The driver was killed outright, and
his widow draws a respectable pension from the company.
Since then two engines are always employed to move the train up the few
miles beyond Gafsa.
The cream-tinted level is speckled with white incrustations and sombre
tufts of desert herbs; here and there, where the winter's rain lingers
underground, are spots of brilliant green; short-lived crops of corn, sown
by the nomads. The hills to the right of the line are bare and torn into
wild ravines; lilac-hued patches, ever changing and fair to see, move
among their warm complexities: cloud-shadows. Here, if anywhere, one
learns that shadows are not always grey or black; even those cast in
moonlight have a certain ghostly coloration.
It was a marvellously clear day, and not many miles before reaching our
destination we looked back upon the downhill route traversed which, so far
as one could see, might have been a dead level. At a distance of nearly
twenty miles Gafsa was plainly visible--white buildings piercing a dusky
line of palms--an hour's walk, it seemed. I observed in the brushwood a
couple of bustards, their heads peering above the herbage.
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