Though spring was now well advanced, and though we were in the edge of the Sahara itself, it was a cold gray day when we set out for El Hamma, and the biting, dust-laden wind which swept across the steppes struck through our heavy rugs and greatcoats and chilled us to the marrow. Shivering, I thought wryly of our friends at home who were doubtless picturing us as sweltering beneath the torrid sun of Africa. Why the Transat considers it worth its while to operate a rest-house at so remote a spot as El Hamma, where European visitors are few and far between, I cannot imagine. But there it was, a Mexican-like, one-story structure of adobe, quite unprepossessing as to its exterior but really charming within, its patio or inner courtyard inclosed by a sort of cloister with Moorish columns from which opened the rooms. In the center of the courtyard there was a small pool and fountain, flanked by palm-trees; and later on, when the weather became warmer, there would be a profusion of flowers. The place was in charge of a Frenchman who had received his culinary training in a Paris restaurant, an exiled Boniface whose sole object in life appeared to be to make his rare guests comfortable and contented. The sight of European faces and the sound of European voices must have been very welcome to him, for he was the only white man in the town. The _hammam_, we learned, was about half a mile away, on the other side of the village. Guided by a domestic from the rest-house, we lost no time in starting thither, for we were tired, chilled, and thickly veneered with desert dust and looked forward eagerly to the luxury of immersing ourselves to the chin in steaming water. Remembering its fame under the Romans, I had pictured in my mind’s eye a rather imposing place, with comfortable dressing-rooms and, no doubt, a series of marble pools and steam-rooms such as one finds in native bathing establishments of the better class throughout the East. A rickety wooden door in a high mud wall was unlocked by an Arab attendant, who ushered us into a spacious inclosure, nearly the whole of which was occupied by a stone-bordered tank. Everything was in the state of untidiness and disrepair characteristic of Arab countries. The tank was filled with boiling water, it is true, from which rose clouds of steam, but its surface was covered with a thick green scum, and the place reeked with the noxious fumes of sulphur. The “dressing-rooms” consisted of a series of cubicles, floored with stone and thatched with palm-fronds and so cold and cheerless that the mere thought of disrobing in them made me shiver. Though, as it happened, no one was using the _hammam_ at the time, the bathing was, I gathered, extremely mixed, Europeans and natives, any one, in fact, who could afford to pay the fee of a few francs, mingling in the pool in a state of complete nudity. I have spent too much of my life in frontier regions to be finical, but one has to draw the line somewhere. Our