yellow earth and stones, which remain there after the rains to mark its way, when it shall come again in its developed might.
This whole locality around the villages is called Tanaout Gray and yellow houses with open galleries and with terraces on their roofs clung to the rocky walls and overhung the ravine below like swallows' nests. Small, narrow windows, doors half sunk in the ground, dirty yards, a mosque with a spindly minaret, cattle wandering through the streets, crowds of children, chickens— all this formed a well-known picture such as I have so often seen in the aouls of the Caucasus, with their same small groups of houses, narrow streets crawling along the mountainside, dirt and crowds of lazy natives.
With a chauffeur who whirled us around dizzy curves at a sickening speed and with apparent disregard of all caution, we were soon at the summit of the first pass, from where we looked back upon the spot of the Tanaout villages, the range of green hills and, beyond them, the dead, reddish-gray plain that floored the valley across to the wall of the Jebilet range, glimmering on the horizon. Directly in front of these mountains lay the little dot which we knew to be the oasis of Marrakesh, and, straining my sight, I could just make out the minaret of the Kutubia mosque.
To the south quite another landscape—a narrow valley, widening as it dropped, led down to the plain between the two high ranges of the mountain, which there overtowered the narrow silvery trail of a river. Small houses were scattered about the upper valley, carrying with them their checker-boards of fields, across which
