We made slow progress to Sheshoua, where the river that might have barred our road to the coast was as friendly as the N’fiss had been on the previous day.  The track to its banks had been flat and uninteresting enough; what good work the winter rains had done by way of weaving a flower carpet on the plains, the summer sun had destroyed.  There was a considerable depression in the plain, though we could not notice it at the slow pace forced upon us, and this accounted for the absence of water between the rivers, and for the great extent of the calcareous gravel, in which few plants could thrive.  Only the zizyphus lotus, from whose branches little white snails hung like flowers, seemed to find real nourishment in the dry ground, though colocynth and wild lavender were to be seen now and again.  But by the Sheshoua River the change was very sudden and grateful to the eye.

A considerable olive grove, whose grey-green leaves shone like silver in the light breeze, offered shade and shelter to a large colony of doves.  There was a thriving village, with a saint’s tomb for chief attraction, and solid walls to suggest that the place does not enjoy perennial tranquillity.  But even though there are strangers who trouble these good folk, their home could not have looked more charmingly a haunt of peace than it did.  All round the village one saw orchards of figs, apricots, and pomegranate trees; the first with the leaves untouched by the summer heat, the apricots just at the end of their blossoming, and the pomegranates still in flower.  In place of the dry, hard soil that was so trying to the feet of man and beast, there were here meadows in plenty, from which the irises had only lately died.  I saw the common English dandelion growing within stone’s throw of a clump of feathery palms.

Tired after the vigil of the previous night and the long hours that had led up to it, we reclined at our ease under the olives, determined to spend the night at Sidi el Muktar, some fifteen or twenty miles away.  From there one can hunt the great bustard, and I had hoped to do so until I saw the animals that were to take us to the coast.  Neither the bustard nor the gazelle, that sometimes roams Sidi el Muktar’s plains, had anything to fear from those noble creatures.  The kaid alone might have pursued bird or beast, but as his gun was innocent of powder and shot there would have been nothing but exercise to seek.

After a two-hours’ rest, given in one case more to sleep than lunch, we moved on towards the village of Sidi el Muktar, passing some curious flat-topped hills called by the natives Haunk Ijjimmal.[48] The oasis had ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and the road became as uninteresting as was our own crawling gait.  I noticed that the Susi muleteers were travelling very sadly, that they had not among them an echo of the songs that had sounded so strangely on the previous day, and I bade Salam find the cause of the depression, and ask whether the young lad whose