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For a distance, while they were within reach of the moist air of the oasis, these sand-mountains produced vegetation of various sorts.
There was always one boy, larger and also naughtier than the rest, who thrashed the thrashers and took their pennies away from them. The prevailing occupation of the children at these places, as on all civilized shores, apparently, was the building of sand-mountains and the digging of pits with their little wooden spades.
If so you have noted, studded hither and yon about the scene, certain conical hillocks or mountainettes of sand. Those dwarf sand-mountains were born of the labor of the winds, which in those distant regions are famous for persistent, not to say pernicious industry. Given a right direction, the wind in its sand-drifting will build you one of those sand-cones almost while you wait.
In the afternoon the town of Mocha Yamen, celebrated alike for its breed of Arab horses and its coffee, was visible from the masthead. It is a large white town, full of cupolas and minarets, surrounded with green as far as irrigation extends, and looking like a pearl set in emeralds on the margin of the deep blue sea against a background of red and yellow sand-mountains.
The operation was not new to her; a dozen times within the month since the outfit had swung out from Athabasca Landing she had watched from the muddy bank while the half-breeds and Indians unloaded the big scows, ran them light through whirling rock-ribbed rapids, carried the innumerable pieces of freight upon their shoulders across portages made all but impassable by scrub timber, oozy muskeg, and low sand-mountains, loaded the scows again at the foot of the rapid and steered them through devious and dangerous miles of swift-moving white-water, to the head of the next rapid.
The people pretend that, though the Shânbah can count the grains of their desert region of sand, and know every form of the sand-mountains as well by night as by day, the Touaricks had nevertheless the advantage over them, pursuing them better by night than by day, because the Genii were their guides; and many Shânbah, who had hid themselves under the sand, were unburied by the Genii, and slain by the Touaricks.
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