Round
about the city, on every side, great sand-hills rose like ramparts
erected by Nature to guard it from the assaults of enemies. These hills
were black with the tents of desert tribes, which, from far off, looked
like multitudes of flies that had settled on the sands. The palms of the
oasis, which stretched northwards from the city, could not be seen from
the south till the city was reached, and in late spring this region was
a strange and barbarous pageant of blue and white and gold; crude in
its intensity, fierce in its crudity, almost terrible in its blazing
splendour that was like the Splendour about the portals of the sun.
Domini and Androvsky rode towards Amara at a foot's pace, looking
towards its distant towers. A quivering silence lay around them,
yet already they seemed to hear the cries of the voices of a great
multitude, to be aware of the movement of thronging crowds of men. This
was the first Sahara city they had drawn near to, and their minds were
full of memories of the stories of Batouch, told to them by the camp
fire at night in the uninhabited places which, till now, had been their
home: stories of the wealthy date merchants who trafficked here and
dwelt in Oriental palaces, poor in aspect as seen from the dark and
narrow streets, or zgags, in which they were situated, but within full
of the splendours of Eastern luxury; of the Jew moneylenders who lived
apart in their own quarter, rapacious as wolves, hoarding their
gains, and practising the rites of their ancient and--according to the
Arabs--detestable religion; of the marabouts, or sacred men, revered
by the Mohammedans, who rode on white horses through the public ways,
followed by adoring fanatics who sought to touch their garments and
amulets, and demanded importunately miraculous blessings at their
hands--the hedgehog's foot to protect their women in the peril of
childbirth; the scroll, covered with verses of the Koran and enclosed
in a sheaf of leather, that banishes ill dreams at night and stays the
uncertain feet of the sleep-walker; the camel's skull that brings fruit
to the palm trees; the red coral that stops the flow of blood from a
knife-wound--of the dancing-girls glittering in an armour of golden
pieces, their heads tied with purple and red and yellow handkerchiefs
of silk, crowned with great bars of solid gold and tufted with ostrich
feathers; of the dwarfs and jugglers who by night perform in the
marketplace, contending for custom with the sorceresses who tell the
fates from shells gathered by mirage seas; with the snake-charmers--who
are immune from the poison of serpents and the acrobats who come from
far-off Persia and Arabia to spread their carpets in the shadow of the
Agha's dwelling and delight the eyes of negro and Kabyle, of Soudanese
and Touareg with their feats of strength; of the haschish smokers who,
assembled by night in an underground house whose ceiling and walls were
black as ebony, gave themselves up to day-dreams of shifting glory, in
which the things of earth and the joys and passions of men reappeared,
but transformed by the magic influence of the drug, made monstrous or
fairylike, intensified or turned to voluptuous languors, through which
the Ouled Nail floated like a syren, promising ecstasies unknown even in
Baghdad, where the pale Circassian lifts her lustrous eyes, in which the
palms were heavy with dates of solid gold, and the streams were gliding
silver.
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