Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/606

586 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 required (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 experiences. 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 doorways, which in most cases took the place of both doorway and window, 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 produced 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 underlying rock of the region—which constitutes the sandy Sahara. From any eminence in the town the eye wanders far into the wilderness 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 territory 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