I find it somewhat difficult to analyze the charm of Biskra. That it has great charm is undeniable, but its charm does not lie altogether in the brilliance of its sunshine, the richness of its colors, or the novelty of its setting. It has no monopoly of these. I think that its peculiar appeal is to be found, rather, in its innate barbarism, for, beneath its thin coating of civilization, it is African to the core. This may seem rather far-fetched when one remembers that it is reached from the north by comfortable trains with _wagons-lits_ and dining-cars; that its larger hotels compare very favorably with the great hostelries of Florida and the Riviera; that its casino is crowded nightly with men and women in evening-dress risking their money at _petits chevaux_ or roulette. Yet the barbaric note is never wholly absent; it rings more shrill by force of contrast; one has the uneasy feeling that the veneer of civilization is none too thick, that one is walking on a perilously thin crust. The caravans which slip in so silently from the great wastes and steal out again with equal mysteriousness bound for God knows where; the hooded figures which crouch motionless in the dimly lit interiors of the native cafés; the tattooed harlots who flaunt themselves in the narrow streets of the Ouled-Naïl quarter; the wild-looking, sullen-eyed men from the depths of the desert who furtively whisper together in the market-place; the momentary flash of a steel blade as a burnous is carelessly thrown back; the eery wail of flutes and the muffled throb of drums; the moonlight gleaming on the bayonets of night patrols—all these combine to remind us that we are in Africa, a tiny island of white men amid a sea of mysterious, fanatical, menacing brown ones; and that out there in the brooding desert, under cover of the darkness, who knows what ominous plans are hatching. As in other places on the edge of the unknown, one is constantly oppressed by an undefinable sense of lurking peril, the uneasy feeling that something is about to happen. Biskra, as every reader of modern fiction knows, is the Beni-Mora of Robert Hichens’s “Garden of Allah,” and to leave there without visiting the gardens of the Villa Landon which the novelist so graphically describes would be as unthinkable as to leave Versailles without seeing the Trianon. For the setting of his story Hichens chose the beautiful estate of Count Landon, a French nobleman who has devoted his life to a study of Arab life, which lies in the extreme outskirts of the oasis, on the very margin of the desert, its walls rising abruptly from the illimitable sea of sand.