Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/197

Rh growth, or even nearly approached it. It is true that the vegetation consists of scattered clumps of bushes, lowly in height and not over-luxuriant in foliage, but their presence is such as to relieve the landscape of the imputation of being a treeless waste. Along almost the entire line of our journey a generous supply of terebinth bushes, one, two, or three feet in height, covered the sand elevations, and with them was a sickly green salsolaceous plant, the exact nature of which I was unable to discover. And if we can fully receive war illustrations recently gathered from the pencil of a staff correspondent, the same feature must be a characteristic of the Sahara about Timbuctoo as well. There are, indeed, a number of spots where the vegetation is even more luxuriant—if a scattering of plants can in any way be called luxuriant—comprising a number of dry herbs, such as the rose of Jericho, which hardly rises a few inches above the surface; on the other hand, there are areas where the vegetation has been completely stamped out, or where it has been buried deep beneath its canopy of sand.

At about four o'clock we entered the depression that is occupied by the great Chott Melghigh. When we first beheld this salt pan from a distance of a few miles it broke upon the landscape with dazzling whiteness. The salt was upon the surface, and the eye failed to distinguish the presence of water. It was like a vast field of immaculate ice thrown into the sands, over which hung the images that were thrust into the sky by the rarely failing mirage. We did not see overturned buildings and trees, or even sheets of water, in these sky pictures; simple blocks of color, glowing in an intense pink illumination, were the expression of the light aberration, and yet they might readily have been taken to represent sections of fortification walls. The reflected images were very much like those which I had watched for hours among the ice of Melville Bay, the same quadrangular blocks cast up to no very great height above the horizon, and seemingly holding no definite relation to any object which was within the field of vision. At one spot only, and that, singularly enough, in the mountainous or broken part of the Sahara, did we see a mirage reflection simulating a body of water, and so true was the deception in this instance that nothing beyond an appeal to the known geography of the region could rid the mind of the false conception that was presented to it. The Chott Melghigh is the largest salt pan of the Sahara, and it occupies a position fifty feet or more below the sea level. It is here that the gifted Koudaire had hoped to bring the waters of the Mediterranean, and to give back to the sea that which once belonged to it. It was while passing this chott that we first experienced the hardship of pulling through the sands. The hollow had accumulated deeply of