districts occupy the beds of vast
ancient lakes, now almost dry, of which the existing _chotts_, or very
salt pools, are the last shrunken and evanescent relics.

And this point about the water brings me at last to a cardinal fact in
the constitution of deserts which is almost always utterly misconceived
in Europe. Most people at home picture the desert to themselves as
wholly dead, flat, and sandy. To talk about the fauna and flora of
Sahara sounds in their ears like self-contradictory nonsense. But, as a
matter of fact, that uniform and lifeless desert of the popular fancy
exists only in those sister arts that George II.--good, practical
man--so heartily despised, 'boetry and bainting.' The desert of real
life, though less impressive, is far more varied. It has its ups and
downs, its hills and valleys. It has its sandy plains and its rocky
ridges. It has its lakes and ponds, and even its rivers. It has its
plants and animals, its oases and palm-groves. In short, like everything
else on earth, it's a good deal more complex than people imagine.

One may take Sahara as a very good example of the actual desert of
physical geography, in contradistinction to the level and lifeless
desert that stretches like the sea over illimitable spaces in verse or
canvas. And here, I fear, I am going to dispel another common and
cherished illusion. It is my fate to be an iconoclast, and perhaps long
practice has made me rather like the trade than otherwise. A popular
belief exists all over Europe that the late M. Roudaire--that De Lesseps
who never quite 'came off'--proposed to cut a canal from the
Mediterranean into the heart of Africa, which was intended, in the
stereotyped phrase of journalism, to 'flood Sahara,' and convert the
desert into an inland sea. He might almost as well have talked of
cutting a canal from Brighton to the Devil's Dyke and 'submerging
England,' as the devil wished to do in the old legend. As a matter of
fact, good, practical M. Roudaire, sound engineer that he was, never
even dreamt of anything so chimerical. What he did really propose was
something far milder and simpler in its way, but, as his scheme has
given rise to the absurd notion that Sahara as a whole lies below
sea-level, it may be worth while briefly to explain what it was he
really thought of doing.

Some sixty miles south of Biskra, the most fashionable resort in the
Algerian Sahara, there is a deep depression two hundred and fifty miles
long, p