it of a sudden about our ears. The caïd has asked us to coffee; in his little office niche under the south arcade we eat and drink in semi-public and more than semi-din. Before the door the market streams in a kaleidoscope of brown and white, shot from instant to instant with some shape of high color, a crimson rug unfurled in the sunshine, a slipper merchant all lemon and orange with his wares, a camel stacked with precious green barley grass from the west oasis, the plum-colored haïk of a Moroccan gentleman on tour, the blue-black face of a Sudanese.

It is Friday, the Sabbath of the Musselman, and Ghardaïa's market day. And a great market it is, even in this year of hunger and thirst. It is one of the few open markets-the open portsthat face upon the Sahara sea. I can name but four of these ports-Figuig Ghardaïa, Ouargla, and Ghadames; and Figuig is in Morocco and Ghadames in Tripoli, the better part of a thousand miles to the east. Everything the south has for the north comes to port in these waterless harbors; in these open markets it is disembarked, transshipped, and here it pays its fees. The possessions of France run down and blur away for hundreds of leagues toward the equator, but here in Ghardaïa, almost cheek by jowl with our sad hotel, stands the squat, square customhouse of France. ...

The market carries on, hawking, gurgling, braying, bickering; an interminable dispute; a mêlée of sights, a panorama of merchandizing-mats piled with wheat from Morocco, date-packs from the south, slippers, haïks, flayed muttons, tent strips, ripe oranges, giltframed mottoes from the Koran, blind beggars, sweetmeat sellers, and (even here) squatted on a carpet, the sharpnosed fellow with the three cards and "the hand that is quicker than the eye."

Bumbled about by all this racket and color, reclining in the half sanctuary of the caïd's place, we exchange the compliments of the day. This lord of the douar is a plump, dark, round-whiskered,

affable man, as like as a twin to his secretary squatted behind a foot-high desk beside the door. They are both Mozabites by every sign of the kind. And even if our eyes had failed us, the caïd would not have left us long astray.

"Among ten Arabs, messieurs, you will find perhaps one honest man. Among ten Mozabites you will find ten."

All the Mzab is in his gesture as he holds up his fingers and thumbs spread fanwise for emphasis. Ten! All honest, all righteous, all right! Right, because they are Berbers of pure blood; right, because they worship (with the schismatic sects) the true descent of the authority of the Prophet; right, because they have no lusts of the flesh (it is forbidden to smoke in the streets of BeniIsguen, the Holy of Mozabite residential Holies); right, finally, because they are well-to-do.

I begin to understand why, in every town of upper Algeria, the itinerant Mozabite is hated and cursed in the same curse with the Jew. The Mozabite himself, being thrice as pious as any other Mohammedan on earth, hates the Children of Israel with three times the hate. But one cannot turn the fact that their traits, cultural, commercial, even physical, are those of the Barbary Jew. With the Jews they fall under the bitterest stigma of the nomad, "They make the commerce!" With the Jews and Kabyles they carry on the pack-peddling of North Africa, going up as young men, coming back home only in middle age. And their peculiar faith, too, seems to have something unrelenting and cabalistic about it. Even in exile among the false believers, wherever two or three of them are gathered together in the name of the True Descent, there their mosque is, there they hold their austere confessional, and there, if one among them be found to have smoked tobacco or to have looked upon the wine of abomination, the others take time to deal out obscure, sometimes terrible, punishment, before they fare away again, dog-chased, stone-bruised, alertly martyr - eyed, on their pilgrimage of petty gain.

"They make the commerce," and what they make they keep. Provident men! The long drought has not been long enough to touch their mortal needs; the seven lean years have not made them lean. The whine of the mendicant that rises day and night from Ghardaïa hill is no Mozabite whine; it is the hunger rattle of Arabs crowding against the doors of Mozabites and Jews. The Mozabites have told me that, and so have the Jews. And so, with the bitterness of wayward and untended children, have the Arabs themselves.

It is the Arabs, then, the wanderers, the homeless drivers of pastureless cattle, the old conquerors of Berber and Jew alike, that are the skeletons we see drifting about the huge, hot, empty bowl of the Mzab. They starve before our eyes, and the sous and franc notes out of our pockets are only the dismallest of drops in the empty bucket of hope.

They flap and creak and mumble across the desert stage. Their womenwomen with sunken cheeks, broom-handle arms, and hard, bright eyes-crouch like dusty crows on every rubbage heap, probing the earth all day long for some forgotten sheep bone or date stone to explore with their solicitous tongues. There is something indescribably shocking about that, something hideous and immoral and obscene.... At the cor

ner of the wall of a dried-up garden on our way to Melika, we pass each day three babies sitting rag-huddled and motionless, as if in solemn conclave, on the sand. I say babies; the eldest of them cannot be more than four. They have no parents. Every witness we have been able to summon says the same; no parents, no kin. All day long they sit there beside the path that goes to Melika, fed literally from the sky of passers-by; all night long, in the dark or the moonshine, they sleep there, cuddled, puppywise, in a little dark lump on the same patch of sand. But this is not as bad as the other. It is no

longer awful. It has gone beyond. It is a fairy tale. The birds will look out for them.

The little girls that shriek and giggle and flee our approach in the cloisteral high streets of Melika and Beni-Isguen are round-cheeked and crimson-clad. But their fathers are of the True Faith; they "make the commerce” and save. It is the Arabs that are shiftless and of no account. And, above all, the land wants rain.

'Ma-kain-che 'l ma!"-"Il manque d'eau!"-in every tongue and at every hour it is the same "It needs the rain!"

It is singular that it does not rain. True, it has not rained more than a halfhour's drizzle for three hundred weeks like the one of our stay, but what of that? We have been in other places in North Africa where no water had fallen for months and years, and when we came it fell, it tumbled, in drab, cold, fruitful floods.

We explain this to the caïd of BeniIsguen one day on the Ghardaia road. From the eminence of his crimson saddle he gives us down an uncommitting smile. "But you are marabouts, then, are you not, messieurs?"

"Never mind, sir. It will rain before we go. You will see."

The smile persists.

"Then you would be marabouts indeed. Then, I assure you, messieurs, we would make for you such a fête as has not been seen for many years in the Mzab, with feasting and dancing and fantasie of horses and guns-if it were to rain, if again the river there were to flow on the sand and fill the wells."

We leave him with a certain feeling about ourselves of imminence and awe. What if? Of course it will not rain; all the same there is something strangely fascinating before being found so, of a sudden, separated from sainthood by no more than a barometric state, a mere naught-point-something on a glass. How would it feel to be a marabout? But of course it will not rain. When we wake next morning it is

...

raining. It is not much, to be sure; a fine drizzle blown on a cold wind. But it is rain. It is a beginning. And the sky, rearing black ranges of thunderheads in the north, promises a bigger end.

We dress and go abroad, as selfconscious as débutantes. We expect to find people watching us with one eye and with the other the sky. But they do not even raise their heads. The thin rain dusts over them; they have put up the hoods of their burnouses and drawn in their turtle necks; they shiver a little with the cold. Beyond this the outward aspect of life goes on unchanged. As always, they roam the open spaces, empty of head and hand, awaiting the will of God.

I know the feeling. It runs around the earth, in every craven human heart: "Don't look, or it won't happen! Don't breathe! Don't stir! Don't even think about it too hard!"

One wants to shake them, all the

same.

"But see, it rains!"

"Ma-ch' yassir. Even now there is the sun on Melika over there."

"Yes, but look at the sky! Presently it will rain-hard!"

"In-cha-'llah! In-cha-'llah! If God

wills!"

Noon arrives. The sun comes out all over the Mzab. But still the storm bank hangs in the north. Again a drift covers the sky. Once in the afternoon there is another spit of rain. We had meant to leave to-morrow, but with saintship for the pair of us in the balance, the thing will bear watching another day.

We couldn't have gone, anyhow. There is no diligence to take us when morning comes. It is drizzling again, and in the rifts we see the black cloud lifting northward even higher than yesterday.

All morning the dry Mzab waits. For it is still as dry as ever; the passing drizzles are like steam drops fallen on a stove, gone as soon as come. And it is the wells that matter, after all. It is

queer to hear the few scattered survivors among them whining and whining on the naked floor under the flood dammed high in the sky, the flood that darkens and bulges and topples and waits and waits again for the moment when the dam shall break.

A little after midday the moment seems to have come. There is a time when no air stirs. There is no breath in the Mzab.

There is a breath. A little wind. It moves in slowly. But it moves in from the baked south.

By three o'clock the last wisp of vapor has fled, the black promise is gone, and our sainthood with it, pushed back by the Sahara wind to the north, the mountains and the sea.

...

That night there is music again in Ghardaia. The Mozabites are shut up and asleep in their thick houses; the starved, idle Arabs beat on drums and sing. They pack together in places of dull delight, or, wanting the sou for coffee, crouch by the yellow streams poured out of the doors and watch the shadows passing and repassing of the dancing-girls from the land of the Ouled Naïl.

The drummers beat their drums. A withered, old bright-eyed Soudanese pipes on a quavering pipe. A girl drifts among the benches, rigid-torsed, shufflesoled, dancing only with an undulation of out-thrust wrists and hands. The monotony of motion marches with the monotony of sound; little by little a hypnotic numbness creeps over the soul. The desert moves back a little into the dark.

All dream. Even the daughters of the Children of Naïl are dreaming, I believe. Wandering across the door lights in the court, rustling their soiled "Mother Hubbards" and rattling their jewels about the inner fondouk of dismal enchantment even in these there is some wistful dream.

In these fruitless years, in this sapless land, their exile is long and long. Gold comes slowly, and only gold will give

They dream. They dream of Djelfa. They dream of the tents of the tribe, the fires of the families, the mountains of the Ouled Naïl. They dream of the mountains all green.

For it has rained in Djelfa. It has rained everywhere everywhere but in the Mzab. The winter has spent itself in one last thundering blow. At Berrian, only a finger width on the map to the north, all the barrages are full to breaking and all the fields in the oasis are ponds. Laghouat is an island in a lake.

The Jew who has to do with diligences puts away his coffee and holds up his hands.

"Two days. Two weeks. Only God (the God of the Christian, the Mohammedan, and the Jew) can say."

Out of doors the moon, grown lazy in service, is just rising over Beni-Isguen hill. Its light runs up the sky, but even in the light the stars burn on. There is no veil. Heaven is glass.

Another dry year has come to the Mzab. "In-cha-'llah! If God wills!"

W

Ο

NE of the many ways in which animals have answered back to the difficulties ever besetting them has been to take advantage of some sort of disguise. It has often paid them to look like something else, and so we find many examples of "masking," or "camouflaging," of protective resemblance to something innocent, and even of a faking which, whatever may be its inner aspect, is from the outside uncommonly near impersonation. Just as a sniper may make up like a shattered tree or a dead horse, just as a ship may be "camouflaged" into the likeness of a wreck or a rock, so, many different kinds of animals are advantageously disguised, or have their real nature in some way or other concealed.

It is difficult to draw a strict line between coverings which make for physical protection or for comfort, and coverings that serve for concealment. The young stages of caddis-flies which creep hungrily about among the stones in the bed of the stream have encasements of small pieces of stick or of tiny pebbles, and they look innocent enough. The leafeating caterpillars, called "bagworms," carry about a protective "over-all" made of pieces of leaf, stick, bark, and debris. In many cases this bag makes them most elusively inconspicuous. When they pass into the resting chrysalis stage they often hang from the branches like cones or dry fruits. Some allied forms make cases deceptively like the shells of small snails. The cocoons or pupa cases of certain insects are like pods; the large, substantial structure made by the caterpillar of the puss-moth is often extraordinarily like the corner which has been chosen as a retreat; the North American bagworm, another remarkable caterpillar, spins its cocoon on

leaves and twigs, and so adjusts the surrounding parts, sometimes killing them first, that, although the cocoon is exposed, it has a high degree of invisibility. To bring about withering artificially, on the shoot of an orange tree, for instance, is certainly a very remarkable device. But one does not mean by this word to suggest that the caterpillar is aware of what it has actually achieved.

Just as lichens grow on trees, so there are many water plants and sedentary animals which anchor themselves on creatures like crabs, and cloak their real nature. Thestrikingphotograph of Fig. 1 shows a crab with a quite extraordinary agglomeration of animals on its back. To appreciate the subtlety of the disguise, however, one must see the animals in their natural colors and in their own rock pool. One rubs one's eyes, as they say, when what looks like a bunch of seaweed suddenly starts on an exploring excursion. Now, it must be admitted that it is very difficult to draw a firm line between cases where the incrusting animals have simply settled down on their bearers as they might on a stone or on a piece of rock, and where the bearers derive real benefit from the association, and are perhaps dimly aware of the fact. This is true all through animate nature, that different kinds of associations between living creatures grade into one another. Let us take an example. Some trees have neutral or indifferent molds about their roots; in certain cases this becomes an important partnership, which may indeed go too far, when the big partner begins to depend too much on the activity of the self-effacing partner underground. These things are an allegory. Many plants are attacked by parasitic