Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 15, 2025
Along the narrow streets, bordered by yellow, flat-roofed houses, they rode slowly, looking now at the motley, many-coloured crowds, who watched them with grave interest, and now at the stately buildings, domed mosques and towering minarets, which everywhere stood out against the deep blue of the evening sky.
There was the place they were to stay, a kind of inn, or lodging-house, but not at all like those you know about. They have them today in that far-off country, just as they built them so many years ago. It was a low, flat-roofed, stone building, with no windows and only one large door.
The white women, or the respectable women of Ghadames, white or coloured, never descend to the streets, nor even go into the gardens around their houses. Their flat-roofed house is their eternal promenade, and their whole world is comprehended within two or three miserable rooms. The date-palms they see, and a few glimpses of The Desert beyond and this is all.
The buildings were of pink brick, faced with granite, and supported in the first story by columns of painted iron; flat-roofed blocks looked down over the low-wooden structures of earlier Hatboro', and a large hotel had pushed back the old-time tavern, and planted itself flush upon the sidewalk.
On the shore was a city of white, flat-roofed houses, and rising above it, perchance the half of a mile from the sea, a hill four or five hundred feet in height and terraced.
Here the women gossip and the men pray, but the latter are often disturbed in their devotions by the intruding glimpses of some Desert beauty. Love-matches and intrigues are equally concerted here on house-tops. The flat-roofed house-top, as before observed, is the Ghadamsee woman's entire world; here she lives, and moves, and has her being.
It is surrounded by mud walls, with flat-roofed houses, while outside are plantations of date-trees. On the 26th of July the caravan again set out. On the 29th they commenced their ascent to the greatest elevation of the desert, four thousand feet above the sea. The path winding along through loose blocks of stone, the precipitous ascent proved very difficult.
Further on white flat-roofed buildings with numerous windows appeared in sight; then the harbour opened up, in which floated a crowd of vessels of all nations, some with red banners floating from their mast-heads, forming the sultan's navy, others English ships of war, merchantmen, countless dhows with high sterns and strange rigs; then more houses and terraces with arches and colonnades came into view, with several consular flags flying above them.
Castle and convent crown their nobler heights, and flat-roofed villages nestle amid groves of mulberry trees.
But when the Vectis came in sight of the rocky isle, with its white stony heights, the heart-sickness of apprehension grew over her, and she saw, as in a mist, the noble crescent-shaped harbour, the stately ramparts, mighty batteries, the lofty terraces of flat-roofed dwellings, apparently rather hewn out of, than built on, the dazzling white stone, between the intense blue of the sky above and of the sea below.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking