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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

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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

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kept in advance on the crests to show the bearings to the straggling company behind. Every one kept shouting and looking to the rear, lest the hindermost should be lost.

After two hours' struggle under the guidance of a sickly moon we entered a scrubby plain, and camped in the dark. The tent-pegs would barely hold, our horses were attached to little bushes, three fires were quickly lighted, dry grass (l'alpha or dreen, "Aristida pungens") was cut from the sparse tufts for fodder, when I discovered to my horror that but one feed of barley apiece was left for our poor beasts, who had two days' toil before them. Omar had professed to purchase two sacks before leaving Tuggurt, and, pointing to the baggage, had assured me of abundance, but it was in vain here to remonstrate with the rascally dragoman. While P. arranged the tent and I cooked the rice, Omar, instead of picketing the horses, was quietly making himself comfortable in his own tent. I boiled over at last he flew into a rage, threw down the tent, danced on it, broke the poles, until I dragged him off by the neck; when, seeking in vain for a knife, and imprecating everything on my head, he rushed forth into the darkness, but returned in an hour, the evil spirit having left him, as though nothing had happened. Having dined on rice and a barley-loaf steeped in coffee, we turned in, resolved on an early start for the morrow.

The day was breaking before the dawdling Bedouin had completed the loading. We went on in advance with one guide mounted on a dromedary, bearing our wraps, lest the camels should be sand-stayed another day on the route. At length we reached a higher range of sand-hills, called Sif Sultaun (the Sultan's sword). A cold sun glared through what appeared a

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