Until very recent years Touggourt was to all intents and purposes an island, a port of call for caravans plying between Algeria and the Niger territories, to be reached only by a five days’ voyage on a swaying “ship of the desert.” But with the completion of the railway its age-long isolation has become a thing of the past, and it is visited each winter by an increasing number of hardy tourists, who, foregoing for a time the bath-tubs, table-d’hôtes, and gaming-tables of Biskra, summon up the courage to brave the hardships of the eight-hour journey by narrow-gage railway in order that they may send picture post-cards to their friends at home from what it pleases them to term “the heart of the desert.” When I first went to Algeria, more than twenty years ago, the journey to Touggourt was a real adventure, to be undertaken only with the consent of the French military authorities and with an adequate escort from the Camel Corps. The oasis was as remote from the beaten paths of travel as Baghdad, or Addis Ababa, or Khiva. But to-day it is only an excursion, to be made by unaccompanied women in comparative comfort and perfect safety. That is what comes from civilization. It is ruining the world for those of an adventurous turn of mind. The motor-car has crossed the Desert of Gobi to Urga; the mysterious mountains of Abyssinia resound to the hoot of the locomotive; seats in the Cairo-Baghdad mail-planes are booked for months in advance; the radio has become a commonplace to the sophisticated savages of the Upper Congo; motor-buses rumble through the jungles of Cambodia; Cooks sell through tickets, meals and rooms included, from Cairo to the Cape. For the Outer Lands are almost all exploited; the work of the pioneer and the frontiersman is nearly finished, and in a few more years, a very few, we shall see their like no more. Forming a lofty hedge of green between the mud-brown town and the encircling desert is a vast forest of date-palms—nearly a quarter of a million of them—whose amazing luxuriance is due to the fact that Touggourt lies in the valley of the Oued Rir, the largest of that system of unseen rivers which drain the southern slopes of the Aurés and which has rewarded the efforts of the well-drillers with a supply of artesian water that has made this one of the most fertile and prosperous regions in the whole Sahara. [Illustration: THE SAND-STORM Whipped by a roaring wind, the sand rises in suffocating clouds; the sun is obscured; the hot blue sky changes to a murky red, then to an angry purple; a sullen twilight descends upon the land; the crests of the dunes melt and smoke, giving the impression that the whole landscape is in motion]