d the banks of fever. No man may
pitch his tent in safety for a single night on the banks of this
death-dealing water; not even the Bedouins, who avoid the locality as
if it were plague-stricken, for fever is in the very air. Strange that
so fair an exterior should veil so baneful a mystery. Those bright,
sweet-smelling flowers conceal snakes and reptiles whose bite is
almost instantaneously fatal, and the place might be appropriately
termed the Valley of Death. Among yonder fair trees lurk the
treacherous panther and the slinking hyena.

Yet, in this world, amid present impressions of pleasure, we have
little time to think of the danger veiled beneath the smiling outward
shape. So, at least, it was with me, as I reclined on the carpet of
soft grass, after slaying the boar, placidly discussing my breakfast,
and enjoying the beauty of the scene around, with the azure-rippling
sea about two miles off, the magnificent mountains around me, the
sparkling river at my feet, and, across the bay in the far distance,
the ruins of the once mighty city of Carthage, with the birds singing
merrily overhead in the bright sunshine. There is exquisite pleasure
in the sensation of the external world thus melting away, as it were,
into a little world of our own, and when the green trees, the azure
sky, the perfumed plants, all take their places in an exquisite
picture of Nature's own painting. Women, perhaps, most indulge this
feeling; hence they often smile with an amiable incredulity when they
hear the "lords of the creation," proud of their scholastic lore,
discussing and settling everything, priding themselves upon having
divided all things so cleverly into _subjective_ and _objective_, and
boasting that they have furnished their wise heads with so many
drawers (like a chemist's shop, forsooth), with reason located in one,
good sense in another, understanding in a third, and so on to the end
of the chapter.

CHAPTER XI.

SPORTING EXPERIENCES.

El Greesh.--Shooting Hyenas.--An Expedition with the Arabs.--The
Caid and his Family.--Another Wild Boar.

The next day I rode on to a place called El Greesh, about twenty miles
from Sleeman. I wanted to pitch my tent at the base of the purple
mountain, outside the village, where I was sure we should have got a
great deal of game, as the mountains were covered with thick
underwood. A----, however, and the rest were opposed to it, so I
yielded, and pitched my tent in the villag