several sizes too large for them; dignified, richly appareled emirs from regions as widely separated as Tibesti and Mauretania; marabouts, clothed in rags and sanctity, pleading for alms; negro clowns from the Sudan, drums slung about their necks and ostrich-plumes in their fuzzy hair, who have accompanied some caravan across the dreary desert miles; dervishes, snake-charmers, sand-diviners, story-tellers ... all these, and many more, make of Ghardaia’s market-place a panorama of Saharan life inconceivably rich in interest, variety, and color. Upon leaving the capital of the Mozabites, two routes offer themselves to the traveler bound for Algeria. If impatient for the food, the music, and the lights of the hotels of Mustapha Supérieur, he had best turn straight northward, through Laghouat, a prosperous border town of some size but no particular interest, to Djelfa, the southern terminus of the railway to Algiers. Djelfa, by the way, is the best starting-point for an excursion into the mountains of the Ouled-Naïl, the home of that highland clan from whose dusky, dashing daughters are recruited half the prostitutes and dancing-girls of French North Africa. Time permitting, I should have liked to visit these ladies of easy virtue on their native heath, but I knew that Harvey and the Cadillac had been for some days at Biskra and that awaiting us beyond the Atlas were peoples and places equally colorful and strange. So, bidding farewell to the Mozabites, we mounted our twelve-wheeled Pegasus and, turning our back upon Ghardaia and its tall white tower, purred out across the desert toward the dawn. CHAPTER XIII BISKRA, DEMI-MONDAINE OF THE DESERT Facing each other, though separated by four thousand miles of African desert, jungle, and veldt, stand two of the most significant and inspiring statues in the world. From a little triangle of green set in the middle of the Rue Berthe, the principal street of Biskra, rises in marble the commanding figure of a priest, a bearded, vigorous, eagle-eyed man in the flowing vestments and pointed miter of an archbishop, who holds a primate’s cross aloft in one hand and with the other confers an apostolic benediction as he strides southward into Africa. Charles Martial Allemand Lavigerie was the priest’s name, cardinal-archbishop of Carthage and Algeria, primate of All Africa, founder of the Order of the White Fathers. His fairness, tact, and statesmanship in handling thorny native questions won for France the confidence and friendship of the warlike border tribes; he was largely instrumental in putting an end to the trans-Saharan slave-trade; and he and his _Pères Blancs_ did more than all the French military leaders put together to carry the tricolor beyond the Great Sahara. [Illustration: THE START FROM TOUGGOURT Mrs. Powell embarks on a ship of the desert But Miss Powell prefers her Arab steed]