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But his villa on the Sahel was a miniature palace; it had formerly been the harem of a great Rais, and the gardens were as enchanting as the interior was if something florid, still as elegant as Paris art and Paris luxury could make it; for ferocious as the Black Hawk was in war, and well as he loved the chase and the slaughter, he did not disdain, when he had whetted beak and talons to satiety, to smooth his ruffled plumage in downy nests and under caressing hands.
Sahel is of considerable extent, but has no nucleus of houses in the shape of a town, consisting merely of a series of small villages and detached houses, like our cottage groups and farms, but, of course, in Moorish style. Extremely warm to-day, though near the sea. Cleared the Sahel the afternoon, and, at night, encamped amidst the last groups of the Atlas, spreading and stretching eastwards.
Then, after sauntering on some distance in a reverie, he stopped and gazed long and earnestly at the pirate city, whose white-washed domes and minarets gleamed in the sunshine like marble, contrasting beautifully with the bright green of the Sahel hills behind, and the intense blue of the sky and sea.
Where he stood under some sheltered columns of a long-ruined mosque whose shafts were bound together by a thousand withes and wreaths of the rich, fantastic Sahel foliage, an exceeding weariness of longing was upon him longing for all that he had forfeited, for all that was his own, yet never could be claimed as his.
Thus one by one they descended the wall, crossed the ditch, ascended the slope on the other side, without having been observed, and, ere long, were safe among the rocks and fastnesses of the Sahel hills.
A magical light, like the light in a dream, gilded the hills of the Sahel; and beyond lay the vast plain of the Metidja, a golden bowl, heaped to its swelling rim of mountains with the fairest fruits of Algeria. The car rushed through a world of blossoms, fragrant open country full of flowers, and past towns that did their small utmost to bring France into the land which France had conquered.
The red-hot light of the after-glow still burned on the waters of the bay, and shed its Egyptian-like luster on the city that lies in the circle of the Sahel, with the Mediterranean so softly lashing with its violet waves the feet of the white, sloping town.
To vary the monotony of such a life, there was enough adventure to be found for the seeking, now an incursion into the Sahel, or into the plains of Mitidja, or a wild foray through the northern gorges of the Atlas.
Many parts had the geological features of the Sahel, or hilly country in the neighbourhood of the city of Algiers. The air was pure and cool. But though it was calm this day and the evening, a sudden tempest got up after midnight. I was lying on the bare ground rolled in a blanket, when the wind tore it from off me, and I was obliged to retreat to a hovel.
The whole of the ground, from Sahel to these first groups of Eastern Atlas, is scattered over with Roman and Greek ruins, and, as it happens, there is a huge piece of an ancient building in the road itself, apparently a temple. I was too weak, however, to descend from the camel, to look closely at it.
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