eys," quickly interrupted Tartarin, becoming quite red
at memory of Noiraud. "How can you expect," he added, hypocrite that he
was, "that such little beasts could carry all our apparatus?"

The prince smiled.

"You are making a mistake, my illustrious friend. However weakly and
meagre the Algerian bourriquot may appear to you, he has solid loins. He
must have them so to support all that he does. Just ask the Arabs. Hark
to how they explain the French colonial organisation. 'On the top,' they
say, 'is Mossoo, the Governor, with a heavy club to rap the staff; the
staff, for revenge, canes the soldier; the soldier clubs the settler,
and he hammers the Arab; the Arab smites the Negro, the Negro beats
the Jew, and he takes it out of the donkey. The poor bourriquot having
nobody to belabour, arches up his back and bears it all.' You see
clearly now that he can bear your boxes."

"All the same," remonstrated Tartarin, "it strikes me that jackasses
will not chime in nicely with the effect of our caravan. I want
something more Oriental. For instance, if we could only get a camel"--

"As many as you like," said His Highness; and off they started for the
Arab mart.

It was held a few miles away, on the banks of the Shelliff. There were
five or six thousand Arabs in tatters here, grovelling in the sunshine
and noisily trafficking, amid jars of black olives, pots of honey, bags
of spices; and great heaps of cigars; huge fires were roasting whole
sheep, basted with butter; in open air slaughter-houses stark naked
Negroes, with ruddy arms and their feet in gore, were cutting up kids
hanging from crosspoles, with small knives.

In one corner, under a tent patched with a thousand colours, a Moorish
clerk of the market in spectacles scrawled in a large book. Here was a
cluster of men shouting with rage: it was a spinning-jenny game, set on
a corn-measure, and Kabyles were ready to cut one another's throats over
it. Yonder were laughs and contortions of delight: it was a Jew trader
on a mule drowning in the Shelliff. Then there were dogs, scorpions,
ravens, and flies--rather flies than anything else.

But a plentiful lack of camels abounded. They finally unearthed one,
though, of which the M'zabites were trying to get rid--the real ship of
the desert, the classical, standard camel, bald, woe-begone, with a long
Bedouin head, and its hump, become limp in consequence of unduly long
fasts, hanging melancholically on one side.

Tarta