convenience of travellers using the roads, and for
the purpose of affording rallying-points for the
troops in the not improbable event of a war or
insurrection.
The usual pattern on which they are constructed
is that of a square courtyard surrounded by rooms
and stabling, the whole building forming a small
loopholed fort, furnished in the largest borjes with a
flanking tower at each corner.
From one borj to the next is the ordinary day’s
journey of a caravan. We, however, had decided to
march by double stages—that is to say, sleeping in
every alternate caravanserai; so instead of halting
for the night at Saada we pushed on to the following
borj at Bir Jeff air.
After passing Saada we came out on to a slightly
rolling plain of gravel composed of little stones of
every imaginable colour, whose combined effect was
that of a dirty salmon pink. The plain was sparsely
dotted over with little bushes of various kinds.
Off one of these Aissa picked a few leaves, which
he handed to me. Aissa said that the smell of
these leaves was a great preventive of thirst and
fatigue, and in order to derive the full benefit from
it himself he stuffed a little pinch of them up one
of his nostrils, and left it sticking there for nearly
an hour while he inhaled their scent with evident
satisfaction.
The inhabitants of Algeria are extremely fond
of any kind of scent, and this trick of stuffing some
strong smelling stuff up the nose is a very common
pne. The effect is generally ludicrous in the extreme—
to see a negro, for instance, walking about
with some bright coloured flower or a piece of
orange peel, or, as I once saw, a small onion sticking
out from one of his expansive nostrils and showing
in startling contrast to the shiny blackness of his
face, is sufficient to provoke a smile from even the
most wooden-faced individual in existence.
Aissa was full of antidotes against fatigue and
the other discomforts incidental to a desert journey.
He cut me off a piece of stick from one of the
bushes we passed, and gave it to me to gnaw if I
felt thirsty. The wood was almost as hard as iron,
but when bitten sufficiently hard I found that it had
a bitter taste, which certainly had to some extent
the desired effect.
When a sirocco was blowing he cribbed the
butter or the vaseline which I used for my gun to
smear on his lips to prevent them from cracking,
and when later on we had to cross the half-dried
bed of a shott, or salt lake, and Aissa, in order to
save his shoes, had taken them off and stuffed them
into the hood of his burnous on the top of his
cigarettes and some dates, which he had just bought
from a passing Arab, and was walking barefooted
through the salt mud, he stopped occasionally to
split open one of the dates and rubbed it over the
soles of his feet to prevent them from becoming
split and sore with the salt.
A propos of the little coloured pebbles which
formed the gravel we were walking over, I, in an
unfortunate moment, told Aissa that I had always
heard that there were both diamonds and emeralds