Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/597



T was, I believe, Fromentin, the eminent French scholar and art critic, who remarked that the sudden view of the Orient through the gateway of El-Kantara presented the most contrasting picture of life and Nature that was to be found anywhere on the surface of the earth. How nearly true this statement may be it is hardly possible to determine, but it is certain that it would be difficult to find elsewhere on the globe a more striking closing of one world and opening of another. Through El-Kantara passes the solemn tread of the camel trains, whose destination is the silent Sahara and the deeper Soudan; in it are offered up the fervent Moslem prayers for a safe journey and return. The giant buttresses of the Atlas Mountains, red and purple with the glow of the morning and twilight sun, look down upon a tempestuous mountain torrent which has cut its way athwart their core, and grim and crag-eaten rocks, buried deep within their own bowlder masses, wall off with heights of three thousand to five thousand feet the gray and yellow panorama of shifting sands—the warm heart of the southern Sahara.

For years I had longed to see and feel this mysterious land—the land which had made forever famous the names of travelers who had sought to penetrate it—a land in which even to-day a "No trespass" is loudly written. Mungo Park, Denham, Clapperton, Barth, Nachtigal, and the lately deceased Gerhard Rohlfs, were heroes of my boyhood days, and now we were approaching the theater of their