The _q'sour_ of Ouargla is divided into three quarters, inhabited by three tribes, who do not live always on the most friendly terms. In appearance it resembles the Saharan _q'sours_, which have all a strong family likeness; there are the mosque, and the governor's residence, and the open market-place, and the narrow squalid streets, often obstructed by heaps of unclean and unsavoury rubbish; and the low dull houses, pierced with holes instead of windows, which have seldom any shutters; so that the traveller, when he penetrates into these dismal quarters, is startled by the contrast which they present to the picture of enchanted palaces full of shade, perfume, and freshness, drawn by his eager imagination. Our poets and romancists have much to answer for. Their ideal East is very different from that actual East, in all its heat, and noisomeness, and glare, which the voyager finds around him, and which seems to have lost much of its beauty along with its grandeur and its power. Pleasant to the fancy is the palm-grove, pleasant the garden with its golden and purple fruitage, but the warm (and often mineral) waters which irrigate, or rather inundate the soil, exhale the most deleterious emanations, so that the unfortunate inhabitants are constantly decimated by fever, blinded by ophthalmic disease, and devoured by insects! We have already seen that the Desert of Erosion is watered by means of artesian wells, natural or artificial. The latter have been known to the peoples of the Sahara from the remotest antiquity; but the implements and the methods employed to bore or preserve them were, as the reader will suppose, very rude and unsatisfactory. The sides of the well are only supported by a framework of palm-wood, which decays very quickly; the well gets choked; divers descend with baskets to clear away the sand; but after awhile the evil exceeds their power of remedying it. "Then, for want of water," says M. Martins, "the palms grow sick and perish; the villages are emptied of their population; the oasis contracts its boundaries, and gradually disappears. The Desert resumes possession of the demesne which the labour of man had temporarily won for it." Fortunately, in the track of the French army have trodden the French engineers, with all the wonderful apparatus that Science places at their disposal, and in numerous places they have excavated true artesian wells, similar to those which supply some of our great towns. And thus many oases which were on the point of perishing have been saved, others have been created, and the conquest of the Desert by modern industry is henceforth no more than a question of time. * * * * *