Adventure Magazine Cover — page 90: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

654 scratches that ran the length of it, just miss- ing both eyes, and as this one heard the passionate sob of Mohammed Jebbour’s voice and saw the moonlight in his eye, his imagination blazed within him and set strange little pulses to beating in his throat and the roof of his mouth—just as would have happened had he listened to the words of a Haytian voodoo-doctor or a West Coast gree-gree man or an exhorter at a Georgia camp-meeting. Then he went forth from the mosque and lay under the palms by the Oued Guir and dreamed, and presently he gathered the men of Oudaghir about him and spoke to them long and eloquently. And when the dawn broke they were gone, and their cara- van was like a string of black ants on the flaming eastern horizon. Surely what was written was written, and Allah and Moham- med had settled the thing once and for all, and the scar-faced negro was as fanatical a believer asany. But onecan not forget ten years in the Twenty-Fifth U. S. Infantry— even in the great Sahara. This was in the days when one French column was at Casablanca, and another marched on Fey from Northern Oran, and still another advanced on Bou-Denib from Colomb-Bechar where ends the railway that some day will reach to Tomboctou. IT AN ADVANCE-GUARD had seized il the wells at daybreak and given the Ait-Usilt warning, and at ten both wells and the pools in the owed were sucked dry. All the moisture of the poor little oasis had been but a drop in the bucket for such a host—six thousand men, the horses of the cavalry, and the countless camels of the caravan that bore their prov- ender and munitions of war. By noon the Ait-Usilt had swept the village clean of their belongings, and their tiny caravan had commenced to creep away to where the oasis of their brothers, the Beni-Garfa, lay in a tremulous green blur against the sand- dunes that were flung across the horizon like a polished string of flashing topaz. There they could find water and refuge until the plague had passed by and the wells had filled again. A company of Zouaves guarded the water and were encamped beside the dried river- bed a half-mile or so from the deserted &sar, Adventure and from time to time they sent the camel water-corps with a load of moisture to the column that crept by a mile distant, like a great party-colored snake whose brilliant maculations were blending to a uniform shade in the sudden dusk. The bright uniforms of the Chasseurs and the Zouaves ceased to flash, likewise the white turbans of the Spahis and the coats of the horses, and the machine-guns strapped on the camels, and the small can- non, and the auto-mitrailleuse that snorted through sand axle-deep and over rocky hammada. Even the hues of the tricolor blended and the snake became bronze—all bronze, the hue of men’s faces and the fine desert sand that floated about them like a veil of delicate texture. The Zouaves began to light their camp- fires, for their orders were to hold the wells until morning, when they would procure a last supply of water before deserting them. An hour before they had thoroughly pa- trolled the ksar and found it vacant, and its inhabitants were plain to be seen, miles away—a poverty-stricken band of weep- ing women, squalling children and unwar- like men. There was little danger, for the scouting cavalry had reported that there were no bodies of Arabs in the sparsely- inhabited country that they were travers- ing. But their guides did not know that beyond the shoulder of the mountains that lay to the south a hundred men waited in the naked desert. “ Regardez, mon Capitaine,” said a sous- officier of the Zouaves to his superior. “Took. There is an Arab who comes from the ksar.” The Captain looked in lazy curiosity. A tall, black-faced man wrapped in a white hatk had walked slowly down to the edge of the river, and looked curiously at the camp of the Zouaves and at the column beyond, which had stopped and was making its camp for the night. A sentry stopped the man when he would have crossed the oued. “You can not pass here,” he said con- temptuously. The man’s bulk and his scarred face were formidable, but who would have dreamed of danger from a single Arab when a column of six thousand troops lay only a mile away, when the tents of a company of Zouaves lay just beyond the oued? The sentry did not ] COMICLOOCkKS. EGO