is simplest and easiest to transport on a camel.

As Saint-Avit handed them to me I arranged them on the only table in
the room.

"Now," he announced to me, "there is nothing more but books. I will
pass them to you. Pile them up in a corner until I can have a
book-shelf made."

For two hours altogether I helped him to heap up a real library. And
what a library! Such as never before a post in the South had seen. All
the texts consecrated, under whatever titles, by antiquity to the
regions of the Sahara were reunited between the four rough-cast walls
of that little room of the bordj. Herodotus and Pliny, naturally, and
likewise Strabo and Ptolemy, Pomponius Mela, and Ammien Marcellin. But
besides these names which reassured my ignorance a little, I perceived
those of Corippus, of Paul Orose, of Eratosthenes, of Photius, of
Diodorus of Sicily, of Solon, of Dion Cassius, of Isidor of Seville,
of Martin de Tyre, of Ethicus, of Athenée, the _Scriptores Historiae
Augustae_, the _Itinerarium Antonini Augusti_, the _Geographi Latini
Minores_ of Riese, the _Geographi Graeci Minores_ of Karl Muller....
Since I have had the occasion to familiarize myself with Agatarchides
of Cos and Artemidorus of Ephesus, but I admit that in this instance
the presence of their dissertations in the saddle bags of a captain of
cavalry caused me some amazement.

I mention further the _Descrittione dell' Africa_ by Leon l'African,
the _Arabian Histories_ of Ibn-Khaldoun, of Al-Iaquob, of El-Bekri, of
Ibn-Batoutah, of Mahommed El-Tounsi.... In the midst of this Babel, I
remember the names of only two volumes of contemporary French