24 AN ARAB DOUAR. ch. i. 



Hay's villa of Ravensrock on oux way back to the town. 

 Near the track we passed close to a native village, or 

 douar, the first which we had seen. When we had heard 

 that the native population is broadly distinguished into 

 two classes by the fact that some retain their original 

 nomadic habits so far as to live permanently in tents, 

 moving from one spot to another during the course of the 

 year, while the others live in houses, and have become 

 rooted to the soil, it never occurred to us that there could 

 be any difficulty in distinguishing between one class and 

 the other with the help of such obvious characteristic 

 marks. But we soon found that the difference is but 

 slight, and not very apparent. The black camel's hair 

 tent is often, both in seeming and in fact, a more durable 

 dwelling than the miserable huts, composed chiefly of 

 slender branches to which the dried leaves still adhere, 

 covered sometimes with brown straw, and oftener with 

 some tattered fragments of cloth, the remains of worn- 

 out garments. Only the mountain tribes, the descendants 

 of the ancient Bereber stock, whose southern descendants 

 we were to become acquainted with in the valleys of the 

 Great Atlas, have preserved the familiar use of stone 

 masonry in this part of Africa. Laden with plants, and 

 with appetites sharpened by our climb over the hiU, we 

 returned to our comfortable quarters at the Victoria Hotel. 

 We did not pass over the very highest point of the Djebel 

 Kebir ; but an observation taken some sixty or eighty feet 

 lower indicated an elevation of about 800 feet above the 

 isea level. 



