The road to Mustapha Supérieur lies through the Bab-Azzoun gate, and passes first along a wide street thronged with Arabs and Kabyles from the country and the mountains. This is the great market road of Algiers, the main artery of supplies, a broad thoroughfare lined with _fondouks_ or caravanserais, where the weary camel from the desert deposits his bales of dates, and where black faces of Saharan negroes smile out upon the curious stranger from dense draping folds of some dirty burnouse. The cafés are filled with every variety of Moslem, Jew, Turk, and infidel. Nowhere else will you see to better advantage the wonderful variety of races and costumes that distinguishes Algiers above most other cosmopolitan Mediterranean cities. The dark M'zabite from the oases, arrayed like Joseph in a coat of many colors, stands chatting at his own door with the pale-faced melancholy Berber of the Aurès mountains. The fat and dusky Moor, over-fed on kous-kous, jostles cheek by jowl with the fair Jewess in her Paisley shawl and quaint native head-gear. Mahonnais Spaniards from the Balearic Isles, girt round their waists with red scarves, talk gaily to French missionary priests in violet bands and black cassocks. Old Arabs on white donkeys amble with grave dignity down the center of the broad street, where chasseurs in uniform and spahis in crimson cloaks keep them company on fiery steeds from the Government stud at Blidah. All is noise and bustle, hurry, scurry, and worry, the ant-hill life of an English bazaar grotesquely superimposed on the movement and stir of a great European city. You pass through the gates of the old Moorish town and find yourself at once in a modern but still busy suburb. Then on a sudden the road begins to mount the steep Mustapha slope by sharp zigzags and bold gradients. In native Algerian days, before Allah in his wisdom mysteriously permitted the abhorred infidel to bear sway in the Emerald City over the Faithful of Islam, a single narrow mule-path ascended from the town wall to the breezy heights of Mustapha. It still exists, though deserted, that old breakneck Mussulman road a deep cutting through soft stone, not unlike a Devonshire lane, all moss-grown and leafy, a favorite haunt of the naturalist and the trap-door spider. But the French engineers, most famous of road-makers, knew a more excellent way. Shortly after the conquest they carved a zigzag carriage-drive of splendid dimensions up that steep hill-front, and paved it well with macadam of most orthodox solidity. At the top, in proof of their triumph over nature and the Moslem, they raised a tiny commemorative monument, the Colonne Voirol, after their commander's name, now the Clapham Junction of all short excursions among the green dells of the Sahel.