I sat at an island crossroads of the western Sahara, where the pale, blurred sand-courses, like the wakes of ships, come up the bald skin of the globe from the green mysteries that lie months away on the other side of the south. “Abd!” I called, “where does the caravan come from, east or west?” Abd was gone. On the tiles I heard the fall of a Christian boot. Borak, the Englishman, came toward me in the shadows. “I wonder you’re not out,” he said. “The caravan comes from the south.” “Not----!” “Rather! This is a real one--like the old days again. Right away up from under. You’d better have a look at the beggars; you’re romantic, you know. Might not have another chance in a year.” I put on my coat and went with him. Borak has been too long in Africa, one part and another. He has forgotten that it is the Dark Continent. As we walked he went on in his habitual vein of banter. “It’s a tidy lot of heroes for you. You may imagine. Seven ‘moonlights’ on the trek, and I lay a pound sterling not a man in the crowd has washed in the thirty weeks.” “Thirty weeks!” I couldn’t help echoing it. “Lord!” “There ought to be a story there, eh? As a matter of fact there isn’t. I insist again that there’s more story, more poetry and romance in the life of a Whitechapel coster than you’ll hear in a year listening to these people. They lack imagination. They want the mental whip of civilization; that’s it in a nutshell.” I felt like saying “Bosh!” Borak is too dogmatic. We were passing into the thick of the “low town,” and on our right loomed the ugly oblong of the douane, the French custom-house that stands at the converging of the deep-Sahara routes. Borak looked at it and chuckled. “Old Arnauld” (the customs official) “is in a fair pother. There’s a frighful mixture in the trek, blacks and browns from a dozen different basins down below, and you may imagine there’s a lack of passports. So that’s Arnauld’s job; to divine. Or rather it’s Bou Dik’s job, for the orderly has all the work. When I passed the market coming to you Bou Dik was tackling an old chap who claims to be Senegal but looks away east of that, a pot-bellied old swine, black as a chimney-pot, solemn as an archbishop, and blind as a bat. I gather all he wants is to be let pass quietly on his way to Holy Mekka, where he hopes to die. Bou Dik, though, is full of wild and horrid notions. He has crossed the trail lately of a dervish man who has the word that Mouley Saa[21] is now booked to descend in the guise of a blackamoor, and naturally, having a fat berth with the Infidel, Bou Dik isn’t going to let the Deliverer into _his_ department--not if he can help it. So just now Bou Dik is death and leprosy on niggers. I wish you could have heard the row.”