A FREE ENTERTAINMENT IN THE SAHARA.
The learned Professor Ducardanoy, and his assistant, Bouchardy, had been toiling along the desert's edge all day. They had hoped to reach the Algerian settlement of Nouvelle Saar-Louis before night, but the sun was getting near the blank western horizon of yellow sand, and the low mountain upon which Nouvelle Saar-Louis was built, the last southern foot-hill of the Atlas, was still some twenty miles away to the east.
"We shall have to camp here in the sand, and push on in the morning," said the learned Ducardanoy, who was, as all his contemporaries knew, the most renowned living chiropodist.
"I fear we shall," said the assistant, Bouchardy, who was not, it must be understood, an assistant in Ducardanoy's surgery, but merely an unscientific fellow who managed the magic-lantern, ate wool, and breathed fire, and did the other things which constituted the grand free entertainment preceding Ducardanoy's evening lectures on the science of chiropody, in the course of which he was accustomed to perform a few gratuitous operations with Ducardanoy's Corn Cure to prove its efficacy. "I fear we shall," said Bouchardy; "but what is that building a mile or so to the south? Perhaps we had better go there."
"Ah! ha!" said Ducardanoy, looking through a field-glass; "it is an old Roman tower. Undoubtedly it is, for there is nothing Moorish about it, and the Romans and French are the only people who have erected anything more substantial than tents in this part of Algeria."
"I think we had better go there," said Bouchardy, "and go rapidly, too. Look behind you."
Away off to the west, galloping along in the track of the setting sun, was a cavalcade of horsemen.
"Spahis," said Ducardanoy, calmly.
"Perhaps so," said Bouchardy. "Perhaps French cavalry, and perhaps Arab robbers. Who knows? It is best to be prepared. If you choose you may stay here to sleep in the sand to-night, and perhaps for all the nights thereafter forever; but as for me, I am going to the Roman castle," and he spurred on his horse and arrived at the tower some minutes after the learned Ducardanoy, who was better mounted than he, and, moreover, was not burdened with a magic-lantern and other appliances used in the free entertainment. They found the tower to be nothing more than a plain round edifice with a single upper chamber in it, reached by a flight of narrow winding stairs ascending in a gentle incline. Up these stairs they led their horses, as the Roman frontier guards had done centuries before, and then looked out of the loop-holes for the approaching enemy.