The consulate was immediately like a disturbed ant-hill, and the sun was still some fathoms above his western bed, when we found ourselves beyond the walls, and fairly plunged into the living desert--for desert it was as soon as the town was shut out. We shortly turned down to the right and threaded our way along the margin, where Africa and the Atlantic meet. The one bore no house, the other no sail--not a vestige of man’s toil on the earth, nor on the ocean a sign of his daring:--they were alone in their immensity. Again striking inward we lost sight of the sea, and under the reigning solitude could fancy ourselves approaching the Zahara. The waste was not, however, dry sand or parched deserts; the land wore a rich vesture, and its tissue was of flowers. The wild growth of the fan-like palmetto, that most useful of comparatively useless plants, predominated. Its services to man were presently made known to me. I had on board a package of saddles and bridles used years ago while travelling in the East. Three sets had been put in requisition without undergoing the requisite repairs and revisions; girths, buckles, straps, gave way one after the other in a manner which in any other country would soon have brought us to a stand still; but on each mischance a man would slip off, make a grasp at a doum branch, and commence plaiting: between the ductility of the leaf and the dexterity of their fingers, girths and bands were miraculously restored, buckles and ties supplied. Around the doum were scattered the narcissus, and the plant of the “gardens of the blessed,” the asphodel. Here we were on the very verge of that sacred west, towards which the living looked where the dead should dwell, within those granitic arms which extend to receive the departed spirit.[246] The fourth plant was the _festouk_. This is honoured by the name of Esculapius: it resembles fennel, but is much longer, the shoots standing eight or ten feet. The gum ammoniac is collected from it in the south. A fly with a horn in the head pierces the trunk, and causes the gum to flow. The stem serves in Spain and Morocco as a razor strop. Great as is our proficiency in cutlery, we cannot put an edge on a razor like the Moors, or shave as they do. They lay the instrument to the very root and make, so to speak, an excision of its growth. Barbers get their name, no doubt, from Breber; that was the early mode of supplying names to professions. The shaving of the head was unknown to the Greeks, Romans or Egyptians, and the hair was always left untouched till the age of manhood, when it was cut short and consecrated. The tombs of Lycia exhibit to us boys with shaved heads and a little tuft, as at present worn by the Mussulmans. This practice of the “Barbarians” of Asia Minor may well have suggested the word, though we do not apply it as it was originally applied, in a geographical sense. The usages of Morocco are so far Mussulman only as the Mussulmans have adopted them.