Everywhere the salt crystals sparkled with the violence
of diamonds. Everywhere there was a strength of colour that hurled
itself to the gaze, unabashed and almost savage, the colour of summer
that never ceases, of heat that seldom dies, in a land where there is no
autumn and seldom a flitting cold.
Down on the road near the village there were people; old men playing
the "lady's game" with stones set in squares of sand, women peeping from
flat roofs and doorways, children driving goats. A man, like a fair and
beautiful Christ, with long hair and a curling beard, beat on the ground
with a staff and howled some tuneless notes. He was dressed in red and
green. No one heeded him. A distant sound of the beating of drums rose
in the air, mingled with piercing cries uttered by a nasal voice. And
as if below it, like the orchestral accompaniment of a dramatic
solo, hummed many blending noises; faint calls of labourers in the
palm-gardens and of women at the wells; chatter of children in dusky
courts sheltered with reeds and pale-stemmed grasses; dim pipings of
homeward-coming shepherds drowned, with their pattering charges, in the
golden vapours of the west; soft twitterings of birds beyond brown walls
in green seclusions; dull barking of guard dogs; mutter of camel drivers
to their velvet-footed beasts.
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