Then I turned and went up into Atlas, and as I went I was in two minds, but at last tradition conquered and I was safe in my own steadfast instincts, settling back as settles back with shorter and shorter oscillations some balanced rock which violence has disturbed. The vast shoulder of Aurès seemed worthy indeed of awe, but not of terror. I made a companion of the snow, and I was glad to remember how many living things moved under the forest trees. So I continued for three days seeing many things, and drawing them till I came to the south side where the streams go down to be lost at last in the sand, and till I saw before me the sandstone ridge red and bare, and from its summit looked out upon a changing landscape, which dried and flattened and became the true desert where miles and miles away a line quite hard and level marked the extreme horizon. On this summit I lay in the shelter of a rock (for it was bitterly cold and a violent wind blew off the snows of Aurès) and looked a long time southward upon the country which is the prison-wall of our race. [Sidenote: The Sight of the Desert] The man near Timgad had said truly that the end of the Empire, the division and the boundary, was abrupt. A precipice falls sharply right against the midday sun; it is built up of those red rocks whose colour adds so much to the evil silence of the Sahara, and the ridge-top of this precipice is here a sharp dividing-line between living and desert land. Africa the province, the Maghreb full of towns and men, ends in a coast, as it were, against this blinding ocean of sand. You look down from its cliffs over a vast space much more inhuman than the sea. Behind the traveller stretches all the tableland he has traversed, bare indeed and strange to a northerner, but very habitable and sown with large cities, living and dead. There are behind him trees, many animals and rain: all the diversity of a true climate and a long-cultivated soil. Before him are sharp reefs of stone, unweathered, without moss, and with harsh unrounded corners split by the furnace-days and the dreadful frosts of the desert. The rocks emphasise the wild desert as reefs do the wild of the sea: they rise out of sand that blows and shifts under the wind. [Sidenote: The View of the Desert] On this day, as I took my first long look at the Sahara, Aurès and the plateau beyond were all piled up with dark clouds, and one could see showers sweeping like shadowy curtains over the distant forests to the northward; but southward over the desert there was a sky like a cup of blue steel, and a dazzling sunlight that made more desperate the desperate iciness of the gale. When I could tolerate the cold no longer I began to pick my way carefully downward. [Sidenote: The Oasis]