Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 January 1920 — ROMANTIC HOUR IN DESERT [ARTICLE]

ROMANTIC HOUR IN DESERT

Dawn th* Only Tim* When Sordid M«* of the Country I* Hidden v Fi i— tfc* tR. One day before sunrise wo set out from Rabat for too ruin* cd Boman Volublli*. . From the ferry of the Bou-Regreg wo looked backward on a last vision of orange rampart* under a night-blue sky sprinkled with stars; ahead, over gardens still deep in shadow, the wall* of Sale were passing from drab to peach color in the eastern glow. Dawn is the romantic hour to Africa. Dirt and dilapidation disappear under a pearly haze, and a breeze from the sea blows away the memory of fetid markets and sordid heaps of humanity. At that hour the old Moroccan cities look like the ivory citadel to a Persian miniature, and the fat shopkeepers riding out to their vegetable gardens like princes sallying forth to rescue captive maidens. Our road led along the high road from Rabat to the modern port of Kenitra, near the spins of the Phoenician colony of Mehedvia. Just north of Kenitra we struck the trail, branching off eastward to a European village on the light railway between Rabat and Fez. Beyond the railway sheds and flat roofed stores the wildernes* began, stretching away into clear distance* bounded by the hiUs of Barb, above which the sun was rising. Range after range these translucent hills rose before us; all around the solitude was complete. Village life, and even tent life, naturally gathers about a river bank or spring; and the waste we were crossing was of waterless sand bound together by a loose desert growth. Only an abandoned well curb here and there cast its blue shadow oh the yellow bled, or a saint’s tomb hung like a bubble between sky and sand. The light had the preternatural purity which givbs a foretaste of mirage; it was the light in which magic becomes real, and which helps to understand how, to people living In such an atmosphere, the boundary between fact and dream perpetually fluctuates.—Edith Wharton to Scribner’s.