During the following hours the course lay southwesterly, cutting
across the routes of El Golea, one of which was explored in 1859 by
the intrepid Duveyrier.

The darkness was profound. Nothing could be seen of the Trans-
Saharan Railway constructing on the plans of Duponchel--a long
ribbon of iron destined to bind together Algiers and Timbuktu by way
of Laghouat and Gardaia, and destined eventually to run down into the
Gulf of Guinea.

Then the "Albatross" entered the equatorial region below the tropic
of Cancer. Six hundred miles from the northern frontier of the Sahara
she crossed the route on which Major Laing met his, death in 1846,
and crossed the road of the caravans from Morocco to the Sudan, and
that part of the desert swept by the Tuaregs, where could be heard
what is called "the song of the sand," a soft and plaintive murmur
that seems to escape from the ground.

Only one thing happened. A cloud of locusts came flying along, and
there fell such a cargo of them on board as to threaten to sink the
ship. But all hands set to work to clear the deck, and the locusts
were thrown over except a few hundred kept by Tapage for his larder.
And he served them up in so succulent a fashion that Frycollin forgot
for the moment his perpetual trances and said, "these are as good as
prawns."

The aeronef was then eleven hundred miles from the Wargla oasis and
almost on the northern frontier of the Sudan. About two o'clock in
the afternoon a city appeared in the bend of a large river. The river
was the Niger. The city was Timbuktu.