The caravan has halted. The camels stand docile, pathetic, shifting their great loads; for it hurts the soft pads of their feet to stand laden, it is easier to walk. The men scatter and squat, each by himself, but each turned from the setting sun toward Mecca. The water of the desert is the sand; and with the sand the men make their ablutions. They place their sandals beside them; all that is unclean in the folds of the burnouse they lay aside. Their mouths mutter fast; their hands perform intricate gestures. To swerve from the immemorial forms, even by a finger twitch, is to be in heresy and to be damned. Their brows touch the sand.... ... For man is earth. The brow is his highest and his noblest part. Let his brow therefore, five times with each day, be lowered to earth. This is ISLAM.... The camels fall into the rhythmic swing which will not swerve while the moon swings over the sand and the sand swings under the night, and the silent men round the ocean of the desert. * * * * * From the town, as from a smoldering fire, smoke. There are no chimneys; Allah takes care of the smoke. After the bright street, the house is a cavern. The eyes, refocused to the dark, observe a long, high chamber, its walls black with ages of grime, its ceiling stanchioned by wooden posts that shine like ebony. There is no table, there is no chair, there is no bed. Dry grass is piled in corners, and serves for sleeping. Four families live in this lower half of the house. Four women squat in its several quarters; about them nurslings, before them a little brasier to which the children feed chips of wood, shreds of rush. The women cut turnips, bake wheat for the _couss-couss_. There is a stair that is scarce a stair: ages of feet have worn it to an incline. The upper story has more light; there is a hole in the center of the ceiling which leads to the roof. If it rains, the water falls through the heart of the house; but light comes in, smoke rises out. Here, too, there is no furniture. A chicken pecks in the crumbled floor; an old woman weaves at a loom. Her hands know an immemorial process of weaving, like the mouth of her husband praying. The roof is the domain of the women. The street is for the men and all that the street leads to. But the housetop is the street and the playground of women. On sunny afternoons of the cool season, here is their escape from the drudge and dark of their homes. This house is high among the houses whose flat roofs move away in waving whiteness. A minaret thrusts up ... there is a gap, a square ... then the packed counterpoint of roof and turning wall and wall again to the green dense at last of palms, to the gorge of the Oued, to the sand-stretch southward where the sun lies in a mist as in a sea of opal.