At Medeah, whither I went by the Mouzai’a Pass, so as to see the scene of the fights in which my brothers had played such a noble part, I had another reception, and another fantasia was performed (but this time it was on foot), by the Coulouglis and the Beni Mzab, wearing great hats with ostrich feathers in them.  Then came a grotesque imitation of the fantasia, performed by the colonial militia, all drunk, who fired their pistols off under my nose and blackened my face with powder.  General Marey, commanding at Medeah, owned the Romance vintage in Burgundy, and gave us some to drink at dinner, which did not diminish the general cordiality.  Ah, well! a glass of good French wine, drunk far from home and the dissensions of the mother country, among comrades ready to give their lives for her at any moment, is a thing worth remembering!

Boghar, hideous and scorchingly hot as it is. would be downright uninhabitable if it were not washed by the waters of the Cheliff.  The necessities arising from our conquest of the country had made it a revictualling post for our columns, and a trial had just been made there of a new sort of provision, described as rations maigres.  These consisted of biscuit and dried cod, and not having been issued within the period reckoned for, they were beginning to go bad.  To avoid financial loss, a pretty numerous garrison had been at once despatched to Boghar to perform the far from pleasant duty of consuming them.  Thanks to the exertions of the officer in command, M. de Monet, who afterwards attained the rank of general, and lost both his arms in the Crimea, the spirit of his men was admirable, but their sanitary condition was quite deplorable.  And when I received the officers, one of them, a captain of Engineers, with the tacit assent of his chief, acted as the mouthpiece of the rest in begging me to raise my voice to put an end to their cruel sufferings.  He represented to me that the unhealthiness of the place was aggravated by a process of poisoning.  The troops had been sent up simply to eat damaged biscuit and stinking cod.  There was no other food issued for the men, and as the neighbourhood produced nothing whatever, it was impossible to vary it in any way.  Everybody was more or less ill in consequence, and if this state of things went on they must all die.  A distinguished officer, M. de Cissey, who had been detailed as my aide-de-camp during my trip, took the poor fellows’ case in hand, and undertook to lay their complaint before the general.

I saw something else at Boghar which was not so depressing—­another fantasia, a huge one, performed by thousands of Arabs, who had hastened in from all quarters.  At the very height of the show, another tribe, the most picturesque of them all, the Ouled-Nails, arrived on the scene, having travelled thirty leagues to do homage to me as the “son of the Sultan.”  There were 1,500 horsemen and their wives, who were carried by something like a hundred camels in a kind of palanquin, covered with gaudy stuffs, which they call “atatich.”  When they arrived, the excitement of the fantasia rose to madness.  The horsemen from the south, in their splendid dresses, showed off all their skill, and whenever one of them performed any specially brilliant feat, the deafening “you-you” of the women rose from the circle of palanquins as from the benches of a circus.