No veil hid her face, but folds of thin woollen stuff beautifully woven,
and dyed blue, almost as dark as indigo, fell from her head nearly to
her feet, over a loose robe of orange-red, cut low in the neck, with
sleeves hiding the elbows. She looked towards the west, shading her eyes
with her hand: and the sun near its setting streamed over her face and
hair, chiselling her features in marble, brightening her auburn hair to
fiery gold, giving her brown eyes the yellow tints of a topaz, or of the
amber beads which hung in a long chain, as far down as her knees.
From the white roof many things could be seen besides the immense
monotonous dunes along whose ridges orange fire seemed to play
unceasingly against the sky.
There was the roof of the Zaouia mosque, with its low, white domes
grouped round the minaret, as somewhere below the youngest boys of the
school grouped round the taleb, or teacher. On the roof of the mosque
bassourah frames were in the making, splendid bassourahs, which, when
finished, would be the property of the great marabout, greatest of all
living marabouts, lord of the Zaouia, lord of the desert and its people,
as far as the eye could reach, and farther.
There were other roofs, too, bubbling among the labyrinth of square open
courts and long, tunnel-like, covered and uncovered corridors which
formed the immense, rambling Zaouia, or sacred school of Oued Tolga.
Things happened on these roofs which would have interested a stranger,
for there was spinning of sheep's wool, making of men's burnouses,
fashioning of robes for women, and embroidering of saddles; but the
woman who looked towards the west with the sun in her eyes was tired of
the life on sun-baked roofs and in shadowed courts.
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