In a narrow street at the back of the Rue Sainte is a _zaouia_ where those visitors whose curiosity is strong enough to overcome their feelings of horror and repulsion may witness the terrible rites of the Aïssaoua sect. This fanatical order of dervishes takes its name from the Marabout Aïssa, a native of Morocco. Lost in the desert, he would have perished from starvation, so the tradition goes, had not the miraculous powers with which he was endowed enabled him to sustain himself on such unusual forms of food as fire, snakes, scorpions, and the spiny leaves of the prickly pear. The members of the sect imitate him, or pretend to imitate him to this day, even improving upon the traditional performances of their founder by eating broken glass, driving knives and skewers through their flesh, and undergoing other self-inflicted tortures. Whether the alleged “holy men” who stage their revolting performance nightly in the back street of Biskra are actually members of the Aïssaoua order is open to some question; certainly their exhibition is mere child’s play to some that I have seen in Inner Asia. Yet they are hideous and disgusting enough, heaven knows, and one wonders how Europeans, particularly European women, can sit through them. Numbers do, however, and become so fascinated that they forget to be horrified or to feel sick until they get home. The performance takes place in a long, low room, its atmosphere heavy with tobacco-smoke, the fumes of incense, the reek of lamps, and the odor of human perspiration. Ranged against the walls are wooden benches for the accommodation of the European spectators, most of whom appear distinctly ill at ease and rather white about the gills, while the native onlookers seat themselves cross-legged on the floor. At the far end of the room are gathered the performers: some hollow-eyed, lean-framed, wild-looking fanatics of the true dervish stamp; others unbalanced, half-crazy individuals such as are to be found about the mosques and bazaars of every Moslem city; the rest perfectly normal men—butchers, porters, scavengers, and the like—who are always willing to endure a little pain for the sake of profit. These last are indubitably impostors; but of the others it is hard to determine just where religious frenzy ends and simulation begins. Music, if such it can be called, is provided by a trio of negro drummers, who thump their barbaric instruments—_roum, roum, roum ... roum, roum, roum ... roum, roum, roum_—until the fetid air of the place pulses with the sound.