iew. To the green hills covered with trees and shrubs
there succeeded long gray undulations draped like the folds of an
Arab burnous and broken in picturesque masses. In the distance could
be seen the wadys with their torrential waters, their forests of
palm-trees, and blocks of small houses grouped on a hill around a
mosque, among them Metlili, where there vegetates a religious chief,
the grand marabout Sidi Chick.

Before night several hundred miles had been accomplished above a
flattish country ridged occasionally with large sandhills. If the
"Albatross" had halted, she would have come to the earth in the
depths of the Wargla oasis hidden beneath an immense forest of
palm-trees. The town was clearly enough displayed with its three
distinct quarters, the ancient palace of the Sultan, a kind of
fortified Kasbah, houses of brick which had been left to the sun to
bake, and artesian wells dug in the valley--where the aeronef could
have renewed her water supply. But, thanks to her extraordinary
speed, the waters of the Hydaspes taken in the vale of Cashmere still
filled her tanks in the center of the African desert.

Was the "Albatross" seen by the Arabs, the Mozabites, and the Negroes
who share amongst them the town of Wargla? Certainly, for she was
saluted with many hundred gunshot, and the bullets fell back before
they reached her.

Then came the night, that silent night in the desert of which
Felicien David has so poetically told us the secrets.

During the following hours the course lay southwesterly, cutting
across the routes of El Golea, one of which was explored in 1859 by
the intrepid Duveyrier.

The darkness was profound. Nothing could be seen of the Trans-Saharan
Railway constructing on the plans of Duponchel--a long ribbon of
iron destined to bind together Algiers and Timbuktu by way of
Laghouat and Gardaia, and destined eventually to run down into the
Gulf of Guinea.

Then the "Albatross" entered the equatorial region below the tropic
of Cancer. Six hundred miles from the northern frontier of the Sahara
she crossed the route on which Major Laing met his, death in 1846,
and crossed the road of the caravans from Morocco to the Sudan, and
that part of the desert swept by the Tuaregs, where could be heard
what is called "the song of the sand," a soft and plaintive murmur
that seems to escape from the ground.

Only one thing happened. A cloud of locusts came flying along, and
there fell such a cargo of th