The white roofs are gay with the color of women. Veils are put aside. Babes suck at ruddy breasts. Red shawls and red babouches touch the color of laughter. Women are carefree. Even the onus of prayer that sits on Islam is not for them. Let them but bear children and hold the good will of their men.[1] One woman, the rich blood clear beneath the bronze of her cheek, presses to her bosom a child who will soon die. Children come and often children go. The way of the child, to manhood or the grave, is in the hand of Allah. A girl, candid and great-eyed with a flinty note upon her luscious flesh, like steel on velvet, holds to her lovely breast which motherhood has not distorted from its apple-rondure, a babe whose eyes are already shut with pus. She will have a blind son--perhaps a muedzin, perhaps a poet: certainly a Seer. * * * * * When the sun is good, many women follow up the Oued, with their brood, for a day’s washing. The river is gracious within its precipitous banks. The winter sun, sweet like our sun of June, has yet the reverberant Saharan weight. It strikes the top of the hills, it rolls down over the clay-maze; it strikes the level sand, down once more it bounds into the gorge, over drenched bushes, over hanging rock and fills the Oued. Here, knee-deep, with their thin gowns lashed to the thigh and the rondures of their bodies speaking, stand women: and the sun comes to them. Other women lay the washed clothes on rocks and with bare feet dance on them, mangling and rinsing in song. The sun and the vigil of the hills, and the town distant, release the spirit of this flesh. Allah is far away, and the pure violence of Mohammed. Women are pagans again, and the Oued has gods. Children peal. Girls let fall their tunics and their breasts dance with their feet. Old women have eyes hot with memories, as they watch the crisp bodies of their daughters. But beyond the Oued, beyond its walled mouth where the water disappears in sand, and beyond the date-palms, lies another town. It is more drear than its graveyard. So far, doubtless, in old days the river ran ere it had clotted and shortened its way with silt. The town is almost a ruin. A few children play, but the houses are silent. No windows break the seared patched blocks of clay. The graveyard is higher, and it has a wall. Here one can sit and watch the ruined town and the maze of gardens by the Oued and the palms, and the present town and the desert sea. The muedzin has thrust his call to sunset prayer. The muedzin is gone. The sun is gone. The mountains are sapphires in a cornelian heaven. The Sahara moves in copper from the town: grows argent: its dunes are swathed in mist like women’s bodies in irradiant shawls. The desert fades into a fume of opal under a bronze horizon.