bamboo poles on their shoulders; and yellow Chinese, with their almond-shaped, cunning eyes and pendulous pigtails, with their heads covered by broad-leafed hats, and white garments fluttering about them, as they hasten to their various avocations. And above all these new and strange sights is the deep-blue vault of heaven, and the fresh sea-breeze fanning the burning cheeks and cooling the hot foreheads. The troops march along like gentlemen. They are the lords of the land and all its treasures, for a white skin imparts nobility, and even the private is never addressed otherwise than as Tuan (sir) by the natives. On the right lies the fortress, which commands the country for a long distance, and under its guns is Weltevreden, a village composed almost entirely of military buildings, storehouses, and barracks, clean and neat—an exact image of the Dutch home-land. But while the Dutch have remained true to themselves in Batavia, they have been unable to escape the influence which the fabled East exerts over Europeans. They have, so to speak, encircled the sword with flowers, and hung the protecting walls with fresh green hangings of grass. On reaching the gate of the camp, where the garrison of Batavia is quartered, a regimental band places itself at the head of the procession. Gay sounds, triumphal marches, and merry strains, accompany the new comers to their temporary abode. The barracks, two stories high, with a wide verandah in front, are airy, cool, clean, and comfortable. The detachment marches into the capacious court-yard, which is surrounded by a blooming hedge of prickly plants. The captain who brought them across the ocean now hands them over to the captain commanding the Dutch depôt in Batavia. With this incident the voyage is ended, and a new life begins. The officer now in command is a rough, strict gentleman. He tells the men with great but severe calmness that he shall treat them as each deserves, after which he assigns their quarters. The sergeants are given a very large lofty room, while the corporals and privates go up a flight of stone steps to a long hall. All the windows and doors open on covered passages, which run along the two sides of the edifice. Along the walls are bedsteads, with mattresses and pillows of rice-straw, and light cotton counterpanes. The troops lay aside their baggage, but do not feel the slightest desire for repose. The cry is heard, "The baker's men will come down!" and, to their excessive annoyance, the privates who held this office last must temporarily perform the duty. These coarse fellows, too, feel the necessity of collecting themselves. The transition has been too sudden, the objects are too new, too strange, too confusing. They would most prefer to get drunk, but where are they to procure spirits within these stone walls, and after the menacing warning of their new commander against drunkenness and smuggling spirits into the quarters under his charge has so lately rung in their ears? They sulkily obey the summons, and, on receipt of further orders, fetch from a kitchen, open on three sides, large tin caldrons full of beef-tea and boiled fresh beef for themselves and their comrades. Benches are used as tables; each man has brought a knife and fork from aboard ship; but few use knives, for they greedily tear the fresh meat, which they have not tasted for so long, with their teeth. The next dish is dry boiled rice, accompanied by a Malay condiment, called sambalyoreng, composed of cayenne pepper and onions fried in palm-oil. Some of the men take a little too much of the latter, and run about with awful execrations, declaring that the foul fiend in person has taken possession of them. The new comers are allowed to stroll about outside for a few hours-till eight o'clock P.M. The bazar-lama, or old market, is no great distance off. A few old soldiers acquainted with the localities join the recruits as welcome guides and eager parasites. The new comers no longer have an eye for the novelties that surround them, or an ear for the sensual music of the Malays. They rush into the Chinese dram-shops: Tabe, ke (Welcome, good friend), and sopi (spirits), are the first Malay words they thoroughly learn. Arrac is a sweet poison, especially when mixed with fruit essences, and overpowers even the strongest men. It flows into the cups, it overflows the lips. The recruits wade in felicity, wallow in delight, and believe the boasting language of their elder comrades. A shot from the 12-pounder guu in front of the great house, which is the signal for tattoo, thunders in unwelcome ears, and interrupts the orgie. With hesitating steps, stupid, mumbling half a dozen different sorts of dialects, they totter back to barracks. But on this day indulgence is shown; the sentry at the gate notices nothing and suspects nothing. The old hands alone, who have taken advantage of the opportunity, are carefully examined, and a bottle of spirits concealed under the tightly-fitting uniform of one of them is mercilessly confiscated. The recruits are called over in their sleeping-room, according to regulations, but it is absurd to think of sleep and quietness. The bright illumination through numerous lamps hanging from the ceiling, and which burn till daylight, keeps up the excitement. Two or three soldiers have brought in Malay women with them, but this causes no offence. In the Dutch East Indies this is permitted the soldiers, and the barracks swarm with Malay women and their children. In that country marriage is merely a matter of propriety, and is based on pecuniary considerations principally. The recruits, who have fallen asleep at a very late hour, are awakened at tive A.M. by the signal-gun from the "Great House," the rattling of drums, and the loud shouts of the sergeants on duty for -the baker's men. The tormented men, still half asleep, and in an awful state of seediness, go down growling to receive in the kitchen the tin vessels of the previous day, which they have fortunately not been called on to clean, filled with very strong coffee and half-pound loaves. The women in barracks are kicked out, and then the men inspect their breakfast. Expressions of angry surprise at the absence of milk, and uncertainty as to how the liquid is to be imbibed, mingled with oaths, are audible on all sides. Surely they are not expected to thrust their mouths into the caldron, like pigs eating out of the same trough. Some try to use their spoons, but soon give up the experiment as tedious and ill adapted. At length, a Frenchman discovers that the shell-shaped cover of his canteen can be employed as a coffee-cup. The idea is applauded and imitated. They fill and drink, and devour their loaves, and the while chaff each other about their seedy ap pearance, or complain about headaches and faintness. In the heated climate of the tropics intoxication leaves far more serious results. Suddenly day breaks, and the bright, dazzling sunshine overflows everything. The lamps are left to go out of themselves, for they are forgotten. Drums summon the troops to the barrack-yard, but the sergeants are obliged to compel them to dress and go down. They fall in gradually. "For this once you will be forgiven the delay and irregularity," their commandant addresses them, "but tomorrow I expect prompt obedience, cleanliness, washed faces, combed hair, brushed uniforms, and polished buttons. If not, I shall be all here, and act as valet to you." Opposite the recruits are drawn up older soldiers, belonging to the depôt, either regular duty men, or such as are awaiting there a discharge. They are all weather-beaten fellows, on whose counte nances vulgar passions and heavy exertion have traced deep furrows. The captain turns to them, and one of their sergeants hands him the previous day's report, which he hastily runs through. "Mönkebach," he says, in a distinct voice, "detected, while trying, when in a state of intoxication, to smuggle a bottle of spirits into barracks-Mönkebach." The man thus summoned a tall, thin fellow, with dissipated features-advances from the ranks. Round the corners of his mouth quivers an expression of terror and desperate defiance. "For a long time past," the captain addresses him, "you have been placed in the second class. You have been punished by the severest imprisonment. You have repeatedly received five, ten, fifteen, twenty-five, and fifty lashes. There is no curing you. Fifty lashes are your sentence. Have you anything to say in your defence?" The culprit has nothing to say, and holds his tongue. A bench is brought up, and he lays himself of his own accord upon it on his chest, holding on to the other end with both hands. A blanket is thrown over him, and pulled tight by two corporals. Two other corporals step forward with bamboo-canes of the thickness of a finger, and station themselves one on either side. The recruits who arrived on the previous day open their eyes to the fullest extent, breathe heavily, and hardly dare to ex change glances of anxiety and disgust. The captain makes a sign. A sergeant counts in a loud voice from one to fifty, and with each number the sticks fall in turn with a sharp whistle on the almost unprotected body. The tortured man does not give one sign of feeling, not a groan reveals his suffering, but his face becomes of a dark red hue. When the sentence has been carried into effect, the blanket is removed, and the culprit attempts to rise, but he falls helplessly on his knees with convulsed features and a heavy sigh. The corporals who held him down seize him under the arms, and drag him off to the prison, where he will be left for the next fourand-twenty hours to his feelings and thoughts. "Take warning by him," the captain says to the new comers. "Drinking is the root of all evil. Whatever tricks you may have played in Europe, are forgotten here. The road to prosperity and honors lies open before you here. Only behave yourselves decently. Otherwise you will sink in the mire as deep as you hoped to rise. We are here under martial law, and can not permit any ugly tricks. Now be off, and let me see you again at nine o'clock, clean and fit to appear before the general." They are dismissed, and form into groups, with more or less evidence of agitation, according to the difference of character. Old hands inform those who care to listen that the punished man had been a student of theology, and lost all his chances of ordination through connection with a young woman; in hopeless despair he enlisted among the colonial troops, and ere long was employed as a commissariat clerk. But a gradual increasing tendency to drink ruined all his prospects: he was sent back to his battalion as a private, eventually placed in the second class, and was now about to be taken back to Europe to be discharged there as incorrigible. Such cases as this are the great evil of the Dutch colonial army, and yet they can not be prevented. These troops, recruited from all parts of the world, and the last refuge of scamps can only be kept in order by the severest discipline. Next came parade before the general. For the last time the recruits brush and clean the uniforms and accoutrements NEW SERIES-VOL. II., No. 1. which they have worn ever since they left Harderwyk, in order to appear before their commander-in-chief. Each of them is ordered to hold his pay-book open in his hand. The general with his staff walks scrutinizingly along the ranks. He is no old martinet who has' gained his present position by seniority. The Dutch army in the East Indies is always assumed to be in a hostile country, and a handful of men are called upon to hold in subjection the warlike inhabitants of the island-world. In such a situation merit is the sole cause for promotion, and privileges of birth and influence are utterly thrown aside. The general is a man of middle age, with a bright sparkling eye. The officers of his suite also look as if they were thoroughly up to their work. He does not heed the paybooks: he only looks at the men standing before him, who are generally ruddy and hearty owing to the voyage. How many of these powerful men will be left a short time hence? or have escaped the ravages of the climate and dissipation? It is not the defiant enmity of the Maylays that removes the majority of the European troops. It is calculated that out of one hundred European soldiers only six remain alive at the end of six years, and but two of them with unimpaired constitutions. The general reminds the officers to question the men as to their former vocation and acquired abilities, and a report is to be sent in on the same day, so that each may be suitably employed. The recruits are now conducted beneath the widely-overarching verandah of one of the storehouses. Articles of clothing are served out to them suitable for the climate, jackets and trousers of stout blue cotton-stuff, cotton shirts and socks, light leathern shoes, and caps with a very projecting straight peak. The government is not sparing with the arti cles, for it is anxious about the welfare and life of its living capital, and it deco rates European soldiers in a way that forms a striking contrast with the native troops. Loaded with three or four suits each, the recruits return to barracks, where soup and meat, rice and pimento, await them, but another desire overcomes their usual greediness. They bastily throw off the clothes they have worn 8 ever since leaving Harderwyk, and feel converted into externally new men. Up to three P M., or during the greatest heat of the day, the troops are not allowed to leave the barracks and surrounding grounds under any pretext. Some throw themselves on the beds in order to fetch up the lost sleep of the past night; others proceed to the backyard, where Malay women keep a shop of eatables under a palm-leaf roof supported by bamboo poles. Women of all descriptions are allowed unimpeded access to the barracks at all hours of the day and night. Here blooming brown girls, only covered from the hips to the feet by the sarang, or witch-like creatures who, however, are not old in years, offer, for a trifle, fish, poultry cut up in pieces, pisangs, slices of yam, all fried in palm-oil, cucumber salad with an abundant addition of small onions, and very strong coffee amply sweetened with raw sugar. For the convenience of eating there are stools and benches made of plaited bamboo. The fellows eat and drink as if they had been starved yesterday, and will go without to-morrow, and hence must take advantage of to-days opportunity. At the same time they learn loving expressions and words of insult. out, but few of them to gaze at the population among which they are cast, or to admire the landscape and the works of human hands, the contrast between the stone-built palaces of the European and the bamboo huts of the Malays; the majority flock to the Bazaar Lama, with its drinking-shops and gambling-booths. The scenes of the previous day are repeated. In an opium-house, where the smokers fall into a glorious sleep in the company of girls, there is a regular fight, because the men drunk with spirits ridicule those drunk with poppy-juice. Still, there are no sanguinary results, as the market-guard interferes betimes and clears the house of all the quarrelers. But, on the eventual return to barracks, the same indulgence is not displayed as on the preceding night. Those who are able to walk and stand, however staggeringly, are not interfered with, and those who fall down are left to lie where they are; but disturbers of the peace are more strictly treated. Some five or six of them are locked up. The rest mostly pass the night on their beds without undressing; the heat of the atmosphere, the fire in their inside, permits no refreshing sleep. Even when the surrounding noise has died out on the next morning, the captain very unceremoniously condemns the It is getting on for four o'clock, and culprits to three days' undisturbed resithe drums beat. The tin vessels, which dence in a very disagreeable locale, the not yet relieved baker's men bring merely supplied with a wooden bench, up, contain a strongly peppered and and grated windows in the roof. They spiced vegetable, boiled with lumps of are protected there from the sun's heat, fresh pork. The former resembles cab- and the musquitoes keep them well awake bage in taste, and bears a great resem- by day and night. Then the entire party blance to European garden produce. It are conducted to the pay-office, and the is tasted and neglected by the overladen pay they have saved during the entire stomachs. The time for going out is voyage is handed over to them in glisapproaching, and some of the men, who tening new gold and silver coinage, fresh pay a little attention to their appearance, from the miut in Holland. The receipt complain of the lustreless state of their of so large an amount has a most overshoes. Where are they to procure black- powering effect upon men who for a ing from? They are taught by com- long time past have counted their wealth rades who have been longer in India, by four-penny-bits. They laugh, talk, and prove it to their own satisfaction by and chaff one another, in spite of their experiment, that leather, when rubbed corporeal suffering. Rosy anticipations with the shells of the pisang, looks as if excite them, and they revel in dreams of it had been varnished. And now the enjoyment. The profligates do not sushour has arrived and the barrack-gates pect that this is the last hour they will are thrown open. All those who are not pass in each other's company. Ön reon duty can remain out and amuse them- turn to barracks the orders are read to selves as they please till eight o'clock. them, telling them off to the battalions Such is the daily rule. They stream and garrisons in the Indian archipelago, scattered in groups, larger or smaller, over Java and Sumatra, Borneo and Celebes. The majority must prepare for immediate departure, because ships ready to sail are lying in the roads. Hardly one thinks of leave-taking, for they are blinded and enchanted by new hopes and prospects. The rest are not let out of barracks during the day, because they will reach their destination by land, and have to start the same night. The buffalo-carts are already standing at the gate to receive their baggage. And thus they set out the majority with not very light heads-some one way, some another, with but slight chance of ever seeing Batavia again, and none of ever returning to their native land. The best account of the Sahara that has yet appeared in English literature is that by Mr. Tristram, from which we give an extract relating to the physical geography of this region: Our ordinary application of the term "Sahara" for the great northern desert of Africa is not strictly accurate; and in these notes I have restricted its use to that portion of the country to which the natives apply it. They divide Africa north of the line into three portions the Tell, the Sahara, and the Desert: the Tell being the corn-growing country from the coast to the Atlas; the Sahara the sandy pasture-land where flocks and herds roam, from the Atlas through the Hauts Plateaux or Steppes to the region where all regular supply of water fails; The Great Sahara. By H. B. Tristram, M. A. John Murray. In the Appendix is a valuable chapter on the Geology of the Central Sahara of Algeria. 1 and the desert, the region which extends thence almost to the watershed of the Niger-arid, salt, affording no sustenance to cattle or sheep, but where the camel snatches a scanty subsistence, and which is, excepting in its rare oases, equally inhospitable to man. The physical and geological characteristics of these regions vary considerably, but they are all comprehended by the Bedouin under the term " Mogreb,' or land towards the sunset, of which the eastern limit is the Gulf of Cabes, and the western Atlantic. If we cast our eyes on the map of Africa, we shall see no portion of the globe apparently so compact-so self-contained. A peninsula, attached to Asia alone by a narrow isthmus, Africa exhibits no islands, like those which encircle Europe, struggling as it were to be freed from the continent. No deep gulfs and bays indent her shores: she stands compact and solid. The geological convulsions which have dislocated Europe have met with an impenetrable barrier in the ridge of the Atlas, which has sternly repelled every encroachment. But we shall find within this self-contained continent very distinct lines of severance in its physical geography. In the first place, the natural history of the Atlas, bears scarcely any affinity to that of the rest of the continent; and this distinctiveness may at once be traced to natural physical causes. To the naturalist North Africa is but an European island, separated, it is true, from Europc, by the Mediterranean, but far more effectually isolated from Central Africa by that sea of sand, the Great Desert. The Atlantic isolates it on the west, while a comparatively narrow but most impenetrable desert of ever-shifting sand cuts it off from Tripoli and Egypt, which on their part seem to lean rather on Asia than on Africa. No link attaches Barbary to the rest of the continent; no river supplies an arterial communication; not the most insignificant streamlet forms either a bond of union or a frontier line; the long Atlas chain abruptly terminates in Tunis, and sends not one solitary spur towards Africa; it rather seems by one of its branches to claim kindred with Europe. So far the Arab geographers are accurate in coupling "Mogreb" with |