Instead of returning to the Tunisian mainland as we had come, we chose another route, motoring to Adjim, on the southern coast of the island, and crossing thence by sailing-boat to Djorf. It was a holiday, and our fellow-passengers had evidently imbibed too freely of the juice of the lotus, for they were boisterous when we started, and when, half-way across, the skipper attempted to collect their fares, they became threatening and abusive. The argument culminated in a fair imitation of an old-time sea-battle—just such an episode, I imagine, as Ulysses and his companions would have loved—the shipmaster and his sailors beating the obstreperous passengers over the head with the oars, while the cargo of braying donkeys, bleating sheep, and cackling fowls contributed to the confusion. It was most entertaining for a time, for no one offered to molest us, but the boat was small and laden to the water’s edge, the wind was rising, and the sea, like the passengers, was beginning to get distinctly rough. Under the circumstances, I was glad to see Harvey and the faithful Cadillac awaiting us on the shore. CHAPTER IX ACROSS THE SHATS TO THE SANDY SEA To one who has been brought up in the belief that cleanliness is next to godliness, the most unpleasant feature of desert travel is the lack of facilities for bathing. You never appreciate the luxury of a tub, soap, and an unlimited supply of warm water until you find yourself in a hot and dusty land where they are unobtainable. The Compagnie Générale Transatlantique—or, as it is usually referred to in North Africa, the “Transat”—has supplied this need in the score or more of admirably equipped hotels which it has established along the main routes of travel, but, once you leave the beaten paths, a bath-tub, or the water with which to fill it, is as unobtainable as ice in Hades. In the Hôtel de l’Oasis at Gabés, and again at the residency at Houmt-Souk, we had been provided with large, circular receptacles of tin into which the Arab servants had poured an inch or so of tepid water, but these extremely sketchy ablutions had about as much resemblance to a real bath as the shivering damsel depicted in “September Morn” has to the surf-riders at Waikiki. So when I learned that the hot springs of El Hamma, a little oasis town on the route to Tozeur, had been famous as a bathing-resort ever since Roman times, I insisted that we spend the night there instead of at Gabés. [Illustration: LIKE FEATHERED BONNETS ON THE HEADS OF A SAVAGE ARMY The date-palms rise against the sky line. An oasis is not necessarily a well, a patch of grass, and a palm on either hand, as the novelists and the motion-picture makers would have you believe. Some of the Saharan oases are hundreds of square miles in extent, supporting thousands of people and hundreds of thousands of date-palms]