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 for tents and garments; the finer quality, exported, comes to us in the form of dainty brushes; his flesh, they say, is just as good as beef, and his hump is famous as a gastronomic luxury. His bones only are disdained and left to float like wreckage on this yellow sea. Verily, the camel is a useful quadruped, meriting a happier fate!

LAKE MELRHIR

As the sun mounts higher in the cloudless sky, the heat becomes intense. A flood of light submerges everything. Above us rolls an incandescent globe, scorching the atmosphere. Some one has said that "the sun is sovereign of these solitudes: a wandering sultan who will tolerate no life along his path, who devours the air and the clouds and the earth, and then when this monarch has destroyed all realities, he creates illusions to torment the traveler." A mirage is ever present on the horizon; lakes and mountains, groves of palms, form and dissolve as if nature were conducting a stereopticon lecture with the surface of the desert for a