In making preparations for a journey in Barbary one should never lose sight of the fact that North Africa is a cold country with a hot sun. Most people, I find, labor under the delusion that Africa is synonymous with heat. This is due, I imagine, to our careless habit of generalization, of taking things for granted. Just as Canada was given a wholly undeserved reputation for frigidity by Kipling’s “Our Lady of the Snows,” so the pictures of sun-scorched deserts made so familiar by steamship-lines and tourist-companies have led to the assumption that every African country has, perforce, a torrid climate. Such misconceptions would be less general if people were more prone to consult the family atlas. There they would see that Tunis is on the same parallel as the city of Washington and that Algeria and Tunisia correspond in latitude to Virginia and North Carolina. The truth of the matter is that in the countries lying along Africa’s Mediterranean seaboard there are few evenings between November and May when a warm overcoat will be found uncomfortable, and even far south in the desert in the late spring I have shivered beneath three heavy blankets. Yet an astonishingly large proportion of American visitors to North Africa appear to be wholly ignorant of the climatic conditions which prevail in that region. Staying in Biskra while we were there was a motion-picture company from California. While “on location” the actors wore pith helmets and white drill riding-breeches and shirts open at the neck and the other garments associated in the popular mind with life in the tropics, but, once the day’s filming was over, they wrapped themselves in sweaters, overcoats, and mufflers and huddled, shivering, about the open fire in their hotel. Those who saw that picture on the screen—it was called “Burning Sands” if I remember rightly—little dreamed that the actors who made it spoke their lines through chattering teeth and gesticulated with hands blue from cold. There is one other popular misconception about North Africa which might as well be corrected now as later on. Save in the extreme south, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco are not flat, desert-like countries, as is frequently assumed. On the contrary, they are distinctly rugged and in parts extremely mountainous. Perhaps it will astonish some of my readers to be told that the High Atlas has a greater average height than the Alps and that at least one of the Moroccan peaks is higher than any mountain in the United States outside of Alaska. Though the Algerian ranges of the Atlas are not so lofty as those further to the westward, I have seen several inches of snow on the passes of the Grande Kabylie a few days before Easter. * * * * *