Facing each other, though separated by four thousand miles of African desert, jungle, and veldt, stand two of the most significant and inspiring statues in the world.

From a little triangle of green set in the middle of the Rue Berthe, the principal street of Biskra, rises in marble the commanding figure of a priest, a bearded, vigorous, eagle-eyed man in the flowing vestments and pointed miter of an archbishop, who holds a primate’s cross aloft in one hand and with the other confers an apostolic benediction as he strides southward into Africa. Charles Martial Allemand Lavigerie was the priest’s name, cardinal-archbishop of Carthage and Algeria, primate of All Africa, founder of the Order of the White Fathers. His fairness, tact, and statesmanship in handling thorny native questions won for France the confidence and friendship of the warlike border tribes; he was largely instrumental in putting an end to the trans-Saharan slave-trade; and he and his Pères Blancs did more than all the French military leaders put together to carry the tricolor beyond the Great Sahara.

At the other end of the continent, in Bulawayo, in the dusty, sun-baked thoroughfare known as Main Street, stands another statue—the bronze image of a short, thick-set, carelessly clad man, his hands clasped behind him, his feet planted firmly apart, as he stares in profound meditation northward over Africa. The name of the dreamer was Cecil John Rhodes, and in his vision he saw twin lines of steel stretching from the Cape of Good Hope straight away to the shores of the Mediterranean; a railway, to use his own words, “cutting Africa through the center and picking up trade all the way.” Though the stupendous project which he envisioned is yet to be completed, it is due to him, more than to any single individual, that the eastern and southern portions of the map of Africa are painted red.

No two men were ever more unlike than Lavigerie and Rhodes. Both empire-builders, both apostles of civilization, one gained his ends by tactfulness, the other by ruthlessness; one stood for the mission-station, the other for the machine-gun; one relied on the power of prayer and proselytism, the other on the pick and the pound sterling. The Pères Blancs organized by Lavigerie carried the cross and the tricolor southward to the Ubanghi; the engineers employed by Rhodes carried the railway and the Union Jack northward to the Congo. As far as the poles apart in character and methods, they yet had this in common: both were inspired by deep patriotism, both were possessed of boundless imagination and inexhaustible enthusiasm. Between them they opened up a continent to civilization.

Whoever had the placing of the great missionary-statesman’s statue in Biskra must have known the man. For the eyes gaze eagerly out into the clean, wind-swept spaces of the desert, while the back is turned in contempt and aversion upon the gaming-houses, the dance-halls, and the brothels of the town. Perhaps because they are so avid for the extremely dubious entertainments which the place has to offer, the thousands of tourists who flock to Biskra every winter find time to bestow on the rapt white figure no more than a cursory glance. To most of these the name of Lavigerie means less than nothing, whereas that of Robert Hichens is familiar to them all!

In the old days, before the railway and the tourists came, before Hichens wrote “The Garden of Allah,” Biskra was no better and no worse than other desert towns. But the hordes of winter visitors which soon began to descend upon the place clamored for the Oriental forms of entertainment which the English author painted so alluringly, and these the avaricious Arabs, who always have an eye out for the main chance, were only too willing to provide, so that to-day Biskra spreads before her guests every form of vice to be found in Europe, and some varieties of which Europe never dreamed. Sensual, provocative, hot with desire, painted of face and barbaric of attire, she beckons from beneath her palm-trees, a demi-mondaine of the desert, a siren of the sands.

Biskra is the capital of the Ziban, or the country of the Zab, a people of mixed Arab and Berber stock, whose villages of sun-hardened mud, nestling amid groves of date-palms and fruit-trees and waving fields of grain, dot that portion of the desert lying between the Shat Melrir and the southern slopes of the Aurés. The water which keeps the oasis green, except a certain amount from wells, all comes from a single stream, the Oued Biskra, which, coming down through the Gorge of El Kantara, forty miles to the north, carries the melting snows of the Atlas to the Sahara and finally drops from sight amid the sands. Biskra itself consists of half a dozen villages, separated by large plantations of palm and olive trees, scattered through an oasis three miles in length by less than a mile in breadth. The native houses are of the usual Saharan type, earth-brown, thick-walled, and flat of roof; but dwelling in black tents along the outer edges of the oasis is a considerable transient population—nomads who have come in from the outer desert to refit themselves for another voyage, for Biskra is, in its way, as much a port as Algiers.

Strongly garrisoned and further strengthened by the fort of St. Germain, Biskra is a place of great strategic importance; the end of one of the fingers, as it were, with which France maintains her grip on the desert. Colomb-Béchar, the present terminus of the railway running south from Oran, is another. So are Gabés, and Tozeur, and Touggourt. Thanks to the chain of outposts which she has flung along the southern frontiers of Barbary from Libya to the Atlantic, France’s hold on the desert is now tolerably secure, but the French have not been lulled into a feeling of false security. They are fully alive to the possibility of one of those general conflagrations which sweep across these fiery regions with the suddenness and violence of a sand-storm, as is denoted by the significant number of uniforms—legionaries, tirailleurs, colonial infantry, spahis, méharistes, chasseurs d’Afrique—which fill the streets of Biskra with color. They are firemen, ever on the alert for an alarm.

The foreign settlement of Biskra, la ville européene, is toward the northern end of the oasis. Barring the Arabs and the camels, it does not differ materially from scores of other winter resorts in the south of France. In the center of the town is a beautiful public garden on which front cafés, restaurants, and small arcaded shops for the sale of post-cards, photographs, native curios, and European goods. Set well back from the broad, rather dusty main thoroughfare, the Rue Berthe, are several luxurious hotels, a pretentious casino in pseudo-Moorish style, where visitors may dance, drink, and engage in various games of chance, and numerous white villas embowered in flowering vines and surrounded by gorgeous gardens. During the season the town is gay with color and music and laughter. Long strings of stately camels stalk slowly through the crowded streets; on the pavements before the native coffee-houses groups of turbaned Arabs chat and smoke; hiverneurs from America and half the European countries lounge on the terraces of the hotels, lean over the green tables of the casino, or rub shoulders in the curio-shops; young men and girls in vivid sport-clothes dash madly about the tennis-courts or canter by on well-groomed ponies; lovely ladies, gowned in the height of the Paris fashion, saunter beside cavalry officers gorgeous in wasp-waisted jackets of sky blue and scarlet riding-breeches; from the cafés arabes come strains of the weird and plaintive music the desert people love; in the afternoons the band of the tirailleurs plays Sousa marches and Irving Berlin jazz in the public gardens.

In the crystal clearness of its air, the vivid blueness of its skies, the brilliancy of its sunlight, and the unbroken sweep of the encircling desert, Biskra reminds one of an Upper Nile town, such as Luxor, if one can imagine Luxor without the river and without the temples at Thebes. From November to April its climate is, generally speaking, delightful, but in the summer the thermometer often registers 110 in the shade during the day and 90 at night, though the absence of humidity makes even such excessive heat endurable. Yet Biskra can hardly be recommended for those who are actually ill, for its glorious winter climate is marred by high, bitterly cold winds which frequently bring the mercury down to the freezing-point and cause the shivering tourists to curse the person who assured them that the Sahara and heat are synonymous.

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.

The creators of northern gardens strive primarily for color; here, amid the glare of the sun and the desert, the chief object sought is shade. Almost wholly absent are the velvety stretches of close-cropped lawn, the brilliant “flower-beds,” the formal avenues and exactly trimmed hedges to which we are accustomed. There are flowers, of course—great clumps of geranium, hedges of red and white hibiscus, cascades of bougainvillea, purple and crimson, clambering roses, and unfamiliar plants and vines with gorgeous blooms—but instead of being set out in formal rows or geometrical designs, as European gardeners are so fond of doing, they peep out unexpectedly from amid a bewildering tangle of bamboos, palms of every known variety, and citrus-trees, for in that fierce heat they can exist only by taking advantage of the shade. Winding through the wilderness of verdure go broad white walks, stamped and rolled until they are as smooth as asphalt and then sprinkled with a thin layer of sand. Everywhere bare-legged Arab gardeners are at work preserving the immaculate tidiness of the gardens. So conscientious are they that a footprint on the sanded walks is instantly erased, not a dead leaf is to be seen.

Entering the cool green tunnels from the intolerable glare and heat of the sun, hearing the pleasant splash and gurgle of water coursing through the network of leafy channels, lounging beneath pergolas smothered in jasmine and bougainvillea, or from the outer promenade gazing across the illimitable sea of sand whose yellow waves break impotently against the retaining-walls of the garden, one marvels at the miracle which has wrought such surpassing beauty from a region so discouraging. Nowhere else have I seen such bold and successful defiance of the desert; here “the wilderness becomes like Eden, and the desert like the garden of the Lord.” The wonder and fascination of the place grow on the visitor hour by hour.

Hidden away in the heart of the gardens is the owner’s villa, a rambling, one-story building which lays no claim to architectural pretensions. The interior is a curious mélange of Moorish and mid-Victorian, the Oriental rugs and hangings, the marbles and paintings, the ornate crystal chandeliers, the broad divans piled high with embroidered cushions, the Empire tables and over-stuffed chairs upholstered in brocaded satin combining the unbridled opulence of the East with the dignity and restraint of the West. Not far away is a charming little pavilion, furnished in the Oriental style, where Count Landon takes his guests after dinner for coffee and cigarettes.

Reclining on a grassy bank before the pavilion was an Arab in a plum-colored burnous, a scarlet hibiscus-blossom thrust behind his ear, pensively engaged in the extraction of mournful music from a flute. We did not need to be told that this was the Larbi described by Hichens. He is a born actor and, if the stories one hears are to be believed, he has been highly successful in capitalizing the fame brought him by the book, for every English and American visitor to the gardens asks to see him and for the plaintive love-airs which he draws from his little reed rewards him generously.

In a charming glade beside a vine-clad kiosk we found another Arab, who offered, for a small consideration, to tell our fortunes in the sand. Ordinarily I should have passed him by, but the atmosphere of the Jardin Landon encourages such tomfoolery, and, at my daughter’s insistence, I told him to try his hand at prophecy. Drawing the hood of his burnous over his head, he spread white sand evenly upon the ground, traced cabalistic designs in it with a pointed stick, blew upon it, and, after a few moments spent in scrutinizing the result, informed me that I was about to undertake a long journey—a safe prophecy under the circumstances and, as it happened, a correct one. He did not prove such a good guesser in my daughter’s case, however, for, after the customary shibboleth, he announced that she was being pursued by a tall dark man who came from out of the South. This had the effect of shaking our confidence in the infallibility of the sand-diviner, for the youth who had pursued her across half North Africa in his big Minerva was a Belgian nobleman, short, fair-haired, and blond!

The gardens of the Villa Landon are intensely theatrical and one always has the feeling that he has inadvertently wandered upon a stage set for a play, which, to my way of thinking, adds enormously to their charm. They evidently did not make the same appeal to all my country-people that they did to me, however, for, while seated beneath a pergola, I heard a voice, with the unmistakable accent of the Middle West, coming from beyond the screen of shrubbery.

“This ain’t half bad,” the unseen speaker remarked condescendingly, “but saay, you just oughta see our back yard in Topeka when the sunflowers and the hollyhocks are out.”

In the desert, a dozen miles southeast of Biskra, is the town of Sidi Okba, the religious center, as Biskra is the commercial capital, of the Ziban. It owes its sanctity, which draws pilgrims from all parts of Moslem Africa, to the fact that its great mosque contains the tomb of Okba ibn Nefi, the soldier-saint of Islam, who, in the first century of the Hegira, conquered Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic and fell in battle with the Berbers near this place in A.D. 682.

It took the Atlantic Ocean to check Okba’s furious onsweep to the West. When he reached its shores he is said to have spurred his horse girth-deep into its waters and, raising his simitar to heaven, exclaimed, “Great God, if my course were not stopped by that sea I would still go on to the unknown kingdoms of the West, preaching the unity of Thy holy name and putting to the sword the rebellious nations who worship any other god than Thee!” He was a mighty soldier, and, had it not been for the providential interposition of the Atlantic, America might be Mohammedan to-day.

The last chapter of Okba’s stormy life was marked by one of those chivalrous episodes so common in Arab chronicles. While he was meditating on some plan for circumventing the Atlantic, the Berber tribes he had conquered on his westward march were rising in his rear. Finding his position hopeless, he sent for one of his chiefs, a man whom he had imprisoned for attempting to incite a mutiny in the army. Okba released him and advised him to fly while there was yet time. But the mutineer replied that he preferred to die by his leader’s side. So, embracing as friends, they drew their simitars, broke the scabbards, and turned to face the onslaught of the foe, falling at last, back to back, amid a ring of the Berbers they had slain.

To-day the great conqueror lies buried, not far from where he made his gallant final stand, beneath a splendid shrine within the precincts of the imposing mosque which bears his name. Carved on the sepulcher in Cufic characters is the simple but pregnant inscription: “This is the tomb of Okba, son of Nefi. May God have mercy upon him.” No older Arabic structure is known to exist in Africa.

In the minds of the tourist, Biskra is always associated with the women of the Ouled-Naïl, those dusky damsels of easy virtue who perform their strange sensual dances and ply their age-old trade in the cafés and brothels which line the narrow, dim-lit thoroughfare named, perhaps with a touch of sarcasm, the Rue Sainte. They are the daughters of a tribe which inhabits the mountains of the Ouled-Naïl, a wild, inaccessible, almost unexplored range which stretches from the western end of the Ziban to the vicinity of Djelfa.

From earliest childhood they are trained for a life of immorality very much as a promising colt is trained for the race-course. A girl is scarcely out of her cradle before, under the tutelage of her mother, who has herself been a danseuse in her time, she begins the arduous course of gymnastics and muscle training which is the foundation of their suggestive danses du ventre. Morning, noon, and night, day after day, year after year, the muscles of her chest, her back, her hips, her thighs, her abdomen are developed and suppled and trained until they will respond to her wishes as readily as her slender, henna-stained fingers. Her lustrous blue-black hair is brushed and combed and oiled and brushed again; she is taught to play the hautboy, the zither, and the flute and to sing the haunting love-songs of the desert people; to make the thick black native coffee and with inimitable dexterity to roll a cigarette. By the time she has entered her teens she is ready to make her début in the dance-hall of some Algerian town, a mistress of all the peculiar arts and accomplishments which make the successful courtezan.

After half a dozen years or so of a life which knows no moral scruples, during which she carefully hoards the money bestowed on her by her admirers, she returns, a-clank with gold pieces and jewelry, to the mud-walled mountain village from which she came, to marry some well-to-do man of the tribe and to bear him children, who, if they are boys, will perhaps don the scarlet burnous and white turban of the spahis and serve in the armies of France, or, if they are girls, will live the life of their mother all over again. The profession is, in fact, a hereditary one, which a very large proportion of the women of the tribe pursue without the slightest blemish to their reputations. It is an extraordinary custom, and one to which no other country, so far as I am aware, offers a parallel, for whereas the geishas of Japan, the nautches of India, and the ghawazi of Egypt are but classes, the Ouled-Naïl are a race, as distinct in features and characteristics as the Touareg, the Kabyles, or the Riffi.⁠[3]

European writers have been prone to envelop these demi-mondaines of the desert in a rosy veil of romance, which is, however, not wholly justified by the facts. Many of them, as I have just said, after earning their dowries in the dance-halls, return to their people in the mountains, marry a respectable young man of the tribe, and ever after lead strictly moral lives; but others, judging from their appearances, have been in no great hurry to reform and settle down.

The Ouled-Naïl, be it understood, are not common to Biskra alone, for they frequently make their way to Constantine and to Algiers, yes, and to Tunis in the east and to Tangier in the west, for they appear to be as popular with the Berbers and the Moors as with the Arabs. Though some of the younger ones are really pretty in a dark, barbaric fashion, with slim, supple bodies, hands and feet that are small and perfectly molded, piquant features, and eyes as large and lustrous as those of a gazelle, their beauty is evanescent, and by the time they have reached their early twenties they have become painted, leering harridans with mouths like steel traps and steely, calculating eyes. Yet, even after their youthful bloom has vanished, their dances continue to arouse the ardor of their native admirers, they are sometimes the objects of extraordinary munificence, and they often provoke furious jealousies which flare up in violent quarrels and not infrequently terminate in bloodshed and death. That is why the Rue Sainte echoes throughout the night to the measured tramp of tirailleur patrols.

The cafés maures which are the scene of the Ouled-Naïl dances are for the most part resorts of the most unsavory description, low-ceilinged, dimly lighted, and foul with smoke. The dancers give their performance on a small raised platform to the shrill of reeds, the clash of cymbals, and the incessant throb of drums played by Arab or negro musicians who squat in a semicircle on the earthen floor. There is no fixed charge for admission, but during the frequent intermissions one of the music-makers, or, perhaps, a dancing-girl herself, will pass among the spectators soliciting contributions.

In their dress, if in little else, the Ouled-Naïl have nothing in common with the Jewish and Moresque courtezans who on the stages of certain extremely disreputable dance-halls in the kasbah quarter of Algiers prance in a state of almost complete nudity for the delectation of visitors from the tourist steamers. Their costumes would, on the contrary, be considered actually prudish by the patrons of the Winter Garden and the Vanities, for, barring the exposure of a narrow band of flesh around the waist, they are so completely enveloped in loose flowing garments that virtually nothing of their figures can be seen. Past mistresses in the art of seduction, they have learned that sexual passion is aroused by suggestion rather than by revelation. The excessive modesty of their costumes is more than counterbalanced, however, by the licentiousness of their dances, which are the very essence of Oriental depravity, an unrestrained appeal to sexual desire. Yet every night the dance-halls of the Rue Sainte are crowded to the doors with European tourists—sober, self-respecting business men, staid matrons, yes, and young, carefully reared girls who view the scene in embarrassed fascination, only half comprehending what the dances mean.

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.

The performance is in charge of a marabout, a dignified, patriarchal-looking Arab in a high thimble-shaped turban and a burnous of brown camel’s-hair, who acts as a sort of stage-director. Calling up the performers, one by one, he enfolds each in his arms and makes a few passes about him, whereupon the dervishes and the demented proceed to work themselves into an authentic frenzy of religious exaltation, rolling their eyeballs in their sockets, foaming at the lips, twitching their limbs, and shaking as though afflicted with palsy, while their confederates, employed for the occasion, imitate them with an attempt at realism which is not wholly convincing. Faster and faster the frenzied figures reel about the room, louder and faster throb the drums, while the “Al-lah! Al-lah! Al-lah!” of the native spectators, who rock themselves backward and forward in time with the chant, adds to the infernal din.

A few minutes of this and, at a signal from the marabout, the racket ceases as abruptly as it began. A word from the leader, and there staggers into the center of the circle a wild-looking, long-haired figure clad only in a breech-clout; his eyes are glazed, and he is thin to the point of emaciation. From a brazier he lifts between his thumb and forefinger a glowing coal the size of a large marble, places it upon his tongue, swallows it as though it were a bon-bon. In the air is the horrid odor of burning flesh; an American spectator gives an exclamation of disgust; a woman utters a faint scream; the natives emit a long-drawn “Ah-h-h” of gratification.

The next number on the program was even more revolting. A pseudo-dervish, who by day is a street-sweeper in the Rue Berthe, so I was informed, plunged his hand into a basket and withdrew a live green snake, perhaps eighteen inches long. The silence in the room was so intense that we could hear the serpent hissing. Holding the wriggling thing firmly, he inserted its head into his mouth ... his throat worked convulsively for a moment ... and it was gone! The florid American beside me mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. There was a little commotion among the spectators gathered near the door; the woman who had screamed was going out.

Now came the apogee of the evening’s entertainment. This time the actor was no neophyte but a real dyed-in-the-wool fanatic such as I had seen in the dervish monasteries of Anatolia and Persia. Him I recognized as the real thing. His eyes glowed with the fires of fanaticism, his nostrils quivered like a race-horse’s, little streams of saliva trickled from the outer corners of his lips. It was plain that he was at the very height of religious frenzy; a man in that condition might do anything to himself—or to others. But when the marabout made a few passes about him and whispered in his ear he quieted like an excited dog which hears its master’s voice. From the folds of his garments the marabout produced a number of steel skewers, about the length of hat-pins. Opening his mouth, the dervish drove one of the steels through the fleshy part of his cheek until a good four inches of it protruded from his face. A second skewer he forced through the muscles of his upper arm; a third through his thigh; two more through his breasts. In scarcely more time than it takes to tell about it the man was a human pin-cushion. Little rivulets of blood, welling from the wounds, coursed down his naked body to form a crimson pool upon the floor. By now the other performers and the native spectators had worked themselves up to a very high pitch of excitement. “Al-lah! Al-lah! Al-lah!” they howled, rocking like automatons and beating themselves upon the breast. The drums boomed and thundered until it seemed as though the wave of sound would lift the roof.

The dervish wrenched out the skewers and dropped, panting, on a mat. Two superbly developed negroes, all but naked, took his place. Beneath the light from the guttering lamps their brown-black skins gleamed like bronzes in a museum. They approached each other on all fours, crouching, circling, snarling, purring. This was the panther dance, an all too realistic representation of the amorous relations of two great jungle cats. Now the religious ecstasy which had provided a pretext for the preceding performances was at an end; this was sheer animalism, frankly obscene and wholly unashamed.

“I’ve had enough of this,” I said to my companion. “I think that I’ll go back to the hotel and take a bath and try to feel clean again.”

We went out into the soft African night. As we strode northward through the Rue Berthe toward the European quarter we could hear behind us the clash of cymbals and the wail of reeds from the cafés where the Ouled-Naïl were dancing, the throbbing of the negro drums. But from the desert a clean and gentle wind was blowing, and the stars shone very bright.