ere only 3,780 feet above the sea. The heat was terrific.

[Illustration: Author's Camels being Fed in the Desert.]

Brackish water is not pleasant to drink, but it is not necessarily
unhealthy. Personally, I am a great believer in the compensating laws of
Nature in preference to the ill-balanced habits of civilised men, and am
certain that the best thing one can drink in the desert, under the
abnormal conditions of heat, dust and dryness, is salt water, which
stimulates digestion and keeps the system clean. Of filters, condensing
apparatuses, soda-water cartridges, and other such appliances for
difficult land travelling, the less said the better. They are very pretty
toys, the glowing advertisements of which may add to the profits of
geographical magazines, but they are really more useful in cities in
Europe than practical in the desert. Possibly they may be a consolation
to a certain class of half-reasoning people. But anything else, it might
be argued would serve equally well. One sees them advertised as
preventatives of malarial fever, but no sensible person who has ever
had fever or seen it in others would ever believe that it comes from
drinking water. Fever is in the atmosphere--one breathes fever; one does
not necessarily drink it. When the water is corrupted, the air is also
corrupted, and to filter the one and not the other is an operation the
sense of which I personally cannot see.

It has ever been my experience, and that also of others, that the fewer
precautions one takes, the more one relies on Nature to take care of one
instead of on impracticable devices--the better for one's health in the
end. I do not mean by this that one should go and drink dirty water to
avoid fever,--far from it,--but if the water is dirty the best plan is
not to drink it at all, whether filtered--or, to be accurate, passed
through a filter--or not, or made into soda-water!

One fact is certain, that if one goes through a fever district one can
take all the precautions in the world, but if one's system is so inclined
one is sure to contract it; only the more the precautions, the more
violent the fever.

But to return to our specific case, brackish water is not necessarily
dirty, and as I have said, is to my mind one of Nature's protections
against fever of the desert. In my own case, when I partook of it freely,
it decidedly kept the fever down.

We made a much earlier start, at 8 p.m., on November 13th, and I had to
walk pa