Previously she had wandered, with only a small escort of native bearers, through savage Southwest Africa, and had been captured there and held for ransom by native torturers. She had adventured, too, among the savage Tuaregs of the Saharan Desert, known as the most bloodthirsty tribe on earth; had crossed the Alps in a balloon, made between sixty and seventy flights in aero and water planes, been attacked and kept prisoner by Apaches in Paris, had nursed in the hospitals of Europe and taken part in rescue work in the slums of London. Of the remarkable experiences that have befallen the plucky countess since then I am now able to tell as the result of having, to begin with, received several lengthy letters from her at Cartagena, in Spain, where she has been living for some months, and, more recently, having been privileged to read the mightily interesting and vividly written journal that she kept from the moment of her arrival at Port Said. Had it not been for the war, it is extremely probable that the countess would have accomplished her project, which would have pushed her into the front rank of successful explorers. She carried out, it seems, her original intention, a venturesome one, indeed, for a white woman, of joining a Bedouin tribe and traveling with them, and had covered over nine hundred miles of her journey when she was caught in the Turkish mobilization and arrested, on suspicion of being a Russian spy, by the Moslems, who, from the beginning had frowned on her project and attempted to prevent it. Bitterly disappointed at being thus defeated just when the chance of success seemed rosiest, the countess was brought back as a prisoner to Damascus. There she had the narrowest escape of being shot for supposed espionage, and it was only after months of surveillance and affronts that she finally was permitted to return to Europe. II--GUEST OF A BEDOUIN SULTAN Though she failed to get across the Arabian Desert, the countess, previous to her arrest, had some of the strangest and most picturesque experiences that ever have befallen a white woman. Probably no other European woman has traveled, as she did, for weeks on end as the honored guest of a Bedouin Sultan (who insisted on believing her to be a sister of the Czar of Russia), living the nomadic life of the tribe and riding on camel-back, nor lived, as did the countess, all by herself, in the heart of old-world Damascus, an experiment that does not commend itself even to the foreign consuls. What she saw of the brutalities of the Turkish mobilization alone makes as thrilling a tale as any that has been told since the war began. Meanwhile the countess has been the victim of an astonishing accident, as a result of which she is still chary about using her right arm.