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This being the most exposed corner of the oasis, the tabias have grown to a fine size; I climbed over the inner one, which must be ten yards high and at least twenty in breadth. From its summit one perceives distant forms of ruinous buildings rising up in the Tozeur direction, on the slope which inclines to the Chott. Was this, perhaps, Zafrana? No.
I'm ready to leave at five minutes' notice, and I can go on as long as you can. I'm looking forward to the trip." "But I've often offered to take you to Biskra." "That's different. Now I've got an incentive." Just as he came in sight of the great chott between Biskra and Touggourt, Stephen heard a sound which struck him strangely in the silence of the desert.
The imagination of an Edgar Poe might picture these Nefta gardens as the reverse of those of Semiramis sunk, that is, further into the profundities of the earth than the already existing Sahara plantations with this difference, that here, to obviate infiltration from the ooze of the Chott, sturdy walls must enclose them.
There was a chott, or dried desert lake, glistening white and livid blue, full of ghostly reflections, to cross; but once on the other side all the poetic romance of fairy gardens and magic mirrors vanished.
From certain books I have begun to make extracts concerning the places I am likely to visit: Metlaoui, the Djerid oases, and the Chott country. Dufresnoy is essentially a mining engineer.
This, I suppose, is inevitable; the gardens must be continually moving moving away from the Chott towards their vital sources, which now lie under a respectable precipice of sand. It is hard to believe that the present site of the fountains is what one might call the natural, aboriginal one.
My companion of this morning, who happened to be of a religious turn of mind, took the opportunity to glide off his beast and, standing a little apart, with his arms thrown through the reins to prevent the mule from straying, recited the dawn prayer. The noble gesticulations looked well on that bare sandy dune, in the face of the Chott.
Once the rock-portal is passed, it unlearns all its sprightly grace and trickles disconsolately through the sands, expiring, at last, in the dreary Chott el Rharsa.
Above the lake of water suddenly appeared a soaring line of white, spreading and mounting higher, then turning from white to vivid rose. It was the flamingoes rising and flying over the chott, the one daily phenomenon of the desert which the woman on the roof still loved to watch.
After about five miles of comfortable wading through soft sand, I became aware of a ghostly radiance that hovered over the pallid expanse of the Chott. Abruptly, with the splendour of a meteor, the morning star shot up. Then the sun's disk rose, more sedately, at the exact spot where Lucifer had shown the way; and climbing upwards, produced a spectacle for which I was not prepared.
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