ARTESIAN WELLS IN THE DESERT. 467 



at a small depth, generally from 100 to 200 feet, and though con- 

 taining too large a proportion of mineral matter to be acceptable 

 to a European palate, it answers well for irrigation, and does not 

 prove unwholesome to the natives. 



The most obvious use of artesian wells in the desert at present 

 is that of creating stations for the estabhshment of military posts 

 and halting-places for the desert traveller ; but if the supply of 

 water shall prove adequate for the indefinite extension of the sys- 

 tem, it is probably destined to produce a gi-eater geographical 

 transformation than has ever been effected by any scheme of 

 human improvement. 



The most striking contrast of landscape scenery that nature 

 brings near together in time or place, is that between the greenery 

 of the tropics, or of a northern summer, and the snowy pall of 

 leafless winter. Next to this in startling novelty of effect, we 

 must rank the sudden transition from the shady and verdant oasis 

 of the desert to the bare and burning party-colored ocean of sand 

 and rock which surrounds it,* The most sanguine believer in 



presented itself, with its smiling images, to the astonished traveller. Young 

 girls were drawing water at the fountain ; the flocks, the great dromedaries 

 with their slow pace, the horses led by the halter, were moving to the water- 

 ing trough ; the hounds and the falcons enlivened the group of party-colored 

 tents, and living voices and animated movement had succeeded to silence and 

 desolation." — Laurent, Memoires aur le Sahara, p. 85. 



Between 1856 and 1864 the French engineers had bored 83 wells in the 

 Hodna and the Saliara of the Province of Constantine, yielding, all together, 

 9,000 gallons a minute, and irrigating more than 125,000 date-palms. — Recltjs, 

 La Terre, i., p. 110. 



* The variety of hues and tones in the local color of the desert is, I think, 

 one of the phenomena which most surprise and interest a stranger to those 

 regions. In England and the United States, rock is so generally covered with 

 moss or earth, and earth with vegetation, that untravelled Englishmen and 

 Americans are not very familiar with naked rock as a conspicuous element of 

 landscape. Hence, in their conception of a bare cliif or precipice, they 

 hardly ascribe definite color to it, but depict it to their imagination as wearing 

 a neutral tint not assimilable to any of the hues with which nature tinges her 

 atmospheric or paints her organic creations. There are certainly extensive 

 desert ranges, chiefly limestone formations, where the surface is either white, 

 or has weathered down to a dull uniformity of tone which can hardly be called 

 color at all ; and there are sand plains and drifting hUls of wearisome monot- 

 ony of tint. But the chemistry of the air, though it may tame the glitter of 

 the limestone to a dusky gray, brings out the green and brown and purple of 

 the igneous rocks, and the white and red and blue and violet and yellow of th« 



