hosts', beside sending a bag of dates for our journey, which quickly disappeared under Omar's careful eye. He received us in his porch, lying on a mastaba, and our interview was very short, chiefly occupied on his part by compliments to our mighty nation, of whom he now first beheld representatives. He had found four camels for us, with four sehaurs and a mounted guide, being an old ragged retainer of his house, bearing a gun twice his own length, but whose presence we were assured would do more for us from the sanctity of his master than any letter of bey or khalifat. We were also accompanied by a negro with a long gun, the "Eliezer of Damascus" of the marabout of Temaçin, on his way to the Tunisian frontier, to welcome his master's return from Mecca.

We ended the day and the year at Tuggurt in purchasing necessaries and looking up our chattels for our ten days' expedition to the oasis of Souf. Alas! my pet lizard, Ed Dabb, which had accompanied us for weeks, but which I had here indiscreetly left behind, I found dead of a broken head administered by some idle Arab or wanton soldier.

The next morning I rose at half-past three, and called Omar, who was now hopelessly demoralized by the seductions of the city. He went out to call the sehaurs, that the camels might be loaded, but disappeared for hours, and we at last discovered him gossiping in a bakehouse. Thus we did not start till seven o'clock, and two precious hours were irretrievably lost. We found that the Khalifat of Tuggurt had secured for us five camels, of which we selected two, and took also another guide, thus starting with eight mounted followers, our own horses, and six camels. We soon left the marshes with their saltpetre-troughs and ruddy

shieldrake feeding among them, and entered upon the desert. Our course was nearly due east.

It was a bleak and miserable New Year's-day. Piercing cold, clouds of sand, a biting north wind, and a sun, glaring but icy, peering through a clear, hard atmosphere. Our very bones were pierced, though I had put on two flannel shirts and a thick burnous. In spite

Marabout near Tuggurt, on the road to Souf.

of my crape spectacles and the brim of my hat over my face, my eyes were in torture, and with sand, wind, and glare, became so inflamed I could scarcely open them. Added to which, my stirrup was irretrievably broken from my saddle, and I had before me a two or three days' ride on my somewhat unmanageable Gazelle. No wonder we agreed that Souf ought to be a place of no common interest, to repay the toil of reaching it.

We soon commenced a toilsome struggle among undulating sand-hills, and about four o'clock descried a strange pile of stones and a club of palm-wood placed upright amongst them. This was Elouibed, the sole well on the route. In a hollow below this guide-post we found a shallow well, about six feet deep, where we watered

our horses and ourselves. Strange episode in this bristling desert, where not the slightest trace of the driest vegetation could be detected! The well was fenced round with stones and pieces of rough brick, or rather sand-cake. Here we were to have made our bivouac had it been a three-days' journey, but, deceived by the fact of the whole distance being only twenty-five leagues, we determined, contrary to the advice of our guides, and to our sorrow, to push on-not, however, before I had had the good fortune to procure three specimens of a lark new to science, and which I never discovered elsewhere (Galerida arenicola, Nob.).

We soon encountered a mass of mamelons of fine loose sand, which rose so abrupt, so fast, and frequent, as to resemble the roll and then the chopping seas of an ocean-storm, in which the far-famed "ships of the desert" proved anything but weatherly. The camels, with a growl and a gurgle, first refused, then headed away from it, and at last floundered across mamelon after mamelon. In the gloom of the evening we could scarcely see we were on a sand-hill, before, with a plunge, the horse commenced an almost perpendicular ascent, then sank knee-deep, and rolled down staggering on the other side. The camels managed better, as the driver, holding on by the tail, steered his ungainly quadruped, who, lurching from side to side, slid down, sometimes on his belly, sometimes on his ribs, to the damage only of our baggage, which became lively on his back, and performed sundry unwonted fantasias.

Soon we too dismounted, the struggle being beyond the powers of our exhausted horses. Always to the knee, sometimes to the waist, as we descended, we waded through the drifts, with our bridles on our arms, and our guns slung to the saddles; while two guides on foot