A SHORT ADVENTURE
It was in Morocco: it was not yet day; and there was a little drizzling rain of that tiresome, feverish sort which you get in those outlandish countries south of Europe and cousin to the desert, only saved from being desert by this same evil rain which does sometimes fall on them. I woke and rose before my companions, and to their annoyance made them rise also, telling them that we needed every hour if we were to reach the sea before the next night.
There was no road, not even such a track as one may see in the American West. Only here and there the sign that wheels had passed over the interminable dusty mud of the plain. We started the unfortunate motor-car and jerked off northwards just as the sad, wet darkness was turning into a sad, wet day. Already the glimmering light showed us the forms of the land, but not yet any direction, and in that first half-hour, as the light grew, we twice urged back, at the peril of our gears, from thick boggy land to harder soil. Then, when it was full daylight, we could better determine our way. There was not a tree anywhere, not even on the distant mountains to the right. There was not a blade of grass. It was a wilderness, where I could see barren slopes and peaks as much as fifty miles away.
I have often wondered what the original Hebrew was for the term "howling," which so admirably describes a wilderness in the Bible. Some day I will look it up; for whoever got that metaphor knew how to write. Also these damnable empty spaces are not good for the soul: they isolate it beyond due measure.
And so we went North. At nearly every dry stream bed (they came at intervals of some five miles) we had to cast about for the passage. In each we feared to remain. But each was at last successfully passed, though I wondered how long the old machine would stand it. The car was, like most of these models of earlier years, very strongly built, and it was patient and willing; but we were asking too much of it.
It was about nine o'clock in the morning that we came at last to a true river, flowing between steep banks, perhaps thirty feet high or more; banks of crumbling earth, and even there not a shrub—mere water, coloured as tawny as the waste itself, and cutting through the waste without result. Here it was that the car gave up the ghost. Crawling down the mass of mud upon the zigzag it reached, with many groans and grindings, the river bed. It crossed the ford, making a noise like a saw; but when it was asked to breast the further bank, in one last gallant effort it sobbed out its life and died.
Upon the height of the bank against the sky there stood a Spaniard, to whom, as is natural in that country, we spoke in French. He told us that near by we should find a small town. We begged him in the meanwhile to fetch us many labourers and a stout rope. This he did. We tied the rope to the front axle in two places, leaving its ends free in the shape of two traces, which traces were taken each by a dozen men, and so, cumbrously, were we hauled to the plateau above. There, sure enough, we saw as filthy a little town as ever was permitted by demons to survive; but the sea was still very far away.