Away above us the mountains towered—here clothed to their summits with pine, arbutus, gum cistus, and evergreen oak; there rearing precipice upon precipice of bare forbidding rock to where the eternal snows formed a line of white against the sky. Below us, for our road ascended high up the mountain-side, lay the valley, clothed in verdure, through the centre of which, now in a wide stone-strewn bed, now dashing between high walls of rock, flowed the river, the roar of which was the only sound that broke the silence. Here and there we looked down on to the flat roofs of the Berber villages, where a small patch of land would be reclaimed, and walnut and other trees planted, through the branches of which peeps of narrow terraces, green with vegetables, appeared. Strange beautiful shapes the mountains take, at places rolling in sweeping curves, at others broken into rock projections and precipices, but everywhere presenting some point of grandeur and beauty. At length towards sunset Zarkten came into sight, ahead and far below us, and we hurried on, hoping to reach the Sheikh’s house before dark, and thus obtain provisions for the night and our next day’s journey; but when, in fast falling twilight, we reached the rocky bed of the river, we found all hope of fording it to be impossible, and reluctantly retraced our steps to a few stone hovels we had passed a quarter of a mile back, near which we found space to pitch our tent. The cold was extreme, and it was only by untiring efforts that we were able to persuade the inhabitants to sell us a fowl, which, of its kind the very poorest, was no meal for eight people. Bread [Illustration: _A View from above Zarkten._] and the native _kuskus_ were neither to be obtained, and a few dried figs was all that our stock consisted of. At daylight we descended once more by a precipitous path, and, after a weary hour and a half of labour, succeeded in getting our animals and our baggage across the river. So tired were the poor mules and donkeys with their struggle of perhaps 100 yards against the swift current, that we were obliged to call an hour’s rest on the farther bank, where we lay down under the shade of the grove of trees that surround the residence of the Sheikh.