CHAPTER X
On the March Once More—Buying Mules—A Bad Road—First Camp—Argan-Trees—Coos-Coosoo—A Terrible Night—Doctoring the Khaylifa—Roughing it Under Canvas.
CHAPTER X
And all this time you (at home) are drinking champagne (well, most of it, anyway), and sleeping in soft beds with delicious white sheets, and smoking Turkish cigarettes, and wearing clean clothes, with nice stiff collars and shirt-cuffs, and having great warm baths in marble bath-rooms and sweet-smelling soap . . . and sitting side by side at table, first a man and then a woman—the same old arrangement, I suppose—knives to the right and forks to the left, as usual.
The hot desert wind in Mogador showed no signs of changing: there was no enlivening sun, and the sad white seaport could only charm in a morbid manner: to be out under the skies, in the open, away from the city and sealed houses and the eyes, was a thing to be sought after, and that quickly. Southern Morocco is like the East in that it is all eyes. The watchful East—it may be lazy, but nothing escapes its eyes. They gleam between the folds of the veil; they look from out of a smooth face, mild and yet as little to be read as the deep sea. And who knows what lies at the bottom of those quiet pools?