"Ah, so has thought many a poor traveller to his undoing, when he was lost in the desert and was dying of thirst," answered her father. "He thinks he sees cool water and green trees ahead of him, and hurries along to reach them, only to find that the mocking mirage has faded away and that there is nothing there but the hot sand of the desert."
A mirage really is nothing more than a sort of reflection of some very distant object projected into the sky through the hot, dry air of the desert. Sometimes the desert traveller sees a phantom city in the clouds, and sometimes a ship, as if it were floating on the sandy waves of the desert instead of on the ocean; but it is all a delusion and not real.
From now on, the little Bedouins began to remark that they were leaving the desert behind them. They began to pass some houses, and then small villages of mud huts with roofs of palm-leaves. Around these villages were little fields divided off by low ridges of earth. There were orchards of fruit-trees, and Hamid and Rashid rode up to one of these and bought some pomegranates.
"Did ever anything taste nicer?" said Fatimah. And they all agreed with her as they ate the sweet, pink pomegranate seeds.
Soon they were riding through great groves of date-palms, and shortly caught a glimpse of the city shining white through the trees still some distance away.
"Oh, Hamid! I believe that is my father yonder," cried Rashid, as he caught sight of several horsemen riding toward them.
It was true; it was the Sharif, Rashid's father, who, with a party of relatives, had come out to meet them. Rashid galloped forward, and in another moment was in the arms of his father.
The caravan came to a halt, and, after many greetings on all sides, got under way again, and they all rode together into the city.
"Is not the big city a wonderful place?" whispered little Fatimah to her mother as they rode through the great city gates of stone, the walls of which were painted with broad bands of yellow and red. She had never before seen a large city.
"Keep clear of the sides, O camel men!" shouted out Nassar-Ben, who had hard work guiding his little caravan through the narrow, winding streets. The camel men had to run behind their charges, prodding them with sticks and crying out: "Go in the middle of the road! O! Hé! O! Hi!"