You see it, eh ?" Slowly the French ace swept the glasses along the surf-foamed fringes of that desolation.

Across the lenses no tree flung its green promise of shade.

No house, no hut was visible.

Not even a patch of grass could be discerned.

The African coast lay stretched out in ivory nakedness, clean, bare, swept and garnished by simooms, by cruel heat, by the beatings of surf eternal.
Back of it extended an iron hinterland, savage with desert spaces of sun-baked, wrinkled earth and sand here and there leprously mottled with white patches of salt and with what the Arabs call _sabkhah_, or sheets of gypsum.