He who returns by motor-car from Biskra to Algiers may avoid the detour via Constantine by taking the new direct road from Batna to Sétif, a distance of 132 kilometres. It ascends to an altitude of over 5000 feet, and in winter is sometimes blocked by snow. But this is not likely to be a frequent trouble. Whichever way he comes, direct or roundabout, by road or rail, the traveller must make Sétif his point. If he omits to take the road from Sétif to Bougie, through the Chabet pass, a distance of 113 kilometres, he will have no idea of what Algeria is capable of in the way of mountain scenery. There is a distinct tendency among Englishmen to-day to revolt against the domination of the guide-book. With our ancient constitution in the melting-pot, and our most cherished national convictions openly contested, it is hardly surprising that even the revered name of Murray has failed to maintain its authority. There are abandoned men who openly flout it, who want to see nothing of the things that ought to be seen, to know none of the things that ought to be known. The reaction was inevitable. Murray and Baedeker and the like set poor human weakness an impossible ideal. They direct us as if we were an army of invasion; they map out our operations day by day and hour by hour with a ruthless precision. Has anyone ever carried through the programme of How to spend ten days in Rome, and survived to boast of it? Wherefore in our iconoclastic age there are men to whom the guide-book’s double star is but a danger signal. Let me implore them to waive their prejudices as far at least as the Chabet pass is concerned. If much be-praised it is still quite un-hackneyed; and it is magnificent. And they may steal a march on the enemy. The guide-books, as far as Algeria is concerned, have not discovered the motor-car. They direct you to hire a carriage at Sétif, to sleep at a roadside inn, and to lumber into Bougie at the close of the second day. We have changed all that. We take a car at Sétif after _dejeuner_, and loitering by the way we yet reach Bougie in time to stroll round the town before dinner. So we have a day in hand. But let us haste to do it before a revised edition comes out. The plateau of which Sétif may be considered the centre lies at a high altitude, and as the sea is no great distance off, we may perceive from a glance at the map that there must be a more or less rapid landfall towards it. Such conditions commonly produce a picturesque coast-line. Here we have more than this. The plain is supported by a very abrupt range of mountains rising to twice its height,—the peaks to 6000 and 7000 feet. Such a range must either be crossed by a high pass, or it may be that we may find an outlet where a mountain stream, taking advantage perhaps of a rift caused by a natural convulsion, has worn for itself a passage. Such a passage is the gorge of Chabet-el-Akhira.