But even in Algeria proper, along the narrow-gauge track out of Touggourt, the rebels only once succeeded in derailing an oil train.

In the desert town of Touggourt, French officials and a sprinkling of carefully chosen Algerians stood in a railroad freight yard ringed by three fences of barbed wire and guarded by soldiers.

With two years to wait for a full-sized 24-in. pipeline from the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast, the French strung the baby pipeline across 93 miles of desert from Hassi Messaoud northward to Touggourt and widened 120 miles of narrow-gauge railway to transport the oil from Touggourt to the coast.

At Touggourt, an oasis in the desert, De Gaulle told 15,000 The Batonga tribe, some 50,000 strong, has survived for more than 500 years on the banks of the Zambesi where it flows through the steaming, fertile Gwembe Valley between Southern and Northern Rhodesia.

He had a feeling that if the clan got near enough to such centers as Zinder to the south, or Touggourt to the north, there would be wholesale desertion of the Bela, and, for that matter, even of some of his younger warriors and their wives.