Dinner was awaiting us when we returned to the rest-house. It was a meal which prompted me to raise my hat, metaphorically speaking, to the genius and organization of the Transat, which feeds and lodges the traveler along the fringe of the Sahara as efficiently as Fred Harvey does along the line of the Santa Fé. We had vegetable soup, and fish fresh-caught in the Gulf of Gabés, and roast lamb (which is to all Moslem lands what roast beef is to England), and a crisp green salad, and for dessert such a soufflé as only a French chef can produce, the whole topped off by a cobwebbed bottle of Mouton Rothschild and the syrup-like Arab coffee. Then we huddled about a meager wood fire—for wood is a luxury which must be use sparingly in the desert—to smoke and sip our liqueurs and peruse two-months-old copies of “_L’Illustration_” and “_Le Rire_” until it was decently late enough to go to bed. The bedrooms were as damp and chilly as a refrigerator, but, having in mind the tragic experience of three Americans at this same rest-house some weeks before, we did not insist on any attempt to heat them. The Americans in question had, despite the warnings of the Arab servants, ordered no less than four charcoal braziers lighted in their room. Then, in order still further to raise the temperature, for it was a bitterly cold night, they had proceeded to close all the doors and windows, thereby transforming the room into what very nearly proved to be a lethal chamber. When their chauffeur sought to arouse them the following morning there was no response. The door was broken down, and the travelers were found unconscious in their beds, overcome by the charcoal fumes and at the point of death from asphyxiation. [Illustration: THE FANTASTIC DWELLINGS OF MECHOUNECH Rise like Chinese pagodas above the pools and palm-trees of an oasis in the Tunisian Sahara]