The foreign settlement of Biskra, _la ville européene_, is toward the northern end of the oasis. Barring the Arabs and the camels, it does not differ materially from scores of other winter resorts in the south of France. In the center of the town is a beautiful public garden on which front cafés, restaurants, and small arcaded shops for the sale of post-cards, photographs, native curios, and European goods. Set well back from the broad, rather dusty main thoroughfare, the Rue Berthe, are several luxurious hotels, a pretentious casino in pseudo-Moorish style, where visitors may dance, drink, and engage in various games of chance, and numerous white villas embowered in flowering vines and surrounded by gorgeous gardens. During the season the town is gay with color and music and laughter. Long strings of stately camels stalk slowly through the crowded streets; on the pavements before the native coffee-houses groups of turbaned Arabs chat and smoke; _hiverneurs_ from America and half the European countries lounge on the terraces of the hotels, lean over the green tables of the casino, or rub shoulders in the curio-shops; young men and girls in vivid sport-clothes dash madly about the tennis-courts or canter by on well-groomed ponies; lovely ladies, gowned in the height of the Paris fashion, saunter beside cavalry officers gorgeous in wasp-waisted jackets of sky blue and scarlet riding-breeches; from the _cafés arabes_ come strains of the weird and plaintive music the desert people love; in the afternoons the band of the _tirailleurs_ plays Sousa marches and Irving Berlin jazz in the public gardens. In the crystal clearness of its air, the vivid blueness of its skies, the brilliancy of its sunlight, and the unbroken sweep of the encircling desert, Biskra reminds one of an Upper Nile town, such as Luxor, if one can imagine Luxor without the river and without the temples at Thebes. From November to April its climate is, generally speaking, delightful, but in the summer the thermometer often registers 110 in the shade during the day and 90 at night, though the absence of humidity makes even such excessive heat endurable. Yet Biskra can hardly be recommended for those who are actually ill, for its glorious winter climate is marred by high, bitterly cold winds which frequently bring the mercury down to the freezing-point and cause the shivering tourists to curse the person who assured them that the Sahara and heat are synonymous. [Illustration: THE STRANGE CAPITAL OF A STRANGE PEOPLE Chalk-white beneath the sun of Africa, the square, flat-roofed buildings of Ghardaia, the city of the Beni-Mzab, a Berber tribe of the Algerian Sahara, rise in terraces, like those of the pyramid-pueblo at Taos, to the _kasbah_, above whose massive walls the minaret of the Great Mosque soars skyward, like a finger pointing toward heaven]