Straggling down here and there into the desert from some of the North African coast towns go the trade routes of the caravans, and it is the protection of these trade routes, traversing, as they do, a territory half again as large as that of the United States, that is entrusted to the twelve hundred _méharistes_ composing France's Saharan forces. By a network of small oasis garrisons and desert patrols, recruited from the desert tribes and mounted on the tall, swift-trotting camels known as _méhari_, France has made the Saharan trade-routes, if not as safe as Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly, certainly very much safer for the lone traveller than lower Clark Street, in Chicago, or the neighbourhood of the Paris _Halles_. It has long been the fashion to hold up the Northwest Mounted Police as the model for all constabulary forces, just as it has been the fashion to extol the English as the model colonisers, but, taking into consideration the fewness of their numbers, the vastness of the region which they control, and the character of its climate and its inhabitants, I give the blue ribbon to these lean, brown-faced, hard-riding camel-men who have carried law and order into the furthermost corners of the Great Sahara. Though comparatively unfertile, the Sahara vastly influences the surrounding regions, just as the Atlantic Ocean influences the countries which border on it. Were commerce to be seriously interrupted upon the Atlantic, financial hardships would inevitably result in the countries on either side. So it is, then, with the Sahara, which is, to all intents and purposes, an inland ocean. Ever since the caravan of the Queen of Sheba brought gifts to King Solomon, ever since Abraham came riding down from Ur, it has been customary for the nomad Arab rulers through whose territories the desert trade routes pass to exact heavy tribute from the caravan sheikhs, the Bilma trans-Saharan route alone being plundered annually to the tune of ten million francs until the coming of the French camel police. Many of these great trade caravans, you will understand, are literally moving cities, sometimes consisting of as many as twelve thousand camels, to say nothing of the accompanying horses, donkeys, sheep, and goats. To outfit such a caravan often takes a year or more, frequently at a cost of more than one million dollars, the money being subscribed in varying sums by thousands of merchants and petty traders dwelling in the region whence it starts. It is obvious, therefore, that the looting of such a caravan might well spell ruin for the people of a whole district; and it is by her successful protection of the caravan routes that France has earned the gratitude of the peoples of all those regions bordering on the Great Sahara. But the days of the caravan trade are numbered, for the telegraph wires which already stretch across the desert from the Mediterranean coast towns to the French outposts in the Congo, the Senegal, and the Sudan, are but