The huts of the Senoussist _zawia_ sheltered us from the sun and the sand-storms, but they were in such a state of ruin and decay that we were obliged to begin at once and make bricks—unbaked, of course. Unluckily, for constructing our buildings we were obliged to depend on the work of the few black soldiers who were not employed in exterior operations; so that many months elapsed before we could build a sufficient number of habitable houses, and complete the detached works of our defensive arrangements, including three rows of rope network, supposed to be barbed, by means of the addition of long thorns from the date-trees. The landscape from the summit of the square donjon which overtopped the fort, though wanting in charm and beauty, was not without a style of its own; the post was built in the middle of a broad valley, closed in on the east, but opening spaciously towards the west; its rugged, steep, rocky sides plunging into shifting sands and wind-swept dunes, each dune curved into the form of a crescent. At the foot of the fort the axis of the valley was delineated by fine rows of date-bearing palms, about 500 yards wide by 20,000 long, broken at intervals by heaps of moving dunes. On either side of the palm-grove there stretched green meadows, which looked as though they would afford fine pasturage for cattle, but which in reality were covered with sharp, hard grasses and herbs of no nutritive value: the most characteristic and the least bad was _akul_, a regular little bush of sharp thorns, which the camels would eat, but not without making a funny grimace at every mouthful. All along the valley there lies a sheet of subterranean water, which rises in some places so near to the surface that the gazelles and jackals easily slake their thirst by scraping away with their feet a few inches of the soil; here and there, indeed, a little stream of water flows out of the sand, and runs a few yards towards a neighbouring depression, and little pools are formed in natural or artificial hollows made in the soil. These jackals and gazelles are the only wild animals found in Borkou; the latter are quite unapproachable by hunters, while the former remain hidden in the daytime, but come in bands at night, yelping round the villages, and penetrate boldly into inhabited enclosures to seek their prey. So cunning are they that they avoid the most ingenious traps the natives can set. The lion, the panther, the hyena, and the wild boar never pass beyond the desert boundaries of Kanem and Wadaï; even the antelope and the ostrich, though bearing thirst so well, cannot venture so far into the Sahara.