of the
rattler. But the esparto picker has a method of heroic treatment for
both the bite of the viper and the sting of the scorpion. He squats
calmly upon the sand while a brother picker cuts out the flesh that has
been pierced. If he survives the twenty-four hours following, he is
pretty likely to pull through. If not--well, the vultures know when and
where to look.

The esparto grass is delivered to the nearest local market compressed in
bales of five or six hundred weight, held together by a coarse netting
of esparto weave, and shipped to Europe. Nearly all of it goes to Great
Britain. There it is shredded and made into cordage, coarse cloth, or
paper.

But the esparto has a rival so far as its use in making paper is
concerned. The wood pulp of Norway and the United States is slowly
displacing it, and in time esparto will be but little used except for
making cordage or gunny cloth. Already the French Government is having
troubles of its own in providing employment for the esparto pickers, but
it is not likely that such a useful plant will be discarded; on the
contrary, its use is likely to increase in the future.

The camel is the institution upon which the commerce of the desert
depends. A more awkward, ungainly beast can hardly be imagined--a
shambling collection of humps, bumps, knobs, protruding joints, and
sprawling legs seemingly attached to a head and neck in the near
foreground. But that shambling gait will carry a load three times as
heavy as the stoutest pack mule can bear, and it will carry it twice as
far in a day.

A horse or a mule must be fed twice a day, but a camel will worry along
for a week at a time with nothing more substantial than its cud. Horses
and mules cannot traverse regions where the watering places are more
than twelve hours apart, unless water be carried in storage; but the
camel is its own storage reservoir, and can carry a supply sufficient to
last for ten days.

At the end of his week of fasting the hump of the camel has shrunken to
a fraction of its former size. When the animal has a few days of feeding
the hump grows to its former proportions again. Indeed, the hump is
merely a mass of nutrition ready to be formed into flesh and blood.

[Illustration: A caravan crossing the desert on the road to Jaffa]

Within the paunch of the animal and surrounding its stomach are great
numbers of cells capable of holding seven or eight gallons of water.
When the camel drinks copiously