132 THE DESERT AND THE OCEAN. 



motionless, a congealed sea, or, rather, it is the smooth bed of a sea 

 whose waters have disappeared. Science teaches us that such is the 

 fact ; and now as ever the expression of the reality is more picturesque, 

 more eloquent than all the comparisons created by the imagina- 

 tion."* 



An eminent French artist, M. Fromentin, whose skill with the pen 

 equals his talent with the brush, has also painted this " congealed sea" 

 in grand and poetic language. "The first impression," he says, "pro- 

 duced by this glowing lifeless picture, composed of the sun, space, and 

 solitude, is keen, and cannot be compared to any other. Little by 

 little, however, the eye grows accustomed to the grandeur of the lines, 

 to the emptiness of space, to the denudation of the earth ; and if any- 

 thing can still astonish, it is that one becomes sensible to effects which 

 change so little, and is so powerfully affected by spectacles in reality 

 of the simplest character, "-f- 



I must also enumerate among the " artists in words " who have 

 painted the wonders of the Sahara, General Daumas, not one of the 

 least distinguished of the Franco- Algerine warriors. He describes it in 

 the following language : " It is a naked and barren immensity, 

 this sea of sand, whose eternal waves, agitated to-day by the choub, 

 will to-morrow be heaped up immovable, and which are slowly fur- 

 rowed by those fleets called caravans." 



General Daumas, it is evident, confines himself to the scientific 

 realism, which M. Martins prefers to the glowing and inexact imagery 

 of the poets, and conveys in a few words an accurate yet very pic- 

 turesque idea of that arid sea, where the wind stirs up rolling waves 

 of sand instead of foaming billows, and which the Arabs call Falat. 

 I shall place before the reader, however, the description given by M. 

 Martins himself, for it represents both the ensemble and the details of 

 the picture. 



" If the Desert of the Plateaux," he says,* " be the image of a sea 

 suddenly fixed during a level calm, the Desert of Sand represents to 



* Martins. " Du Spitzberg au Sahara," in loc. 

 t Fromentin. " Une Etc dans le Sahara." 



