160 THE Q'SOUR OF OUARGLA. 



dimensions, and their dense foliage over-arches a small world of fruit 

 trees. Outside the gardens grow some wild date-palms, which yield a 

 smaller crop, but whose fruit is much more savoury. Two avenues, 

 or clearings, bisecting the forest from north to south, lead to the 

 q'sour, or village, of Ouargla. This q'sour, like every other, is built 

 of sun-dried earth, and surrounded by a circular rampart in very bad 

 condition, six to thirteen feet in height, and four and a-half feet 

 thick at the base. It is flanked with loop-holed towers, and encircled 

 externally by a muddy moat, crossed by six causeways leading to as 

 many gates. 



Before some of these gates are planted the small entrenched 

 camps, wherein the Arab shepherds of the neighbourhood take 

 refuge with their flocks what time the oasis is menaced by an enemy. 



The q'sour of Ouargla is divided into three quarters, inhabited 

 by three tribes, who do not live always on the most friendly terms. 

 In appearance it resembles the Saharan q'sours, which have all a 

 strong family likeness ; there are the mosque, and the governor's 

 residence, and the open market-place, and the narrow squalid streets, 

 often obstructed by heaps of unclean and unsavoury rubbish; and the 

 low dull houses, pierced with holes instead of windows, which have 

 seldom any shutters ; so that the traveller, when he, penetrates into 

 these dismal quarters, is startled by the contrast which they present 

 to the picture of enchanted palaces full of shade, perfume, and fresh- 

 ness, drawn by his eager imagination. Our poets and romancists have 

 much to answer for. Their ideal East is very different from that 

 actual East, in all its heat, and -noisomeness, and glare, which the 

 voyager finds around him, and which seems to have lost much of its 

 beauty along with its grandeur and its power. Pleasant to the 

 fancy is the palm-grove, pleasant the garden with its golden and 

 purple fruitage, but the warm (and often mineral) waters which 

 irrigate, or rather inundate the soil, exhale the most deleterious 

 emanations, so that the unfortunate inhabitants are constantly 

 decimated by fever, blinded by ophthalmic disease, and devoured 

 by insects ! 



