With the aid of a railway an English novelist inadvertently made of Biskra what it is to-day. I say inadvertently because there is not the least reference to Biskra in the whole book, and I am sure that Mr. Hichens was the last person to wish to create of a Sahara oasis a kind of Dieppe-on-sand. Neither would this town have been so thronged with trippers had it been miles away in the desert without a railway, but it is so easy to get into the train at Algiers one night and detrain the next day in time for lunch in the Sahara that more people come here than to any other place in the south. Of course, from the point of view of the country, the change has brought in a great deal of money and the town has an air of fat prosperity unknown in the other places we have visited. Arab guides are paid the wages of colonels and the hiring of camels is as expensive as a motor-car. The cafés of the Quarter charge what they please and the numerous Palace hotels have corresponding prices. It is a curious place and well worth a visit. It is difficult to decide which arrival is the most attractive—possibly that from the south, because the oasis is the first thing seen. It is an impression of palm-trees, three times as many as at Laghouat, and as one approaches in the evening, the golden light seems to envelop their feathery heads in a mysterious radiance as the wind rustles through them. From the northern approach the coloring on the rocks and hills will perhaps be as wonderful, but there is not that same feeling of the Sahara because the town masks the oasis. The largest hotel is the Royal, and from its tower a wonderful panorama of the desert is spread before one. Unfortunately it is difficult to keep up this atmosphere long, as it is impossible to close one’s eyes to the Anglo-Saxon hibernators who have brought with them their knitting and their bridge and their crossword puzzles, while the foreign waiters in their starched dickeys jar horribly after the silence of the Great South. Moreover, if one steps into the street superb guides in sky-blue robes assail one—flight north seems the easiest course only to find a gallery of curiosity shops stocked with gaudy merchandise from Syria. Again fleeing from the oily merchants toward the sounds of a deep flute, one finds oneself in a coffee-house, as dirty as in the other cities, with the only difference that the mint tea costs five francs. Again in a wretched state of persecution mania one turns south again and, seeing a brilliantly lighted building of Moorish architecture, one hurries in; lights dazzle one, the sounds of bad dance-music strike the ear mingled with monotonous cries of _“Rien ne va plus!”_ It is the casino, but, just as one is about to depart again into the night in search of a haven of refuge, the curious scene arrests one’s steps.