294 THE SECRET OF SAHARA: KUFARA 



the zawia, and they sell their dates and produce to the 

 college. 



Two of the students met us half-way across the wadi 

 with a note from Mohammed saying that rooms were 

 being prepared for us in the zawia and Yusuf promptly 

 proceeded to change his clothes. He tore off his tattered 

 shirt, baring a muscular brown torso to the public gaze, 

 produced a mysterious bundle from a sack on my camel 

 and shook from it embroidered waistcoat, silk jerd, 

 yellow shoes and immaculate white linen, all of which he 

 donned as we walked along. When the white walls were 

 very near we fired our revolvers into the air to announce 

 our arrival and Mohammed came out to meet us, smiling 

 broadly. We passed through a big, white arch into a 

 wide, open space with a well in the middle, round which 

 were clustered groups of students who gave us warm 

 greeting. To the right rose the solid, castle-like wall of 

 Sidi Idris's house, whose gallery on the other side looked 

 down on to a beautiful square court of the qubba with 

 its wide-arched and columned arcades. The facade near 

 the square is pierced by a few shuttered windows and 

 the carved main door through which one goes to the 

 qubba court. To the left the square was bordered by a 

 row of neat little round-lintelled doors, each with a slit 

 of window above it, the lodging-houses for the students. 

 A big, two-storied house rose beyond and, at the door 

 of this, we were met by a dehghtful old man with pale, 

 thin face, a long beard as white as his woollen jerd or 

 the colourless walls behind him. 



"Greeting to you and the peace of Allah!" he said, 

 and led us into a dwelling more complicated even than 

 the kaimakaan's house of many courts at Taj. We 

 went up and down little flights of steps which seemed to 

 exist without reason, under low arches, by odd little 

 passages and mud-floored yards, till a longer staircase led 



