In the old days, before the railway and the tourists came, before Hichens wrote “The Garden of Allah,” Biskra was no better and no worse than other desert towns. But the hordes of winter visitors which soon began to descend upon the place clamored for the Oriental forms of entertainment which the English author painted so alluringly, and these the avaricious Arabs, who always have an eye out for the main chance, were only too willing to provide, so that to-day Biskra spreads before her guests every form of vice to be found in Europe, and some varieties of which Europe never dreamed. Sensual, provocative, hot with desire, painted of face and barbaric of attire, she beckons from beneath her palm-trees, a demi-mondaine of the desert, a siren of the sands. Biskra is the capital of the Ziban, or the country of the Zab, a people of mixed Arab and Berber stock, whose villages of sun-hardened mud, nestling amid groves of date-palms and fruit-trees and waving fields of grain, dot that portion of the desert lying between the Shat Melrir and the southern slopes of the Aurés. The water which keeps the oasis green, except a certain amount from wells, all comes from a single stream, the Oued Biskra, which, coming down through the Gorge of El Kantara, forty miles to the north, carries the melting snows of the Atlas to the Sahara and finally drops from sight amid the sands. Biskra itself consists of half a dozen villages, separated by large plantations of palm and olive trees, scattered through an oasis three miles in length by less than a mile in breadth. The native houses are of the usual Saharan type, earth-brown, thick-walled, and flat of roof; but dwelling in black tents along the outer edges of the oasis is a considerable transient population—nomads who have come in from the outer desert to refit themselves for another voyage, for Biskra is, in its way, as much a port as Algiers. Strongly garrisoned and further strengthened by the fort of St. Germain, Biskra is a place of great strategic importance; the end of one of the fingers, as it were, with which France maintains her grip on the desert. Colomb-Béchar, the present terminus of the railway running south from Oran, is another. So are Gabés, and Tozeur, and Touggourt. Thanks to the chain of outposts which she has flung along the southern frontiers of Barbary from Libya to the Atlantic, France’s hold on the desert is now tolerably secure, but the French have not been lulled into a feeling of false security. They are fully alive to the possibility of one of those general conflagrations which sweep across these fiery regions with the suddenness and violence of a sand-storm, as is denoted by the significant number of uniforms—legionaries, _tirailleurs_, colonial infantry, spahis, _méharistes_, _chasseurs d’Afrique_—which fill the streets of Biskra with color. They are firemen, ever on the alert for an alarm.