BOKHARI. BOGHAR 423 Foreign Legion, translated by Lady Duff Gordon ("The French in Algiers "). Abd-el-Kader fired and abandoned it before the arrival of the French troops. The fort has been rebuilt, and dominates the village. Under the cli are some beautifully cultivated gardens, watered by numerous little streamlets; but the general appearance of the rock on which Boghar perches is arid and sun-dried. The artist, M. Fromentin, writes "I did not go to Bokhari; it seemed to me dull, cold, curious perhaps, but ennuyeux. As for Boghar, it is the true land of Ham, It is strikingly quaint. I know nothing like it in matter of colouring. I could never have imagined anything so-must I say yellow? The word does not in the least convey the idea of the thing. It robs it of all fineness of tone. To express the action of the sun on this burning soil, by saying that it is yellow, makes it at once ugly-vulgarizes it. Let us then say nothing as to its colour, but declare only that it is beautiful. “The village, on this background, is white, streaked with brown and lilac, overlooking a little ravine; it might be cut from a block of porphyry or agate, so richly is it veined with colour from delicate lilac to blood-red. Here, by a kind of miracle, two or three green fig-trees; and as many lentisks, are growing. Besides these, there is nothing around Boghar that resembles a tree or even grass-the soil is sandy and as bare as a cinder."-Un Été dans le Sahara. Even more exciting and interesting to the traveller will be the view which the "Balcony of the South," for the first time gives him, of that vast mysterious region which he has known and pictured to his mind's eye from a child upwards -the Great Sahara. But, like everything else which we so dream of, it is utterly unlike that picture; and, at the first sight, it must be confessed, it is disappointing. We want the limitless stretch of yellow sand, with perhaps, the dying camel in the midst, to which our ideas have so long been assimilating the notion of the Great Sahara. We look in vain for the spotted leopard-skin-for the distant waving palm-trees, for the sandy whirlwind. We look out; we gaze with a wondering bewilderment over a green and brown billowy expanse stretching away into purple distances; we strain our eyes upon a horizon where sky and mountain meet in an infinity of blue. We are told that this is our long-dreamed-of Sahara, and we feel that life has lost an illusion the more; we discover, though perhaps not for the first time, that realities are but snares to lure us to disappointment; and yet, in spite of ourselves, we gaze and gaze upon the scene before us, and the longer we gaze the more we find to attract and to repel us-to inspire us at once with a notion of mysterious illimitable space, and barren desolation. By-and-by we grow into content with the Sahara as it is, instead of that which we have imagined it to be. There is a bridle-road, one day's journey over the mountains, from Bokhari to Teniet-el-Had. CHAPTER XXV. ON THE WAY TO THE DESERT.-BOKHARI TO EL-AGHOUAT. "Mid far sands The palm-tree-cinctured city stands, Bright white beneath, as heaven-bright blue HE journey from Algiers south, as far as Bokhari, pre THE sents no difficulties, and is not fatiguing. Beyond this point, however, it is scarcely advisable for travellers to pass, who are not disposed in a measure to rough it. From Bokhari to El-Aghouat diligences run, the journey occupying three long days. The diligences are anything but good, being in fact only char-à-bancs, open at the sides, with curtains as their sole protection; and the only accommodation to be found on the route is in caravansaries bare of every comfort, and where food is sometimes scarce. "These are," says Murray, "managed for the most part by obliging people, and the beds are clean. Charges fixed. Bed, 2 fr.; déjeuner, 3 fr.; dinner, 3 to 4 fr." Plenty of wraps should be taken, as the weather is sometimes very cold on the steppes of the Sahara, even late on into the spring. From Bokhari the Sahara may be said to begin, the Sahara being understood to be by no means a mere desert, but as the general name of a great country composed of plains and hills, with intervening tracts of sand, more or less inhabited by two races-those who have fixed habitations in towns, and those who wander from place to place, and who every year, when they have laid in their provisions of grain from the Tell, emigrate with thousands of camels and all their belongings into the southern tracts. The old popular notion which associated the Great Sahara with an enormous moving sand-ocean is by no means carried out by facts, or by the reports of those travellers who have penetrated into even some of its wildest regions. The most interesting account that we possess of Saharan travel, and the only one likely to serve as a guide-book to those who wish to make excursions to some of the remote oases, is the "Great Sahara" of Canon Tristram, written in 1860, since which time, however, various routes have been opened out by the French. These desert journeys are even yet attended with considerable risk and difficulty, and will scarcely be within the programme of ordinary travellers. But to El-Aghouat, the route presents neither difficulty nor danger, and discomforts are the greatest drawbacks to which the traveller will be likely to be exposed. The distance is one hundred and ninety miles due south from Bokhari. Soon after leaving this town, which from its southern side is said to resemble the hill-cities of Judea, a very desolate region is entered-the valley of the Chelif. "Imagine a country of stone, beaten by hot winds, and baked to its very entrails, with marbly earth polished like pottery, and so bare of vegetation that it might have been subjected to the action of fire: horizontal bare hills cut into fantastic serrated shapes, narrow valleys as bare and clean as a barn-floor, the only vegetation a few dust-laden oleanders burnt up by the fierce sun, and all this as far as the eye can reach, neither red, yellow, nor brown, but exactly the colour of the lion's skin!"—Un Été dans le Sahara. Passing through this rocky region, which is supposed to represent the coast-line at the time when the Sahara was covered by the sea, and which is marked by water-worn caverns, the road emerges by a narrow defile on the first great plain of the south, affording pasturage for an immense number of flocks and herds of camels, the latter seen always feeding one behind the other in curious long lines. The black tents of the herdsmen alone break the monotony of the plain, which extends for a distance of some seventy miles due south, bounded in the dim blue horizon by the mountains of the Seven Sisters, the Djebel Sahari. Ain-Ousera is the place where the diligence stops for breakfast. Here are a very clean and good caravansary and a well, on the border of what was once a salt-marsh, but which has now been drained. "This first aspect of the desert made me sad. It was not the impression of a fine country struck by death and condemned to sterility; it was not like the skeleton of Boghar, strange but striking. It was the oppression of a great space without form, almost without colour-it was emptiness, nothingness, a thing forgotten of God. Sadness and sameness, greyness and indecision of outline, these were its characteristics. Night when it fell added nothing to the inexpressible desolation of the place." -Un Été dans le Sahara. The only vegetation, and that extending, it would seem, into almost illimitable space, is the yellowing dried-up green of the alfa—the desert grass. This plant, which had long been considered an almost hopeless weed, has within the last few years, been discovered to be one of the most |