The country was strangely desolate, but was not the level, sandy desert Kit had thought. In fact, there was not much sand, and in spots it looked as if the soil was sometimes cultivated. The bank behind Kit's camp was sharply cut as if by an angry torrent, but since he had left the beach he had not seen water. There was not a rabbit or a partridge, although in the dry Canaries rabbits haunt the stony ravines and red-legged partridges run in the prickly pear. Nothing but a pair of buzzards, floating very high up, had crossed the sky.
Half closing his eyelids, Kit looked about. Strange reflections quivered across the stones and distant objects were magnified. In the foreground, the light was dazzling, and the hollow melted into a luminous belt of brown and yellow. A euphorbia bush with stiff, thick stalks, however, was harshly green and looked like a house, although it was but four or five feet high. The euphorbia puzzled Kit; in a country where one found no water, its stalks were tender with milky sap. He glanced at his companions. Their cotton clothes had gone yellow, their skin was brown, and he thought one could not distinguish them a short distance off. An hour since he imagined somebody had looked out from behind a stone. Although he wanted to meet the Berbers, he did not want to think they cautiously followed his track.
He mused about the barrenness of the country. At Lanzarote, sixty miles from the African coast, it sometimes did not rain for six or eight months, and then, when the concrete cisterns were nearly dry, it rained in floods. Perhaps it was like that in Morocco; sheep and camels could not live if it did not rain at all. Kit began to think about the good bishop who used all his fortune to send the people of Lanzarote water.
A sailor shouted, and Kit jumped up. A cloud of dust rolled down the wady, and in the dust, about sixty yards off, men on camels rode for the camp. Kit watched their advance with dull surprise. A few moments since he had seen nobody and a camel is a large object to hide. It looked as if the Berbers had sprung from the sand. Then he heard the humming flight of a stone and a camel swerved. A sailor laughed hoarsely and stooped to get another stone for his sling, but Kit stopped the man. He had come to meet the Berbers and they carried long guns. Had they meant to hurt him, they could have hidden behind the stones and shot the party.