"I know I must have eaten a basketful," said Rashid. "Oh, there goes my veil," cried Fatimah, who had thoughtlessly popped her head out of the litter. "Thou wilt never see it again," said her mother. Almost immediately it had been lost to view as it went sailing through the air. "Never mind, thou shalt buy the prettiest that can be found in the Bazaar when we get to the city," said her father, consolingly. The little caravan struggled against the wind all the rest of the day; and that night there was no sleeping in a tent for anybody. The next day, however, things went better. "Oh! I see over there a beautiful lake of blue water and palm-trees beside it," cried Fatimah. "Look, mother," she said, waking her mother from a doze and pointing across the sandy plain. "Indeed it looks as though there were water and trees ahead," said her mother; but Al-Abukar answered: "Nay, it is but a _mirage_." "But we can see the ripple of the water; it must be real," persisted Fatimah. "Nay," said the camel man, and shielding his eyes with his hand, he peered at the strange sight. "The camels say nothing," he continued, "and they are wise and can always tell when water is near. If it were real water they would begin to whine and groan." Sure enough, as they went toward the _mirage_, it faded away altogether, the lake, trees, and all. "But it did look real, did it not, father?" said Fatimah. "Ah, so has thought many a poor traveller to his undoing, when he was lost in the desert and was dying of thirst," answered her father. "He thinks he sees cool water and green trees ahead of him, and hurries along to reach them, only to find that the mocking _mirage_ has faded away and that there is nothing there but the hot sand of the desert." A _mirage_ really is nothing more than a sort of reflection of some very distant object projected into the sky through the hot, dry air of the desert. Sometimes the desert traveller sees a phantom city in the clouds, and sometimes a ship, as if it were floating on the sandy waves of the desert instead of on the ocean; but it is all a delusion and not real. From now on, the little Bedouins began to remark that they were leaving the desert behind them. They began to pass some houses, and then small villages of mud huts with roofs of palm-leaves. Around these villages were little fields divided off by low ridges of earth. There were orchards of fruit-trees, and Hamid and Rashid rode up to one of these and bought some pomegranates. "Did ever anything taste nicer?" said Fatimah. And they all agreed with her as they ate the sweet, pink pomegranate seeds. Soon they were riding through great groves of date-palms, and shortly caught a glimpse of the city shining white through the trees still some distance away. "Oh, Hamid! I believe that is my father yonder," cried Rashid, as he caught sight of several horsemen riding toward them.