Nefta, reputed to be the most beautiful oasis in all of Saharan Africa, lies almost athwart the Tunisian-Algerian frontier, and our driver insisted that it would be a thousand pities if we did not make the short detour necessary to visit it and to view its famous sunken gardens. The oasis occupies the bed of what was presumably once a small lake, and from the summit of the arid sand-hills with which it is ringed about we looked down into a circular vale so dense with verdure, so thickly set with palm and fruit trees, that it well deserves the name which the French have given it of _la corbeille_. The floor of the oasis is so much lower than the level of the encircling desert that, standing as we were on the rim of the depression, we were above the tops of the tallest palms. Here, in this sheltered spot, the _deglat-nour_ date, the most delicious in the world, grows in supreme luxuriance, “its feet in the water and its head in the fires of heaven.” For the date-palm has this singular and apparently contradictory characteristic: it demands moisture but cannot stand rain. Those unfortunates who know the date only when it has been dried and pressed into a sugary viscous mass, covered with flies in a grocer’s window, can hardly imagine how luscious is the semi-transparent amber-colored fruit when eaten, fresh from the tree, beside one of the purling streams which meander through the green gardens of Nefta. It is an enchanting.spot, is Nefta, and I should have liked to dally there for several days, but the desert was calling and I had to go. A quarter of a mile outside the wretched, mud-walled little town of El Oued, the Transat, we found, had established a semi-permanent camp in a sort of amphitheater formed by the sand-dunes. There was a spacious dining-tent before which had been laid out a sort of flowerless garden composed, appropriately enough, of hundreds of empty wine-bottles, up-ended and planted in geometric designs in the sand. Hard by was another tent, for lounging purposes, provided with comfortable cane chairs and lined with bright-colored native hangings; while at the back, ranged in a semicircle, were a dozen or more small sleeping-tents for the use of travelers and their servants. The encampment was in charge of a genial old Kabyle from the mountains of Algeria, whose astonishing proficiency in numerous European tongues had been acquired, so he explained, during a lengthy engagement with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. Though he was well on in years and held a responsible position, I think that the old warrior secretly hankered for the blare of brass bands, the roar of cheering crowds, and life under the “big top.”