Leaving Dra-el-Hammah, after a hot march of five or six miles, we arrived at the top of a rising ground, at the base of which was situate the famous Toser, the head-quarters of the camp in the Jereed, and as far as it goes. Behind the city was a forest of date-trees, and beyond these and all around, as far as the eye could wander, was an immeasurable waste--an ocean of sand--a great part of which we could have sworn was water, unless told to the contrary. We were met, before entering Toser, with some five or six hundred Arabs, who galloped before the Bey, and fired as usual. The people stared at us Christians with open mouths; our dress apparently astonished them. At Toser, the Bey left his tent and entered his palace, so called in courtesy to his Highness, but a large barn of a house, without any pretensions. We had also a room allotted to us in this palace, which was the best to be found in the town, though a small dark affair. Toser is a miserable assemblage of mud and brick huts, of very small dimensions, the beams and the doors being all of date-wood. The gardens, however, under the date-trees are beautiful, and abundantly watered with copious streams, all of which are warm, and in one of which we bathed ourselves and felt new vigour run through our veins. We took a walk in the gardens, and were surprised at the quantities of doves fluttering among the date-trees; they were the common blue or Barbary doves. In the environs of Mogador, these doves are the principal birds shot. Toser, or Touzer, the _Tisurus_ of ancient geography, is a considerable town of about six thousand souls, with several villages in its neighbourhood. The impression of Toser made upon our tourists agrees with that of the traveller, Desfontaines, who writes of it in 1784:--"The Bey pitched his tent on the right side of the city, if such can be called a mass of _mud-houses_." The description corresponds also with that of Dr. Shaw, who says that "the villages of the Jereed are built of mud-walls and rafters of palm-trees." Evidently, however, some improvement has been made of late years. The Arabs of Toser, on the contrary, and which very natural, protested to the French scientific commission that Toser was the finest city in El-Jereed. They pretend that it has an area as large as Algiers, surrounded with a mud wall, twelve or fifteen feet high, and crenated. In the centre is a vast open space, which serves for a market-place. Toser has mosques, schools, Moorish baths--a luxury rare on the confines of the Desert, fondouks or inns, &c. The houses have flat terraces, and are generally well-constructed, the greater part built from the ruins of a Roman town; but many are now dilapidated from the common superstitious cause of not repairing or rebuilding old houses. The choice material for building is brick, mostly unbaked or sun-dried. Most of these houses stand detached.