets and sordid heaps of

a we struck the trail, branching off eastward to a European village on the light railway between Rabat and Fez, and beyond the railway-sheds and

plateau-and-hill forma

e

less sand bound together by a loose desert growth. Only an abandoned well-curb here and there cast its blue shadow on the yellow bled, or a saint's tomb hung like a bubble between sky and sand. The light had the preternatur

grims to and from the sacred city of Moulay Idriss, the founder of the Idrissite dynasty, whose tomb is in the Zerhoun, the mountain ridge above Volubilis. To untrained eyes it wa

ed either; nor was Captain de M., the

en the General goes to Meknez he is always followed by a number

as any one else, apparently. It is curious how quickly the bled empties itself to the horizon if one happens to have an accident in it! B

that somebody might turn up, a

ek-bones, and the exceedingly short upper lip which gives such charm to the smile of the young nomad women. Her dress was the usual faded cotton shift, h

ar off to be reached on foot, and there were probably no mules there to spare. Nearer at hand there was no sign

army with banners. We stared at it unbelievingly. The mirage, of course! We were too sophisticated to

image from the mountains. They're going to Salé to pra

the beauty of this long train winding toward us under parti-colored banners. There was something celestial, almost diaphanous, in t

a stately Ca?d rode alone at the end of the line on a horse

ordered to harness themselves to the motor and haul it back to th

to the darkest passions. Even in this land of contrasts the transition from pious serenity to rapacious rage can seldom have been more rapid. The devotees of the marabout fought, screamed, tore their garments and rolled over each other with

a reddish-yellow course channelled between perpendicular banks of red earth, and marked by a thin line of verdure that widened to fruit-gardens wherever a village had sprung up. We traversed several

nguish them from the tent villa

heir womenkind were washing the variegated family rags. They were handsome blue-bronze creatures, bare to the waist, with tight black astrakhan curls and firmly sculptured legs and a

Soudanese boys whom the founder of Meknez, the terrible Sultan Moulay-Isma?l, used to carry off from beyond the Atlas and bring up in his military camps to form the nucleus of the Black Guard which def

au. Far off a fringe of vegetation showed promise of shade and water, and at last, against a pale mass of olive-trees, we

gh plateau backed by the mountains of the Zerhoun. Below the plateau, the land drops down precipitately to a narrow river-valley green with orchards and gardens, and

stem, an order, a social conception that still run through all our modern ways, the other, the untouched Mos

century it was very nearly destroyed by Moulay-Isma?l, the Sultan of the Black Guard, who carried off its monuments piece-meal

en columns and architraves which strew the path of Rome across the world. But its site is magnificent; and as the excavation of the ruins was interrupted by the war it

isitors. The French Fine Arts have built a charming house with gardens and pergolas for the custodian of the ruins, and have found in M. Chatelain an archaeologist