Indeed, of all the men I came across in this country, only two were of the purely Oriental kind the books make out to be so common. One was a fierce Moor of gigantic stature and incredible girth. He was dressed in bright green, and drank the cordial called _crême de menthe_ in a little bower. The other was a poor Arab and old, who sold fruits upon a stall in Setif. In his face there was a deep contempt of Christendom. [Sidenote: The Little Old Semite] The snow fell all around him swiftly, mixed with sleet and sharp needles of cold rain. It was evening and the people were passing down the street hurriedly to find their homes: so passed I, when I saw him standing like a little stunted ghost in the rain. He knew me at once for some one to whom Africa was strange, and therefore might have hoped to make me stop even upon such a night to buy of him. Yet he did not say a word, but only looked at me as much as to say: “Fool! will you buy?” And I looked back at him as I passed, and put my answer into my eyes as much as to say: “No! Barbarian, I will not buy.” In this way we met and parted, and we shall never see each other again till that Great Day.... [Illustration] * * * * * Remembering him and this last one who had given me a ride, I went on through the night towards Timgad. It was a very lonely road. [Sidenote: The Lonely Night March] Loneliness, when it is absolute, is very difficult to depict, for it is a negation and lacks quality, and therefore words fail it. But one may express the loneliness of that valley best by saying that it felt, not as though men had deserted it, but as though men had perpetually tried to return to it and, as perpetually, had despaired and left the sullen earth. The impression was false. The Romans had once thoroughly possessed and tilled this land: the scrub had once been forests, the shifting soil ordered and bounded fields; but the Mohammedan sterility had sunk in so deeply that one could not believe that our people had ever been here. Even the sharp and recent memory of those ruins of Lamboesis faded in the stillness. Europe came back into my mind. The full rivers and the fields which are to us a natural landscape are but a made garden and are due to continuous tradition, and I wondered whether, if that tradition were finally lost, our sons would come to see, in England as I saw here in the night in Africa, vague hills without trees and drifts of mould and sand through which the rain-bursts would dig deep channels at random.