e columns
of black marble sang strange, chanting songs as they strode along.
White-clad Arabs whose green turbans told that they had been to Mecca,
walked beside their young wives' camels. Withered crones in yellow
smocks trudged after the procession, driving donkeys weighed down with
sheepskins full of oil. Baby camels with waggling, tufted humps followed
their mothers. Slim grey sloughis and Kabyle dogs quarrelled with each
other, among flocks of black and white goats; and at night, the sky
pulsed with the fires of desert encampments, rosy as northern lights.

Just before the walled city of Ouargla, Victoria saw her first mirage,
clear as a dream between waking and sleeping. It was a salt lake, in
which Guelbi and the other animals appeared to wade knee-deep in azure
waves, though there was no water; and the vast, distant oasis hovered so
close that the girl almost believed she had only to stretch out her hand
and touch the trunks of the crowding palm trees.

M'Barka was tired, and they rested for two days in the strange Ghuara
town, the "City of Roses," founded (according to legend), by Solomon,
King of Jerusalem, and built for him by djenoum and angels in a single
night. They lived as usual in the house of the Caid, whose beautiful
twin daughters told Victoria many things about the customs of the Ghuara
people, descendants of the ancient Garamantes. How much happier and
freer they were than Arab girls, how much purer though gayer was the
life at Ouargla, Queen of the Oases, than at any other less enlightened
desert city; how marvellous was the moulet-el-rass, the dance cure for
headache and diseases of the brain; how wonderful were the women
soothsayers; and what a splendid thing it was to see the bridal
processions passing through the streets, on the one day of the year when
there is marrying and giving in marriage in Ouargla.

The name of the prettier twin was Zorah, and she had black curls which
fell straight down over her brilliant eyes, under a scarlet head-dress.
"Dost thou love Si Maieddine?" she asked the Roumia, with a kind of
innocent boldness.

"As a friend who has been very kind," Victoria answered.

"Not as a lover, oh Roumia?" Zorah, like all girls of Ouargla, was proud
of her knowledge of Arabic.

"No. Not as a lover."

"Is there then one of thine own people whom thou lovest as a lover, Rose
of the West?"

"I have no lover, little white moon."

"Si Maieddine will be thy lover, whether thou