586 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



North Africa than which a more luscious fruit can hardly be found 

 anywhere, not even on the volcanic slopes of the famous Hegyalya 

 of Hungary and ice. Unfortunately, health considerations re- 

 quired (or, at least, we thought that they so required) that the last- 

 named article should be associated with some vinous or mineral 

 water, and we therefore could not indulge in what would have been 

 at the time one of the greatest of luxuries ice-water. 



Still early in the evening the pattering of raindrops taught us 

 that the Sahara was even in the most heated and driest portion of the 

 year not entirely rainless a correction to geographical statements 

 of a kind of which we had many to make during our African experi- 

 ences. The rain was of not long duration, nor of more than feeble 

 quality, but before it ceased it was accompanied by hail and a vivid 

 showing of lightning in the western sky. 



The sleeping apartments of this interesting hotel opened on 

 stone corridors either in the front or in the rear; the spacious door- 

 ways, which in most cases took the place of both doorway and win- 

 dow, permitted of a generous exchange of inside and outside air, but 

 it can not be said that there was enough of this to produce a really 

 cooling effect. Even sprinkling the stone flooring of the rooms pro- 

 duced hardly more than a momentary relief against the pressure of 

 a somewhat suffocating atmosphere; yet, with all, we managed to 

 pass a sufficiently comfortable night, and one that surely was not 

 lacking in interest as the first night in an African oasis. 



Biskra lies thirty-three miles beyond El-Kantara, and therefore 

 about this distance within the Sahara itself. To it outliers of the 

 Great Atlas still descend, but beyond its final palm begins that 

 almost endless expanse of gravel and sand gently moving here into 

 dunes and sand hills, elsewhere covering with a thin crust the under- 

 lying rock of the region which constitutes the sandy Sahara. 

 From any eminence in the town the eye wanders far into the wilder- 

 ness of this lonely expanse flat as the surface of the sea, more silent 

 than the melancholy waste of the deep ocean. Biskra is elevated but 

 three hundred and sixty feet above the sea, and from it the land 

 gently falls away until, at the great Schott Melghigh, it is carried 

 down seventy feet or more below the actual ocean level. It lies on 

 the caravan route to Tuggart, Ouargla, and the central Soudan, the 

 route which as late as 1881 saw the annihilation of the Government 

 expedition of Flatters, and passes but little to one side of the terri- 

 tory of Ghadames, where was enacted the tragedy of the past year 

 the extermination of the exploring column of Count Moras. 



It can hardly be said that Biskra is as yet what has been claimed 

 for it, a truly charming wintering resort. If climate alone can make 

 a place charming, it probably is such, as, apart from sand storms and 



