"Allow me also to look! Where is it?"
"Just to north of that gash--that wady, or gully, making down to the
beach. You see it, eh?"
Slowly the French ace swept the glasses along the surf-foamed fringes
of that desolation. Across the lenses no tree flung its green promise
of shade. No house, no hut was visible. Not even a patch of grass
could be discerned. The African coast lay stretched out in ivory
nakedness, clean, bare, swept and garnished by simooms, by cruel heat,
by the beatings of surf eternal.
Back of it extended an iron hinterland, savage with desert spaces of
sun-baked, wrinkled earth and sand here and there leprously mottled
with white patches of salt and with what the Arabs call _sabkhah_,
or sheets of gypsum. The setting sun painted all this horror of
desolation with strange rose and orange hues, with umbers and pale
purples that for a moment reminded the Master of the sunset he had
witnessed from the windows of _Niss'rosh_, the night his great plan
had come to him. Only eight days ago, that night had been; it seemed
eight years!
Carefully Leclair observed this savage landscape, over which a
brilliant sky, of luminous indigo and lilac, was bending to the vague
edge of the world.
Pages:
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203