And we passed onward through the private pavilions—bewildering in their magnificence of marble and gold, and green with many leaves—to the Great Hall of the Divan, where, standing under the royal baldachin of yellow silk brocade, the Sultan of Abea rejoiced me with his favours, proclaiming me, Ahamadou, tribes man of the Azjar, the Saviour of the City in the Sky.
No Touareg has ever contracted marriage with an Arab; therefore, after tarrying in Afo for many moons, I made peace with my people and returned unto them, for the wild life of the limitless sands was more congenial to me than the ease and perfumes of palaces and the favours of kings.
Chapter Eleven.
The Throne of the Great Torture.
Far south, beyond the Atlas Mountains, beyond that great, limitless plain of the Talidat where nothing meets the aching eye but a dreary waste of red-brown, drifting sand, one experiences some curious phases of a life comparatively unknown, and little understood in European civilisation. There, life to-day is the same as it was ten centuries ago—the same as it will ever be: free and charming in its simplicity, yet with many terrors ever present, and sun-bleached bones ever reminding the lonely traveller that a pricked water-skin means the end of all things.
The Veiled Man — by William Le Queux
On a journey alone from Biskra to Mourzouk, in Fezzan, I foolishly disregarded the injunctions of my fellow tribesmen, and was rendered extremely uncomfortable by the astounding discovery that the camel caravan I had joined in Zaouia Timassanin, and with which I had been travelling for twenty days, belonged to the Kel-Izhaban, a tribe of marauders and outlaws with whom we had had for years a fierce blood-feud, and whose depredations and relentless butchery of their weaker neighbours caused them to be held in awe from Morocco across to Tripoli, and from Biskra to Lake Tsâd. In addition, I ascertained that the Sheikh, known to me as Sidi El-Adil, or “The Just,” was really none other than Abdul-Melik, like myself, a pirate of the desert, against whom the French Government had sent three expeditions, and upon whose head a price had been set.