A magical light,
like the light in a dream, gilded the hills of the Sahel; and beyond lay
the vast plain of the Metidja, a golden bowl, heaped to its swelling rim
of mountains with the fairest fruits of Algeria.
The car rushed through a world of blossoms, fragrant open country full
of flowers, and past towns that did their small utmost to bring France
into the land which France had conquered. Boufarik, with its tall
monument to a brave French soldier who fought against tremendous odds:
Blidah, a walled and fortified mixture of garrison and orange-grove,
with a market-place like a scene in the "Arabian Nights": Orleansville,
modern and ostentatiously French, built upon ruins of vast antiquity,
and hotter than all other towns in the dry cup of the Chelif Valley:
Relizane, Perregaux, and finally Oran (famed still for its old Spanish
forts), which they reached by moonlight.
Always there were fields embroidered round the edges with wild flowers
of blue and gold, and rose. Always there were white, dusty roads, along
which other motors sometimes raced, but oftener there were farm-carts,
wagons pulled by strings of mules, and horses with horned harness like
the harness in Provence or on the Spanish border. There were huge,
two-storied diligences, too, drawn by six or eight black mules, crammed
under their canvas roofs with white- or brown-robed Arabs, and going
very fast.
From Oran they might have gone on the same night, reaching the end of
their journey after a few hours' spin, but Nevill explained that haste
would be vain.
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