The road on leaving Ghardaïa is the same by which one arrives, but, after following it for ten kilometers, one turns sharply to the right along the desert track. There is at once an impression of desolation and loneliness—no more telegraph poles, no more milestones, little to mark the sides of the road. At first the flat-topped hills are on either side, then gradually they give way to great rolling expanses stretching away, away on all sides; even the scrub has disappeared; it is the first real impression of the Sahara, and, though the noisy rush of the car makes one forget the solitude, the silence and loneliness appal one at any stop one makes. Some twenty kilometers along the track another track branches off to the right. It must not be taken, as it leads to Ouargla, to the Hoggar, to the far south until it reaches Timbuctou. A little farther on, as if nature wished to fool the traveler, one suddenly sees a splash of green winding about among the stony plain. It looks like some lovely river shaded by trees, and, though there is no water running between its banks, it is a river making its way below the surface of the ground, to spring up later at some oasis. But it is soon left behind, and the country becomes more and more desertic, though, curiously enough, it has not such a cruel aspect as the land about Ghardaïa. The hills are of a delicate rose color and the lines less hard; it is the prelude to the sand. The road starts climbing, then all of a sudden, as it tops the rise, the oasis of Guerrera appears, solitary in the middle of these pink hills. It is the most impressive sight of the whole journey. Battlemented walls surround the town, as it piles itself into a pinnacle surmounted by the cone-like minaret. At its feet lies the oasis, with its thirty thousand palm-trees bowing in the breeze. It is one of the most amazing spectacles any traveler can wish to see—an impression of desolation, of solitude, of green vegetation, of a town of a past age. There is quite comfortable accommodation in the _bordj_, and, though the food is almost entirely Arab, it is cleanly cooked. In the itinerary set out at the end of Chapter XXV it has been suggested that Guerrera should be passed through on the way to Touggourt, without stopping, but, though it differs little from the other six towns of the Mzab, its oasis, its remoteness from civilization, make it well worth a longer break in the journey.