One afternoon, for want of something better to do, we rode out to Temacin, a pretty little oasis, fifteen miles to the south of Touggourt, with white houses peering out from amid the palm-groves and the inevitable marabout’s tomb. Though it was an insufferably hot day, with the mercury hovering around 120 in the sun, the first two or three miles were delightful, for the road led through the date plantations, with the great leaves forming a canopy of green overhead and in our ears the pleasant sound of running water. But when we debouched upon the desert, to strike one of the seven main caravan-routes which cross the Sahara, it seemed as though we were riding upon the top of a stove at white heat and that we would be broiled alive. The great trade-track on which we now found ourselves was very wide, a broad swath trodden below the level of the desert by the heart-shaped pads of the camels which have followed it since long before recorded history began. When half-way to Temacin we met a caravan coming up from the south; five months out of Timbuktu, our guide informed us after a brief colloquy with the leader; an endless file of men and animals plodding slowly across the burning waste. Some of the camels bore huge, round, tent-like arrangements, called _bassourabs_, in the privacy of which the women rode, protected alike from the sun and from the eyes of men. Atop of the _bassourabs_ were curious wooden frameworks, six or eight feet high, resembling the lattice masts of battle-ships or miniature Eiffel Towers. The tops of these towers must have been fully sixteen feet above the ground, and from them fluttered colored rags or streamers, which were visible long before the camels themselves had appeared above the sky-line. I could not even hazard a guess as to their use, but the guide informed us that they were for purposes of identification, like the numerals at the bows of a destroyer or the emblems painted on the under wings of a battle-plane. His French was very sketchy, but, as nearly as I could make out, every tribe, or every caravan—I am not certain which—can be recognized by the shape of its camel-towers and by the color of the rags which flutter from them. This is a wise precaution, for in the vast stretches of the Sahara, where life is none too safe at best, it is essential that the leader of a great convoy, responsible for hundreds of lives and millions of francs’ worth of merchandise, should be able to determine before they come within rifle-shot whether those he sees approaching are enemies or friends. [Illustration: THE SPORT OF KINGS In the Barbary of to-day, as in medieval Europe, the great lords a-hunting go with horse and hawk and hound. Some of the falcons, probably a species of eagle, are powerful enough to bring down gazelles]