The scent of orange blossoms in her own little high-walled garden came
up to her; yet she had forgotten that it was sweet, for she had never
loved it. The hum of the students' voices, faintly heard through the
open-work of wrought-iron windows, rasped her nerves, for she had heard
it too often; and she knew that the mysterious lessons, the lessons
which puzzled her, and constantly aroused her curiosity, were never
repeated aloud by the classes, as were these everlasting chapters of the
Koran.
Men sleeping on benches in the court of the mosque, under arches in the
wall, waked and drank water out of bulging goatskins, hanging from huge
hooks. Pilgrims washed their feet in the black marble basin of the
trickling fountain, for soon it would be time for moghreb, the prayer of
the evening.
Far away, eighteen miles distant across the sands, she could see the
twenty thousand domes of Oued Tolga, the desert city which had taken its
name from the older Zaouia, and the oued or river which ran between the
sacred edifice on its golden hill, and the ugly toub-built village,
raised above danger of floods on a foundation of palm trunks.
Far away the domes of the desert city shimmered like white fire in the
strange light that hovers over the Sahara before the hour of sunset.
Behind those distant, dazzling bubbles of unearthly whiteness, the
valley-like oases of the southern desert, El Souf, dimpled the yellow
dunes here and there with basins of dark green.
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