It showed him the pinions of _Nissr_
gleaming like snow on the velvet plain; showed him, too, the vast
sweep of the city's walls.
Those walls, no less than a hundred feet high, were cunningly
loopholed for defense. They presented a slightly concave facade to the
plain, and slanted backward at about the angle of the Tower of Pisa.
Through their aureate glimmer, dazzling in the direct rays of the
sun now well past its meridian, a glimpse of a flashing river
instantaneously impressed itself on the Master's sight, with cascading
rapids among palm-groves, as it foamed from beneath the city walls.
Then all was blotted out by the gleaming side of the stupendous
archway.
Up into a broad thoroughfare that rose on a steep slant--a
thoroughfare very different from the usual narrow, tortuous alleys of
Arabian cities--the swarm of horsemen swept, with a dull clatter of
hoofs on the soft yellow pavement that gave almost like asphalt. The
utter lack of any ruts well proved that wheeled vehicles were here
unknown. Nothing harder than unshod horses, than goats and sheep, and
the soft pads of camels had ever worn these gleaming ways.
The brush of a Verestchagin, a Gerome, a Bida, skilled in the colors
of the Orient, would have been needed to paint even an impressionistic
_coup d'oeil_ of this scene surpassing strange, now opening out before
the Legionaries' eyes.
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