“Travel,” Madame de Pompadour once remarked petulantly to her friend Louis XV, “is the saddest of all pleasures.” And, with two thousand miles of African desert and upland behind you, it will not be surprising if you are of the great courtezan’s way of thinking by the time you have arrived at Setif, a busy but colorless and uninteresting town some hours to the west of Constantine. If by now you have reached that stage of physical weariness and mental boredom which led a companion of mine to observe upon gaining the summit of the Grand St. Bernard, “Why, my dear fellow, there’s nothing to see here but scenery,” then I should strongly advise you to continue westward by the _route nationale_ which leads across the Chaine-des-Bibans to Algiers; and on the evening of the second day after leaving Constantine you will be seated in evening dress at a perfectly appointed table in one of the great tourist hostelries which crown the heights of Mustapha Supérieur, with the lights of the Algerian capital twinkling at your feet and the boulevards of Paris only eight-and-forty hours away. But, if you can stand a few additional days of traveling, I hope for your own sake that at Setif you will turn your car north instead of west, taking the wonderful road which runs through the Chabet Pass to the shores of the Mediterranean and Bougie and thence into the highlands of the Grand Kabylia. Unless you do this you will miss some of the grandest scenery the world has to offer, your friends in Algiers will listen to your explanations with ill-concealed astonishment, and you will regret it all your life. I am not urging you to make this detour, you understand; I am merely suggesting it. What? You are willing to follow my advice? Good! Let’s go! For the first thirty miles after leaving Setif you will be disappointed, for the road runs between endless fields of grain. But upon crossing a chain of hills, from which we obtain a splendid view of the mighty range we are about to penetrate, the road drops rapidly to Kherrata and the little river which has worn for itself a narrow passage—the gorge of Chabet-el-Akhira—through the Djurjuras, which rear themselves in a tremendous rampart, in places seven thousand feet in height, between us and the coast.