After about four miles the gorge begins to widen, its walls become less abrupt, the mountains give way to hills covered with forests of oak and cork trees, and we emerge from the gloom of the defile into a lovely mountain valley drenched in the spring sunshine. So on down the ever-broadening valley, with occasional glimpses of the azure sea ahead, until, at a point about twenty-five miles east of Bougie, we reach the Mediterranean. For a time the road stays inland, traversing the rich coastal plains which lie between the mountains and the sea; but as we approach Bougie the increasingly mountainous nature of the country forces it to the very edge of the lofty cliffs which line the shore, along which it runs in an endless succession of curves and zigzags, contorting itself into S’s, U’s, and Z’s. In places, where the spurs of the mountains run down to the sea in precipitous headlands, the French engineers have jeered at Nature’s attempt to obstruct the road by carrying it on a narrow shelf blasted in the face of the sheer rock, so that the motorist has the somewhat alarming sensation of driving along a slender ribbon slung between sea and sky. Up and down it winds, round capes, promontories, bays, and inlets; it is flung across gorges on bridges as massively constructed as Roman aqueducts; sometimes it is tunneled, and one emerges from the semi-darkness upon views of bright blue sea and bright green mountain-slopes which are dreams of loveliness. The African Corniche, as that portion of the coastal highway between Djidjelli and Bougie is called, fully equals, if it does not surpass, the famous road of the same name along the Riviera. I believe, indeed, that the day is not far distant when this strip of the Algerian littoral will rival the Côte d’Azur as a resort for winter tourists. It has a better winter climate than the Riviera; it is almost immune from the cold winds which at times set Cannes, Nice, and Monte Carlo a-shiver; it is surrounded, east, south, and west, by scenery incomparably grander than any in the Maritime Alps; its vegetation is richer and more varied, with more suggestion of the tropical, than that on the other side of the Mediterranean; hundreds of miles of splendid highway are open to the motorist—east to Tunisia, west to Morocco, south to the Sahara; it is no further from Bougie to Algiers than it is from Nice to Marseilles; and Algiers, thanks to the _rapides_ of the P. L. M. and the swift steamers of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, has become only a step from Paris. Dredge the spacious harbor of Bougie to a depth which would permit the entrance of the great tourist steamers; erect a casino and a good hotel or two; line the sandy beach below the town with bathing-cabins, and the Kabyle Coast would ere many years, if I am not mistaken, put the Blue Coast out of business. For, apart from its innumerable natural attractions, it offers to the tourist a romantic and irresistible appeal, the lure of Africa.