The people live in small houses, and ply their business quite humbly. Modernisms have not crept in, and the shopkeepers do not worry the visitor to buy. When the day’s work is over they repair to their gardens—the gardens which have made Laghouat famous. Every man who can afford it has his own piece of land in the oasis. It may be an acre, it may be three, but, all the same, it is his garden and he is proud of it. Surrounded by high walls, it is planted with palm-trees, peach-trees, vines, apricots, figs, oranges, pomegranates, pears, medlars, and, in fact, all kinds of fruit. The oasis being at a comparatively high level, the date-palms do not produce a very marketable fruit, such as is found at Biskra in the south, and in Laghouat a palm-tree only brings in fifty francs. All the other fruit-trees, however, bear abundantly, too abundantly, for, there being no railway, there is no outlet, and in early summer peaches can be had for one franc the dozen, and apricots are given away. Some people even find it too much trouble to carry the fruit to market, and they merely eat what they can and use the rest for manure. Vegetables are in almost the same position, and are sold for negligible sums. It is astonishing to realize that such fertility exists so close to the wastes of the desert. There is a wonderful opportunity for an enterprising man with capital who comes to Laghouat with a fleet of lorries and bears away the fruit and vegetables to Algiers. The purchase of the raw material will cost him next to nothing; it is merely a question of transport. A jam factory in Laghouat would pay a hundred per cent., but let it be hoped, for the sake of the peace and beauty of the surroundings, that no enterprising capitalist will come and spoil a land of pure delight, where living is so easy and so cheap. To produce all this vegetation, however, there must be water, and, its absence being conspicuous in the south, it may interest the reader to hear how an oasis is watered. The whole of southern Algeria is crossed by rivers, which in the winter have a certain amount of water, but which in the summer are dry, and are in reality only drains to carry off the rain which comes down from the hills after storms. The real rivers of the south follow the water-courses, but they flow underground, and it is only when they rise to the surface that they form an oasis, and, as the Arabs say, the palm-trees spring up with their feet in the water and their heads in the flames. Anywhere along these courses wells can be sunk and the water tapped at a depth varying from one hundred and twenty to twelve hundred feet, and in some cases there are broad underground lakes, known to the natives as Behar Tahtani—_the sea of the underworld_. [Illustration: Sand Storm Getting up on the Sahara] [Illustration: Waterfall of Boiling Water, Hammon, Meskoutine] [Illustration: Arab Falconer Setting Out to Hunt]