THE BUBALINE ANTELOPE 153 



". . . in a waste place, where no man comes, 



Or hath come since the making of the world." 



Some three years ago the present writer passed 

 through much of the old antelope country ; flocks of 

 sheep and goats, with their Arab shepherds, 

 wandered where once bubal and addax grazed ; and 

 the haunt of leopard and hyaena was now marked 

 by a trim French town. The days of Gerard and 

 Bombonnel are indeed over! the wild fauna is 

 represented by bands of storks and flocks of 

 cisalpine sparrows rather than by troops of lions 

 and herds of antelope. Ancient Icosium has become 

 modern Algiers ; agents for the Roman games 

 would find it difficult to obtain from the entire 

 colony a single lion for the arena. 



Let us picture the bubal as it lived in the old days, 

 when the Roman sentries guarded their outpost of 

 Calceus Herculis, and the Numidian archers harassed 

 ostrich and bustard on the very margin ofthe desert. 



A wide uneven plain on the northern edge 

 of the Sahara. Far on the horizon, rose-pink 

 against a sky of turquoise, rise the Aures mountains, 

 the home of lion and wild sheep ; in the middle 

 distance an arid valley gives shelter to a spruce, 

 bright-eyed troop of gazelles. Round the remnants 

 of an encampment a few cisalpine sparrows, pert and 

 brisk as their London brethren, peck and bicker ; a 

 desert lark springs into the air, and with a feeble 

 ineffective song dives headlong into the bushes. In 



