The mountains raise their convolutions in a great struggle, ere they break and die under these southern sands. The heights grow steep. Water falls through rock, pours through curtains of brush that hang upon the gorges. There is verdure: cataracts of stone with silver veins of water, flats of sand where the palms rise seeking the sun above a precipitous gulch, water mills hid in orange-groves, terraced houses with many roofs and every roof a place for looms, for women. The water broadens, is caught into a hundred irrigating ditches. The date-palms thicken and camp like an army; the town huddles with its white walls windowless. The morning sun comes late to the Oasis, for it must rise above the hills. But dawn dwells already on the desert. It is a subtle radiance of decaying night. Infinitesimal browns and blacks fleck the dim waste: these are the camps of nomads who use the Oasis as a trading center. Their tents are of undyed camel wool, strung low so that they look like camels crouching. The great slow beasts are at anchor by the tent. Dry grass is piled for them; they turn their delicate heads on the arched neck that fronts the body like the prow of a ship. Camel grass burns within. The Arab, swathed in his white burnouse, squats at the mouth of the tent and strikes his brow to the dust, saying his dawn-prayer. Unveiled behind him is his wife over the flame of twisted grass, and cooks and watches her children. On the horizon stand two caravans of twenty camels, bulging with dates. Now the thread of their approach writes upon the desert. It is market day in the Saharan center. There will be many caravans. And the wide scatter of nomads will close in like fragments of iron magnetized; making an irradiant design from the town to the horizons. The market place is a low square, on the edge of the town away from the Oasis. One side of it is a mosque, a Koran school, a string of Moorish cafés where already merchants huddle with their coffee. The corner breaks into a labyrinth of streets strident with tiny shops. Upon a third side, the desert road cuts into the breast of sand-dunes; far away is the white solitary shell of a Marabout’s tomb. The crowd is the town and the desert: an Arab world, drawn by hunger from far gold slopes, to make this thick and hardy organism. Most of the men wear burnouses of unbleached wool; their heads are covered by the ample hood and the skirt falls low over the inner jacket, over the naked legs, to the feet which are either bare or shod with sandal soles of grass thonged to the ankle. Time has dyed the virgin wool and use has torn it; the shreds and rents are fantasies in dirt. Within the hoods, sun-baked faces stare. The hands are talonous; the legs are like the tendoned legs of some great bird. And yet the dirtiest garment falls to the dust with grace; and the most squalid head is high.