APPLETONS' 



POPULAR SCIENCE 



MONTHLY. 



MARCH, 1898 



ASPECTS OF NATURE IN THE AFRICAN SAHARA. 



A SUMMER JOURNEY. 



By Professor ANGELO HEILPEIN. 



IT was, I believe, Fromentin, the eminent French scholar and art 

 critic, who remarked that the sudden view of the Orient through 

 the gateway of El-Kantara presented the most contrasting picture of 

 life and Nature that was to be found anywhere on the surface of the 

 earth. How nearly true this statement may be it is hardly possible 

 to determine, but it is certain that it would be difficult to find else- 

 where on the globe a more striking closing of one world and opening 

 of another. Through El-Kantara passes the solemn tread of the 

 camel trains, whose destination is the silent Sahara and the deeper 

 Soudan; in it are offered up the fervent Moslem prayers for a safe 

 journey and return. The giant buttresses of the Atlas Mountains, 

 red and purple with the glow of the morning and twilight sun, look 

 down upon a tempestuous mountain torrent which has cut its way 

 athwart their core, and grim and crag-eaten rocks, buried deep within 

 their own bowlder masses, wall off with heights of three thousand to 

 five thousand feet the gray and yellow panorama of shifting sands — 

 the warm heart of the southern Sahara. 



For years I had longed to see and feel this mysterious land — the 

 land which had made forever famous the names of travelers who had 

 sought to penetrate it — a land in which even to-day a " No trespass " 

 is loudly written. Mungo Park, Denham, Clapperton, Barth, 

 Nachtigal, and the lately deceased Gerhard Rohlfs, were heroes of 

 my boyhood days, and now we were approaching the theater of their 



TOL. LII. — 42 



