After quite an excellent dinner, considering the remoteness of the place and the limitations imposed on culinary efforts, we ranged our chairs around the camp-fire—a mighty roarer fed with palm-logs the length of a man—and the ex-rough rider put on a very creditable variety show with local talent for our entertainment. The program opened with a plaintive Bedouin love-song by the camp cook, an Arab from the Tunisian Sahel. His two assistants, one of them a really remarkable ventriloquist, gave an extemporized skit which must have been highly amusing, judging from the roars of laughter with which it was greeted by the native onlookers. Four Arabs, armed with sword and spear, then gave a kind of war-dance, during the course of which they became so excited that I feared they would turn the farce into reality and do each other bodily harm. The program was concluded by a quartet of local prostitutes, unveiled, tattooed, and festooned with jewelry, who performed the strange and sensuous dances of the desert folk to the wail of flutes and the boom of tom-toms. The brooding desert, gray white beneath the stars; the purple velvet sky; the ghostly sand-hills; the little circle of natives, so closely cloaked and hooded that only their eyes were visible, squatting on the ground; and the slim, supple bodies of the dancing-girls twisting and swaying in the light of the leaping flames—all these combined to form a scene which is etched deeply on the tablets of my memory. Because of the rapid radiation which takes place at nightfall, the temperature in the desert is subject to almost unbelievably sudden and extreme variations. This characteristic of the Saharan climate was particularly noticeable at El Oued, the thermometer registering a drop of nearly sixty degrees in not much over an hour. During the day the heat in the little hollow where our tents were pitched was so intense that we fairly gasped for breath; the stray currents of air which occasionally reached us, far from affording relief, were like blasts from the open door of a furnace; before the sun was an hour high the mercury climbed to 120 and stayed there; to stay within one’s tent was to invite suffocation, to stay without, where a thermometer probably would have registered 150, was to be broiled alive. Yet the sun had scarcely disappeared below the horizon ere we were shivering beneath our greatcoats, and that night I slept under three heavy blankets—and suffered acutely from the cold! That is why the climate of the Sahara must be treated with profound respect by Europeans, for exposure to the sudden chill which comes at sunset is frequently as deadly as exposure to the sun itself.