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CHAPTER X
“THE ARAB SHOD WITH FIRE”

(Horses, Donkeys, and Mules)

AS a Kentucky colonel once said, the pure-bred Arabian horse is a fine thing in his native land; but there is more good horse-flesh, per head of population, in the United States than the first home of the ancestor of the blooded horse ever possessed. Everything points to the fact that the gentleman knew what he was talking about, as fine specimens of Arabian horse-flesh are rare to-day, even in Arabia and North Africa. They exist, of course, but the majority of horses one sees in Algeria and Tunisia are sorry-looking hacks.

In the desert the case is somewhat different. There the beautiful Arabian horses of which romance and history tell are more numerous than the diminutive bronchos of the coast plains and mountains. The descendants of the Anazeh mares, the parent branch of royal Arabian blood, are not many; but an Arab of good lineage may still be had by one who knows how to pick him out, or gets some friendly Sheik to give him his.

No one seems to know where the original Arabian horse was bred, though it was known in the Mauritania of the Romans, in the environs of Carthage, long before that little affair of Romulus and Remus startled an astonished world. In all probability he was a descendant of the same horses which made up the Numidian cavalry which overran Rome during the Punic wars, and that’s a pretty ancient pedigree.

To-day all through North Africa, in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Tripoli, Egypt, and in Arabia across the Red Sea, the type is recognizable in all variations of purity and debasement.

The “Arab shod with fire” of the Bedouin love-song may not be all that sentiment has pictured, but he is an exceedingly high-bred animal nevertheless.

Here are his fine points: —

This is the formulæ upon which the French remount officers choose their Arabian horses, and for hard work they take always a “traineur avec sa queue,” a horse of seven years or more.

Each chief of an Arab family possesses one or more of the blooded Arabians of classic renown. It is his friend in joy and sorrow, and his constant companion when he is away from his family. If the Arab chief has many horses he always keeps one, the favourite, as a war-charger. If there are no wars or rumours of war in sight, he only rides this favourite on gala or parade occasions; but at all times he gives it more care and attention than many heads of families, in more conventionally civilized lands, give their wives. The Arab knows the ancestors of his horse as well as he knows his own; and he has its pedigree writ on parchment, which is more trouble than he has taken to perpetuate the memory of his own remote parents. The Algerian Arab horse has been called a “mixed-pur sang,” whatever that may mean, but certainly it will take somebody more expert than a mere “horsey” person (the kind that go around talking about their “mounts” and how “fit and saucy” was the one they rode that morning) to mark the distinction between the best of the Algerian variety and those of Egypt, Syria or Arabia.

The Arab trains his horses for his own personal use, to pace, canter, or gallop, never to trot, a gait which is only fit for the European who is afraid to sit on, or behind, a horse with a quick-moving pace. This is the Arab version of it, and an Arab horse owner will hobble his beast with a rope if he shows the least inclination to trot or single foot. If this won’t break him, why he sells him to some one who will stand for it – at the best price he can get. The Arab horse owner thinks with the late A. T. Stewart: “If you have got a loss to meet, meet it at once and get your capital working on something else.”

The writer recently met an Italian trying to bargain with an Arab for a saddle-horse. The Arab was with difficulty convinced that the gentleman was not an Englishman who would buy only a “trotting saddle-horse.” Quel horreur! “Allah be praised!” said Ali-something-or-other, the trader, all Europeans are not imitators of the English taste in saddle-horses. Once in awhile an Italian or a Spaniard or a Frenchman wants a horse for a carrousel and not for an amble in the Bois, which is his idea of doing as they do in London.

The reputation of the blooded Arabian horse, whether it is found in Arabia, Algeria or Morocco, is classic, and the mule, too, seems here to take on qualities not its birthright elsewhere. With the donkey, the petit âne with a cross down its back and a silver museau, the same thing holds good. North Africa is the donkey’s paradise. Here, if he finds herbage scant once and again, he thrives as nowhere else, and attains often an age of thirty-five years. The donkey in Africa is worked hard, but is neither unduly maltreated nor misunderstood. Perhaps that is why he lives long, though if the present race of donkey boys, who have been trained at the Paris and Chicago exhibitions, go on their unruly ways now they have got back to their homes at Cairo, Tunis or Algiers, even the patient, sad little donkeys may take on moods that hitherto they have never known.

The horses and donkeys of the big towns may well become spoiled by vanity, for they are often the subjects of an assiduous and inexplicable care on the parts of their owners, who comb their locks, and braid them, and cosmétique them and put rouge on their foreheads, and even stain them with henna until they are a regular “Zaza” tint. Darkest Africa is not so backward as one might think!

All classes of native riders, whether on the camel, mehari, horse, mule, or donkey, beat the ribs of the creature with a heel-tap tattoo in what must be an annoying manner for the beast. From the way the native, rich or poor, sits on his horse, spurs would be of no use to him, and only the Spahi, or native cavalry, has adopted them.

Donkey riding is the same dubious rocheting proceeding in all Mediterranean countries. It is no worse here than in Greece or on the Riviera. “The donkey’s a disgrace,” says the Arab; and he runs along behind, beating his onery little beast and calling it a fille de chacal, a graine de calamité or a chienne. This need awaken no sentiments of pity whatever – for the donkey. They are as much terms of endearment as the occasion calls for. The most common four-footed beast of burden in Algeria is undoubtedly the despised donkey of tradition. Every one does seem to despise the donkey, except the Mexican “greaser,” who asks as affectionately after his neighbour’s burro as he does his wife or children. Here the bourriquet or h’mar is quite a secondary consideration in the Arab’s domestic entourage.

The bourriquet is an economical little beast, costing only from ten francs upward. He usually feeds himself, browsing as he goes, and trots twenty or thirty kilometres a day, encouraged by the whacks and expletives of his driver who may often be found perched on top of the donkey’s load of a hundred and fifty pounds or more.

To us it all savours of cruelty, and perhaps some real cruelty does take place; but much of the “coaxing” of a donkey into his gait is necessary, unless one is disposed to let him stand still for hours at a time, too lazy to do anything but swish and kick the flies away. Æsop’s ass prayed to Jove for a less cruel master, but that deity replied that he could not change human nature nor that of donkeys, so things were left to stand as before.

The Arabs often slit the nostrils of their donkeys, on the supposition that the Maker did not fashion them amply enough to allow them to breathe readily. The more readily the donkey breathes, the more capable he is to carry heavy burdens long distances. Logical, this! And the procedure, too, improves the tonal quality of the donkey’s bray. Well, perhaps, though most of us are not devotees of that sort of music. Compared to Italy or Spain, there are considerably fewer suffering sore-backed donkeys in Algeria or Tunisia.

There is no question but that for economical service the donkey will kill any horse or mule; and it is clear that, weight for weight and load for load, he daily outdoes the camel. The latter, weighing fifteen hundred pounds, carries perhaps a weight of three to five hundred. The ass weighs two hundred and fifty to four hundred pounds, and, carrying one hundred and fifty to two hundred, outpaces the camel by a mile an hour.

The donkey is guided by the voice, a stick, or a rope halter, which lies on the left side, and is pulled to turn him to the left, or borne across his neck to turn him to the right. The stick serves the double purpose of striking and guiding, and the stick must needs come into play only too often.

The donkey here in the Mediterranean countries is often very small, not thirty-two inches in many cases, no bigger than a St. Bernard. When one hires a donkey to carry him over an étape on some mountain road, it is often a beast from whose back one’s toes touch the ground, though one is seated on a pad, not a saddle, and measures only five feet seven.

CHAPTER XI
THE SHIP OF THE DESERT AND HIS OCEAN OF SAND

A CAMEL may be a cumbersome, ungainly and unlovely creature, and may be destined to be succeeded by the automobile, to which he seems to have taken a violent dislike; but there is no underrating the great and valuable part which he has played in the development of the African provinces and protectorates of France. He has borne most of their burdens, literally; has ploughed their fields, pumped their water, and even exploited the tourists, to say nothing of having been the companion of the Mussulman faithful on their pilgrimages.

The camel caravans which set out across the desert from Tlemcen, Tunis, and Constantine (there are no camels nearer Algiers than Arba) are in charge of a very exalted personage, – or he thinks he is. His official title is gellâby. Each and every beast of burden is loaded to the limit, and pads his way with his great nubbly hoofs across untold leagues of sand or brush-covered soil without complaint. At every stop, however, and every time a start is made, he always gives vent to shrieks and groans; but as this procedure takes place at each end of a day’s journey as well, it is probably pure bluff, as the camel-sheik claims. To one unused to it the noise seems like the wails which are supposed to come up out of the inferno.

The camel of Africa, so-called, is really not a camel, he is a dromedary; the camel has two humps, the dromedary but one, but camel is the word commonly used. The two-humped quadruped, then, is a camel, – the direct descendant of the camel of Asia, whilst that of the single hump is the dromedary of Africa. The distinction must be remembered by all who talk or write on the subject, with the same precision that one differentiates between African and Indian elephants.

The camel has by no means the rude health and strength which has so often been attributed to him, indeed he is a very delicate beast and demands a climate dry and hot. Cold and snow and persistent rains are death to a camel. A camel must be well nourished, and with a certain regularity, or he soon becomes ill and dies. He is easily frightened and can spread a panic among his fellows with the rapidity of wild-fire.

For the most part the camel is kindly and temperate, but he can get in a rage and can be very dangerous to all who approach him on foot.

The camel of the south cannot live in the north and vice versa. They are not acclimated to the varying conditions. One judges a good camel (dromedary) by his hump; firm and hard, it is a sure sign of a good-natured, hard-working, friendly sort of a camel; if flabby and mangy, then beware.

A camel eats normally thirty or forty kilos of fodder a day, and must be allowed four hours to do it in. As to drink, once in two or three days in summer is enough, but in winter he can go perhaps ten days, and his food bill is increased nothing thereby.

He can carry 150-160 kilos, a parcel hung over each side in saddle-bag fashion. The mehari, or long-distance, fast-gaited camel of the Sahara, is to the ordinary dromedary what a blooded Arabian is to a Percheron. He can better stand hunger and thirst, and on an average needs drink only once in five days; furthermore is not as liable to fright as is the djemel, as the Arab calls the camel, and is more patient and more courageous. Less rapid than a race-horse for short distances, the mehari, well-trained and well-driven, can make his hundred kilometres a day, day in and day out.

The saddle is called a rahala and has a concave seat, a large, high back, and an elevated pommel. The rider sits in the bowl-like saddle, his legs crossed on the beast’s neck. The mehari is driven through a ring in its nose, to which is attached a rope of camel’s hair. The beast is somewhat difficult to drive, more so than the djemel, and only its master can get good results. To mount, the beast kneels as do ordinary camels.

En route the mehari does not graze, but waits for a decent interval and takes its meal comfortably. A mehari, not accustomed to the sight of a horse, is often put into a terrible fright thereby. The education of a mehari is very difficult; it takes a year to break one.

The policing of the great Saharan tracts would not be possible without troops mounted on mehara, – the plural of the word mehari, – and France owes much of the development of her African provinces to the mehari and the slower-going camel.

The dromedary, or camel, as it is referred to in common speech, was an importation into Algeria away back in some unrecalled epoch, at any rate anterior to the Arab invasion of the eleventh century.

The mehari was a warlike beast as far back into antiquity as the days of Herodotus, Tacitus, and Pliny. Herodotus, recounting the battle of Sardes, said, according to Pliny: “Camelos inter jumeuta pascit Oriens, quorum duo genera Bactriani et Arabici…”

If an Arab is owner of a thousand camels, he wards off any evil that may befall them by leading out the oldest and blinding it with a rod of white hot iron.

A camel that has fallen ill may be cured, many superstitious Arabs believe, by allowing it to witness the operation of searing the hoofs of another, tied and thrown upon the ground. This is auto-suggestion surely, though where the curative powers come in it is hard to see.

When a bayra, a female camel, has given birth to five camels, the last being a male, her ears are bored and she is sent out to pasture, never more to be put to the rough work of caravaning. Like putting an old horse to pasture in perpetuity, it seems a humane act, and it solves the race question in the camel world, or would if the camels only knew the why and the wherefore.

The camel’s feet are admirably made for the sands of the desert; they form by nature a sort of adapted ski or snow-shoe. The hoof (though really it is no hoof) is bifurcated and has no horny substance, merely a short, crooked claw, or nail, at the rear of each bifurcation, a sort of elastic sole – the predecessor of rubber heels, no doubt – covering the base. The camel travels well in sand, but with difficulty over stony ground, where frequently the Arabs envelop his feet with cloths or leather wrappings.

The camel possesses further four other callosities, one on each knee, and he uses them all four every time he gets up or lies down. These callous places are something the beast is born with; they get ragged and mangy-looking with time, but they are there from birth.

The boss, or hump, of the camel-dromedary is mere gristle; it contains no bone, and is more or less abundant according to the health of the animal.

A well-fed and happy camel, starting out on a long march, regards his well-rounded hump with pride. Excessive travel and forced marches diminish its shape and size and the beast seemingly becomes ashamed and literally feels sore about it. But, like the conquered general on a battle-field who loses his sword, he ultimately gets it all back again, and a little rest, a change of diet, and a good, long drink – “a camel’s neck,” you might call it – makes a difference with the camel and his hump in the course of a very few days.

A camel gets unruly and cries out at times, and often becomes unmanageable, but an application of a sticky gob of tar or pitch on his forehead usually quiets him down.

The baby camels usually come into the world one at a time; and can stand up on their four legs the first day, and run around like their elders at the end of a week.

At the age of four years the young camel is put to work, and carries a rider, two barrels of wine or two gunny-sacks filled with crockery or ironware indiscriminately. His average life is twenty years, and, as with the horse, one reckons his age by his teeth.

The Arab gets an astonishing amount of work out of an apparently unwilling camel. He encourages him with punches, and beatings and oaths and songs. Yes, the Arab camel-driver even sings to his camel to induce him to get along faster, and plays a screechy air on the galoubet; and the curious thing is that the flagging energies of a camel will revive immediately his driver begins to drone. It is a custom which has come down from antiquity, and soon one may expect every caravan to carry its own phonograph and megaphone.

The chief of these airs, rendered into French for us by a lisping, blue-eyed Arab, was, as near as may be: —

 
“Battez pour nous,
Battez pour nous,
O Chameaux!
Battez pour nous,
Battez pour nous,
Chameaux, pour vos maîtres!”
 

No very great rhyme or rhythm there, but it suits the camel’s taste in poesy.

To “vagabond” with a camel caravan would be the very ideal of a simple life. The life of a caravan to-day is as it was in Bible times, except that one carries a “Smith and Wesson” or a “Colt” instead of a spear.

The following essential facts apply to all the camel caravans making their respective ways from the coast towns of the northern provinces down into the Soudan and the Sahara. The caravan usually makes its day’s journey between wells, or at least plans to stop at a source of water at night rather than push on; this in case one has not been previously passed by, and every one become refreshed a short time before.

A dozen to thirty kilometres or so a day is the average commercial caravan journey, – for a part of the outfit walks, it must be remembered, – and an eight or ten weeks’ itinerary is the duration of the average journey. Such food as is carried is generally of pounded dates and figs in the form of a paste, which the dry climate more or less petrifies.

The Arab trader, the chief of the trading caravan, and the city merchant en voyage, be he Arab. Turk, or Jew, is a man of position, the others are mere helpers, employés or perhaps slaves.

At each important halting-place of a caravan the Sheik’s great tent is unstrapped from its camel bearer and set up on a pied de terre in as likely a spot as may be found. The Arab tent is no haphazard shack or shelter; it is a thing of convention, and has its shape and size laid down by tradition.

The great central post or pillar has a height of two and a half metres, and the perches, or entrance posts, have a height of two metres, and a considerable inclination, whereas the central one is perpendicular.

The tent proper, the covering, is invariably of alternate black and brown or brown and white woollen bands, sewn together with a stout thread of camel’s-hair. These bands are called felidj and have a width usually of seventy-five centimetres.

Within there is no furniture properly called, simply the provision for a nomad life, sacks of grain, dates, figs or olives, a few pots and pans, harness, etc., and a few smaller sacks or bags, cachettes, where the womenfolk hide their earrings, corals, and brooches. These last are usually used as pillows at night. It is a law of somebody – perhaps the Prophet – that none of the Arabs’ tent accessories must be of wood or iron, save the tent poles, which are of both, being made of wood and shod with iron; thus all utensils and other furnishings are of skins or mats, and dishes of woven grass, and all cords are of spun camel’s-hair. A few copper pots and pans there are of necessity, and a few rude crockery bowls.

The desert caravans form to-day the same classic pictures as of yore as they thread the trails and paths, obscure and involved enough to the stranger, but plain sailing to the chief or guide of a caravan who precedes the following “squadrons” as a Malay pilot precedes his ship.

 
“At the head of his dusty caravan,
Laden with treasures from realms afar
 

…

 
Through the clouds of dust by the caravan raised
Came the flash of harness and jewelled sheath.”
 

The chief of a tribe, or even a caravan, is a very grand personage among his fellows, and when he is en route rides apart and sleeps in a palanquin or attouch, an attouch being no other thing than a cabin on a ship; here a cabin on the ship of the desert.

The attouch, to be à la mode, must have a tall, chimney-like ventilator rising in the middle and tipped with ostrich plumes. Generally this retreat is large enough to shelter two persons, – always persons of importance in an ostrich-feather-tipped attouch, a sheik and his favourite wife, for example.

The caravans of to-day vary in size from a dozen to fifty camels to a train of four, five, or seven hundred (in Tripoli). Under certain conditions, after a long journey, the camel carriers – the freighters – are usually allowed to rest a matter of days, weeks, or even months, according to the lack of necessitous conditions for pushing on and for recuperation. One of the chief trading towns of the Tripoli caravans to-day in Africa is Kano, a place ruled by a native chief and inhabited by a black population. The chief, for a consideration, affords shelter and protection, and the Arabs of the caravan open up shop and do business in the real county-fair style that they knew before county fairs were even thought of. Native products are bought or traded for in return, and such currency as passes is a sort of wampum made of shells and a few Maria Theresa dollars. Barter, or mere swapping, with a bonus on one side or the other, is the usual caravan Arabs’ idea of merchandizing, and the European can as often get a native-made woollen burnous or a camel’s-hair blanket by the exchange of a “dollar watch” or a “Seth Thomas clock,” as he can by giving up two or three gold louis.

The proper benediction to cast down on the head of any Sheik who may have shown you a courtesy en route is to say in simple French: – “Merci, noble Sheik, de ta générosité. Que la bénédiction d’Allah descende sur toi, sur tes femmes, tes enfants, tes troupeaux et ta tribu.” If you can give him a slab of milk chocolate or a piece of “pepsin” chewing gum, he will appreciate that, too.

The negroes and negresses accompanying the caravans walk, but the Arab either rides camel-back or horseback, like the veritable king of his own little kingdom, which, virtually, every Arab is when he is on the open plain.

The Touaregs, south of Touggourt, one of the real, genuine, Simon-pure tribes of desert Arabs, are not given to the trafficking and merchandizing of those who live down on the coast. Their chief, and in many cases, sole occupation consists in catering for the migratory caravan outfits, selling them dates and mutton and water, for if a Touareg can discover anywhere an unworked oasis with a spring, he has got something which to him is very nearly as good as a gold mine.

Among the Touaregs there are blacks and whites; the whites dress like the conventional Arabs, but the blacks after a fashion more like that of the savage blacks further south. The three superimposed blouses are never too great a weight or thickness for the genuine Arab, even in the blazing furnace of the Sahara. They ward off heat and cold alike.

One of Napoleon’s famous sayings, forgotten almost in favour of others still more famous, was: “Of all obstacles which oppose an army on the march, the greatest, the most difficult to remove, is the desert.”

One imagines the desert as a great, flat, sandy plain with illimitable horizons, like the flat bed of a dried-out ocean. This is a misconception of our youth, brought about by too diligent an application to the precepts of the copy-book and the school geography. All things are possible in the vrai désert. The oasis is not the only interpolation in the monotonous landscape. There are great chotts or marsh tracts, even depressions where a murky alkaline water, unfit for man or beast, is always to be found, vast stretches of rocky plateau, great dunes of sand and even jutting peaks of bare and wind-swept rock, with surfaces as smooth as if washed by the waves of the ocean. These are the common desert characteristics throughout the Sahara, from the Gulf of Gabès to the Moroccan frontier and beyond. Occasionally there are the palpable evidences of new-made volcanic soil, and even granite and sandstone eminences half buried in some engulfing wave of sand swept up by the last sirocco that passed that way.

Over all, however, is an evident and almost impenetrable haze. At a certain moment of one’s progress in the desert, he sees nothing of distinction before or behind or right or left, and at the next finds himself close to a pyramid of rock fifty feet high. Really the desert is very bewildering and enigmatic, and the Arab who navigates it with his caravan is like the sailor on the deep sea. He has to take his bearings every once and again or he is lost and perhaps engulfed.

It is the fashion to write and speak of the mystery of the desert, but in truth there is no mystery about it, albeit its moods are varied and inexplicable at times. To the solitary traveller there is an interest in the desert unknown to seas, or mountains, or even to rolling prairies. Above is a sky of stainless beauty, and the splendour of a pitiless, blinding glare; the sirocco caresses you like a lion with flaming breath; all round lie drifted sand-heaps, where the wind leaves its trace in solid waves. Flayed rocks are here, skeletons of mountains, and hard, unbroken, sun-dried plains, over which he who rides is spurred by the idea that the bursting of a water-skin, or the pricking of a camel’s hoof, would be a certain lingering death of torture. The springs seem to cry the warning words, “Drink and away!” There is nothing mysterious or dull about such a land, indeed it is very real and exciting, and man has as much opportunity here as anywhere of measuring his forces with Nature’s, and of emerging, if possible, triumphant from the trial. This explains the Arab’s proverb: “Voyaging is victory.” In the desert, even more than upon the ocean, there is present death; hardship is there, and piracy, and ship-wreck.

Newcomers to Algeria and Tunisia talk of the monotonous calm of the sand dunes of the desert; but those who know its silences best find nothing monotonous about them. It is as the automobilist expresses it with regard to the great tree-lined “Routes Nationales” of France – “there is sameness, but not monotony.” One does not become ennuied in the desert. He may be alone within a circle of many miles radius, but each glint and glimmer of sunlight, each leaping gazelle and Saharan hare – really a jack-rabbit – keeps him company, and when a camel caravan or a patrol of Spahis rises on the horizon, he feels as “crowded” as he would in a “bridge crush” in New York, or on the Boulevard des Italiens on a fête-day.

Here at one side is a shepherd’s striped tent, surrounded by bleating sheep and goats and tended by a lean, lonesome Arab who is apparently bored stiff with lonesomeness. His is a lonesome life indeed, like that of a shepherd anywhere, and when night comes – often drear and chill even in the Sahara – he slips under his tent flap, pulls his burnous up around his ears and trusts to luck that no jackal will make away with a kid or lamb while he sleeps. He is not paid to sleep by the owner of the flock (a franc and a quarter a day, out of which he feeds himself), but still, sleep he must. Fatigue comes even to a lazy Arab sheep-herder, and he’d rather fall sound asleep beside a brazier inside his tent than doze intermittently before a fire of brushwood in the open. Who would not, at a franc and a quarter a day; particularly as the day includes the night! There is no eight-hour day in the desert.

Before he sleeps, he munches a “pain Arab” and pulls his matoui from his belt, from which he fills his pipe with kif and soon smokes himself into insensibility. Poor sheep and goats, what may not happen to them whilst their guardian is in his paradise of burnt hemp!

In the little oasis settlements where there are natural springs, and not at the Bordjs or government posts of relays, one’s sight is gladdened with flowering fig and almond blooms or fruits and bizarre spiny cacti with pink laurel and palms in all the subtropical profusion of a happy sunlight land. The chief characteristics of an oasis are the superb giant palm-trees, their aigrettes reaching skywards almost to infinity, the azure blue cut into fantastic, fairy shapes, which no artist can paint and no kodakist snap in all their fleeting grace.

Here dwell a few score of sheep, goat, horse, or camel owning Arabs, who mysteriously live off of nothing at all, except when they sell a kid or a baby camel to a passing caravan. It is the simple life with a vengeance! And the children play about in the shadow of the tents naked as worms, and, as they grow up, marry, and adopt by instinct the same idle life. They know no ideas of progress, and perhaps are the happier for it.

The colour effects in the desert are things to make an artist rave. The dunes change colour with each hour of the day, and the silver light of the sunrise and the streaky blood-red and orange of the sunsets are marvels to be seen nowhere else on earth.

The temperature in the desert frequently changes with a suddenness that would be remarked in Paris, the place par excellence in Europe where the changes in temperature are most trying; or in Marseilles, where, from a subtropical summer sun, one can be transplanted on the breath of the mistral into the midst of an Alpine winter in the twinkling of an eye. Fifty degrees centigrade at high noon in the desert may be followed by ten degrees at midnight. That’s a change of seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit, and that’s something.