Atlantida

"Stop the camel," Tanit-Zerga commanded. "It is not worth while to make him kneel."

A little gray creature bounded on the camel. The mehari set out again at his best speed.

"Let him go," said Tanit-Zerga. "Galé has jumped on."

I felt a tuft of bristly hair under my arm. The mongoose had followed our footsteps and rejoined us. I heard the quick panting of the brave little creature becoming gradually slower and slower.

"I am happy," murmured Tanit-Zerga.

Cegheir-ben-Cheikh had not been mistaken. We reached the gour as the sun rose. I looked back. The Atakor was nothing more than a monstrous chaos amid the night mists which trailed the dawn. It was no longer possible to pick out from among the nameless peaks, the one on which Antinea was still weaving her passionate plots.

You know what the Tanezruft is, the "plain of plains," abandoned, uninhabitable, the country of hunger and thirst. We were then starting on the part of the desert which Duveyrier calls the Tasili of the south, and which figures on the maps of the Minister of Public Works under this attractive title: "Rocky plateau, without water, without vegetation, inhospitable for man and beast."

Nothing, unless parts of the Kalahari, is more frightful than this rocky desert. Oh, Cegheir-ben-Cheikh

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