Three cases of respectable dimensions were carried one after another to the Captain's room, and the grimaces of the porters said enough as to their weight. I discreetly left Saint-Avit to his unpacking and began opening the mail which the convoy had sent me. He returned to the office a little later and glanced at the several reviews which I had just recieved. "So," he said. "You take these." He skimmed through, as he spoke, the last number of the _Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft fur Erdkunde in Berlin_. "Yes," I answered. "These gentlemen are kind enough to interest themselves in my works on the geology of the Wadi Mia and the high Igharghar." "That may be useful to me," he murmured, continuing to turn over the leaves. "It's at your service." "Thanks. I am afraid I have nothing to offer you in exchange, except Pliny, perhaps. And still--you know what he said of Igharghar, according to King Juba. However, come help me put my traps in place and you will see if anything appeals to you." I accepted without further urging. We commenced by unearthing various meteorological and astronomical instruments--the thermometers of Baudin, Salleron, Fastre, an aneroid, a Fortin barometer, chronometers, a sextant, an astronomical spyglass, a compass glass.... In short, what Duveyrier calls the material that is simplest and easiest to transport on a camel. As Saint-Avit handed them to me I arranged them on the only table in the room. "Now," he announced to me, "there is nothing more but books. I will pass them to you. Pile them up in a corner until I can have a book-shelf made." For two hours altogether I helped him to heap up a real library. And what a library! Such as never before a post in the South had seen. All the texts consecrated, under whatever titles, by antiquity to the regions of the Sahara were reunited between the four rough-cast walls of that little room of the bordj. Herodotus and Pliny, naturally, and likewise Strabo and Ptolemy, Pomponius Mela, and Ammien Marcellin. But besides these names which reassured my ignorance a little, I perceived those of Corippus, of Paul Orose, of Eratosthenes, of Photius, of Diodorus of Sicily, of Solon, of Dion Cassius, of Isidor of Seville, of Martin de Tyre, of Ethicus, of Athenée, the _Scriptores Historiae Augustae_, the _Itinerarium Antonini Augusti_, the _Geographi Latini Minores_ of Riese, the _Geographi Graeci Minores_ of Karl Muller.... Since I have had the occasion to familiarize myself with Agatarchides of Cos and Artemidorus of Ephesus, but I admit that in this instance the presence of their dissertations in the saddle bags of a captain of cavalry caused me some amazement.