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Show ROMANTIC HOUR IN DESERT Dawn the Only Time When Sordid-ness Sordid-ness of the Country le Hidden ' . From the Eye. One day before sunrise we set out , from Rabat for the ruins of Roman Volubllls. From the ferry oA the Bou-Regreg wa looked backward on a last vision of orange ramparts under a night-blue sky sprinkled with stars; ahead, over gardens still deep in shadow, the walla of Sale were passing from drab to peach color in the eastern glow. Dawn is the romantic hour In Africa. Dirt and dilapidation disappear under a pearly haze, and a breeze from the sea blows away the memory of fetid markets mar-kets and sordid heaps of humanity. At that hour the old Moroccan cities look like the Ivory citadel In a Persian miniature, min-iature, and the fat shopkeepers riding out to their vegetable gardens 11k princes sallying forth to rescue captive cap-tive maidens. . , Our road led along the .high road from Rabat to the modern port of Ke-nltra, Ke-nltra, near the ruins of the Phoenician Phoeni-cian colony of Mehedvia. Just north of Kenltra we struck the trail, branching branch-ing off eastward to a European village on the light railway between Rabat and Fez. Beyond the railway sheds and flat roofed stores the wilderness began, stretching away Into clear distances dis-tances bounded by the hills of Rarb, above which the sun was rising. Range after range these translucent translu-cent hills rose before us; all around the solitude was complete. Village life, and even tent life, naturally gathers gath-ers about a river bank or spring; and the waste we were crossing was of waterless sand bound together by a loose desert growth. Only an abandoned aban-doned well curb here and there cast Its blue shadow on the yellow bled, or a saint's tomb hung like a bubble between be-tween sky and sand. The light had the preternatural purity which gives a foretaste of mirage; It was the light I In which magic becomes real, and j which helps to understand how, to peo-l peo-l pie living In such an atmosphere, the j boundary between fact and dream per-l per-l petually fluctuates. Edith Wharton In j Seiner's. |
