Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II ICED SUNSHINE IN January, three days' journey from London, we are in the garden of the Hesperides. It is the land of perpetual summer and sunshine. The seasons are all confused. Golden oranges and lemons load the branches of the trees, and on the same bough the blossom is being put forth for next season's crop. Along the Riviera, on the Cote d'Azur, it is summer also; but the weather is variable. When the Mistral blows a shiver runs through all the gay holiday people. But here, on the Southern shore of the Mediterranean, the Mistral is unknown. Sometimes a cloud passes over the sky and a tropic rain bursts upon the thirsty earth; then the whole land smiles and looks up like a giant refreshed. But mostly Algiers basks in sunshine, stretched out upon the steep hillside, garlanded with groves of orange, lemon, palm, olive, cypress, and pine, festooned with roses, geraniums, clematis, mimosa, and bougainvillaea, and dipping her unsandalled feet in the clear waters of her sheltered bay. We crossed the Mediterranean in halcyon weather, and in the heat of the afternoon we sighted, very faint and almost like clouds touched by the sun, the snow-capped range of the Djurdjura Mountains. Gradually they took shape through the vapour which clouded the horizon, sharply cut, deeply serrated, with snow-filled gorges clearly defined, like a range of Alps — ominous and mysterious mountains like the giant guardians of some secret —the bastions of Africa. A hundred miles to the South stretches another range, the frosty Atlas, shutting off the desert like a wall, and on the high table-land between them winter reigns, winter high above the smiling sun-kissed coast. Has Europe ever really conquered the land which lies beyond that barrier ? Will it ever make it other than an implacabl...