t desert have been visited, and on the northern
limits two animals are found--the addax antelope, and Loder's gazelle.
The wide-spread hoofs of the addax antelope enable it to travel over sand
at a great pace. It is a large and ungainly beast with spiral horns.
Probably it follows in the wake of the rains wherever they go; but what
happens to it in the dry season is unknown. Similarly with Loder's
gazelle: though more or less a desert animal, it is a mystery how it
remains alive through the long rainless months, in places apparently
without water, and on wastes of rolling, wind-drifted sand.

Of the natural inhabitants of desert country, the Sahara is by no means
devoid: sand-lizards, jumping-mice, sand-grouse, sand-vipers,
desert-larks, and even a family of snakes belonging to the boas, are to
be found. The kh[=a]ki-coloured sand-grouse are most difficult to see on
the yellow face of the country: the sand-rats and sand-moles all take on
the colour of their surroundings, and thus hide and protect themselves:
one and all exist in some marvellous manner where it would seem that
existence could only be miraculous. The skink is met with, beloved of the
Romans, who imported desert-skinks into Rome in Pliny's day, and held
them a valuable remedy for consumption, chopped up into a sort of white
wine: the trade was brisk in 1581. To-day the Arabs consider it a
remedy, and eat it as a food. It acts very much in the same way as do
flat-fish in the bottom of the sea, sinking itself under the sand,
allowing the sand to lie over its back and cover it, like a flounder,
only leaving its sharp eyes out of cover, and sometimes the spines on its
back.

For the maintenance of all this animal life, it is quite possible that
rain may occasionally fall even upon desert, and disappear with
lightning-like rapidity; for on the borders of certain African deserts in
the north a phenomenon very much like the description of the Mosaic manna
occurs when the plains have been wetted with rain. The surface is seen
next morning "covered with little white globes like tiny puff-balls, the
size of a bird-cherry, or spilled globes of some large grain." It is
gathered and eaten by the Arabs, but, like an unsubstantial fungus
growth, melts or rots in the course of a day or two.

Enough of the Sahara. Meeting with men in Mogador who had come straight
from the mysterious country, veiled, untamed, and remotely removed from
European touch, our interest was natu