Now we were in the Djerid, as the Arabs call the oasis-sprinkled region immediately to the south of the shats. _Djerid_ is the Arabic for palm-frond, and, inferentially, for palm-grove, the name being given to this tract of sand because of the numerous oases which dot it, in the words of some old writer, like the spots on a leopard’s skin. To those who have obtained their ideas of the desert from motion-pictures (made in California) and certain popular but quite inaccurate works of fiction, the word “oasis” conveys a picture of a small patch of vegetation, some scattered clumps of palm-trees, a limpid pool, and, perhaps, a few striped Arab tents, the whole surrounded by a sea of yellow sand. The description is accurate enough as far as it goes, perhaps, but it should be understood that oases are not necessarily of small area. Many of them, on the contrary, are of the size of American counties, with numerous villages, extensive systems of lakes and streams, and vast forests of date-palms. Indeed, some of the great oases of the Inner Sahara, such as Gourara, Tuat, Tafilet, Tidikelt, and Timbuktu, are as large as the State of Rhode Island and support considerable populations, both sedentary and floating, for the larger oases are nearly always important centers of the caravan trade. Our immediate objective, our jumping-off place for the country of the great dunes, was Tozeur, a sand-locked oasis town built on the narrow isthmus which separates the Shat-el-Djerid from the Shat Gharsa. Tozeur is one of the most beautiful, prosperous, and interesting oases in the Tunisian Sahara, its ten score springs supplying a perfect network of streams, rivulets, and irrigation canals, which in turn support upward of half a million date-palms. Seven little villages nestle amid this palm-forest, the tops of the trees, when seen from a little distance peeping above the intervening sand-dunes, looking like feathered bonnets on the heads of a savage army.