TO get into the interior back of Algiers, you make your start from Maison CarrÉe. Here one gets his first glimpse of the real countryside of Algeria. These visions of the Arab life of olden times are quite the most interesting features of the country. Civilization has crept in and rubbed shoulders very hard here and there; but still the Arab trader, workman, and shopkeeper conducts his affairs much as he did before he carried a dollar watch and lighted his cigarettes with safety matches.

The kaleidoscopic life of the market at Maison CarrÉe is one of the sights of suburban Algiers. Here on a vast, dusty down, packed everywhere with donkeys, mules and blooded Arabians, and there in a great enclosure containing three or five thousand sheep, is carried on as lively a bit of trading as one will observe anywhere outside a Norman horse-fair or a land sale on some newly opened reservation in the Far West.

Horses, donkeys, mules, and sheep cry out in all the varied accents of their groans and bleatings, the sheep and their lambs, lying with their four feet tied together, complaining the loudest. Hundreds of Arabs, Kabyles, Turks, Jews, and Europeans bustle and rustle about in picturesque disorder, doing nothing apparently, but vociferating and grimacing. All sorts of footwear and head-gear are here, turbans, fezes, haiks, sandals, sabots, and espadrilles. Gay broidered vestments and dirty rent burnouses jostle each other at every step.

Mutton is up or down to-day, a sheep may sell for eight francs or it may sell for twenty, and the buyer or seller is glad or sorry, he laughs, or he weeps,—but he smokes and drinks coffee at all times nevertheless.

In a snug corner are corralled some Arab steers and cows, a rare sight even in the markets of Algiers. One eats mutton all the time and everywhere, but seldom beef. The butchers of Algiers corner it for the milords and millionaires of the Mustapha hotel, who demand “underdone” beefsteaks and “blood-running” roasts of beef for breakfast, dinner, and supper.

An Arabian horse, so-called, but not a blooded beast, sells here for from eighty to two hundred francs. High-priced stock is rare here, hence there is little horse-trading of the swindling variety, and no horse thieving. The Arab maquignons, dressed in half European and half desert fashion, bowler hats and a burnous, sandals and bright blue socks with red clocks on them, are, however, more insistent, if possible, than their brothers of Brittany.

“You want to buy a horse, un chiv’l?” says a greasy-looking blackamoor. “Moi, z’en connaiz-un, 130 francs, mais z’i peux ti l’avoir pour 95.” You don’t want to buy a horse, of course, but you ask its age. “Moi, s’i te sure, neuf ou dix ans peut-Être—douze ans, mais ze, ze le connais, il trotte comme la gazelle.” It’s all very vague, including the French, and you get away as soon as you can, glad at any rate that you have lost neither time nor money.

All the trading of the Arab market is, as the French say, pushed to the limit. Merchandizing describes the process, and describes it well. A hundred sous, a piÈce only, refused or offered, will make or break a bargain almost on the eve of being concluded.

An Arab trader in—well, everything—has just sold half a ton of coal to a farmer living a dozen kilometres out in the country. The farmer bought it “delivered,” and the Arab coal merchant of the moment bargains with a Camel Sheik for fifty sous to deliver the sooty charge by means of three camels. Three camels, twenty-four kilometres (a day’s journey out and back), and a driver costs fifty sous, two francs and a half, a half a dollar. It’s a better bargain than you could make, and you marvel at it.

A troop of little donkeys comes trotting up the hillside to the market, loaded with grain, dates, peanuts, and some skinny fowls and ducks. They have “dog-trotted” in from Rovigo, thirty kilometres distant, and they will trot back again as lively after breakfast, their owner beating them over the flanks all the way. Poor, patient, clever little beasts, docile, but not willing! Yes, not willing; a donkey is never willing, whatever land he may live in.

Booths and tents line the sides of the great square, filled with the gimcrack novelties of England, France, Germany, and America,—and the more exotic folderols of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. Jews sell calico, and Turks and Greeks sell fraudulent gold and silver jewelry and coral beads made of glass melted in a crucible. Merchandise of all sorts and of all values is spread on the bare ground. A pair of boxing gloves, an automobile horn, a sword with a broken blade, and all kinds of trumpery rubbish cast off from another world are here; and before night somebody will be found to buy even the boxing-gloves.

Europeans, too, are stall-holders in this great rag-fair. Spaniards and Maltese are in the greatest proportions, and the only Frenchmen one sees are the strolling gendarmes poking about everywhere.

Noon comes, and everybody with a soul above trade repairs to a restaurant of the middle class near by, a great marble hall fitted with marble top tables. Here every one lunches with a great deal of gesticulation and clamour. It is very primitive, this Algerian quick-lunch, but it is cleanly and the food is good. For twenty-five sous you may have a bouillabaisse, a dish of petits pois, two oeufs À la coque, goat’s-milk cheese, some biscuits and fruit for dessert, a half-bottle of wine and cafÉ et kirsch. Not so bad, is it?

“The better one knows Algeria,” says the brigadier of gendarmes, or the lieutenant in some army bivouac, “the less one knows the Arab.” The point of view is traditional. The serenity and taciturn manner of the Arab is only to be likened to that of the Celestial Wong Hop or Ah Sin. What the Arab thinks about, and what he is likely to do next no one knows, or can even conjecture with any degree of certainty. All one can do is to jump at conclusions and see what happens—to himself or the Arab.

When the Duc d’Aumale conquered Biskra, the Arabs promptly retook it, practically, if not officially, and gave themselves up to such abandoned orgies that not even the military authorities could make them tractable. The authorities at Paris were at their wits’ ends how to win the hearts of the Arabs, and conquer them morally as well as physically. Louis-Philippe made a shrewd guess and sent Robert Houdin, the prestidigitateur, down into the desert. From that time on the Arab of Algeria has been the tractable servant of the French.

Straight south from Maison CarrÉe, across the Mitidja, eighteen kilometres more or less, lies Arba, the beginning of the real open country. A steam-tram goes on ten kilometres farther, to Rovigo. At Arba, however, the “Route Nationale” to the desert’s edge branches off via Aumale to Bou-Saada and beyond, where the real desert opens out into the infinite mirage.

The nearest the camel caravans of the desert ever get to Algiers is at this little market town of Arba. Here on a market day (Wednesday) may be seen a few stray, mangy specimens of the type loaded with grapes, figs, or dates, though usually the bourriquet, or donkey, is the beast of burden. The Arab never carries his burdens himself, as do other peasants. It is beneath his dignity; for no matter how ragged or rusty he is, his burnous is sacred from all wear and tear possible to be avoided.

Except for its great market back of its modern ugly mosque, there is not much to see in Arba. Here is even a more heterogeneous native riffraff than one sees at Maison CarrÉe, Blida, or Boufarik. And indeed it is all “native,” for the Turks and Jews of the coast towns are absent. The trading is all done in produce. And if the native merchant, in his little shop or stall where he sells foreign-made clothes and gimcracks, cannot sell for cash, he is willing to barter for a sack of grain or a few sheep or some goat skins. The Jew trader will not bother with this kind of traffic. He wants to deal for cash, either as buyer or seller, he doesn’t care which.

Here a native shoemaker, or rather maker of babouches, sits beneath a rude shelter and fashions fat, tubby slippers out of dingy skins and sole leather with the fur left on. On another side is a sweetmeat seller, a baker of honey cakes, and a vegetable dealer, and even a butcher, who tries to lead his Mussulman brother astray and get him to become a carnivorous animal like us Christians. He doesn’t succeed very well, because the Arab eats very little meat.

In a tent, beneath a great palm, sits the physician and dentist of the tribe, with all his paraphernalia of philters and potions and tooth-pulling appliances. Like the rest of us, the Arab suffers from toothache sometimes; and he wastes no time but goes and “has it out” at the first opportunity. The procedure of the Arab tooth-puller is no more barbaric than our own, and the possessor of the refractory molar has an equally hard time. All these things and more one sees at Arba’s weekly market. It is all very strange and amusing.

Aumale is nearly a hundred kilometres beyond Arba, with nothing between except occasional settlements of a few score of Europeans and a few hundreds of Arabs. Communication with Algiers from Aumale is by a crazy, rocking seven-horse diligence which covers the ground, by night as often as by day, in nine or ten hours, at a gait of six or seven miles an hour, and at a cost of as many francs.

Aumale is nothing but the administrative centre of a commune blessed with two good enough inns and a long, straight main street running from end to end. As the Auzia of the Romans, it was formerly occupied by a strong garrison. The Turks in turn built a fortress on the same site, and the French occupied it as a military post in 1846, giving it a second baptism in the name of the Duc d’Aumale, the son of Louis-Philippe.

From Aumale on to Bou-Saada is another hundred and twenty-four kilometres over a new-made “Route Nationale.” It is a good enough road for a diligence, which makes the journey in sixteen or eighteen hours, including stops. There is no accommodation en route save that furnished by the government bordjs, the caravanserai and the cafÉ-maures.

Here, at last, one is launched into the desert itself. The journey is one of strange, impressive novelty, though nothing very venturesome. In case of a prolonged breakdown, there is nothing to do but to drink the water of the redir (a sort of a natural pool reservoir hollowed out of the rock), and be thankful indeed if your curled-up Arab travelling companion will share his crust with you. To him white bread, if only soaked in water, is a great luxury; to you it will seem pretty slim; but then we are overfed as a rule and an Arab dietary for a time will probably prove beneficial. The life of the nomad Arab is a very full one, but it is not a very active nor luxurious one.

Through wonderful ocean-like mirages and clouds of dust whirled up by the sirocco, a veritable “tourbillon de poussiÈre,” as Madame de SÉvignÉ would have called it, we rolled off the last kilometres of our tiresome journey, just as the last rays of the blood-red sun were paling before the coming night. We arrived at Bou-Saada’s Hotel Bailly just as the last remnants of the table d’hÔte were being cleared away, which, in this little border town, half civilized and half savage, means thrown into the streets to furnish food for chickens. How the inhabitant of the Algerian small town ever separates his own fowls from those of his neighbours is a great question, since they all run loose in the common feeding-ground of the open street.

Bou-Saada is even of less importance than Aumale to the average person. But for the artist it is a paradise. It is not Tlemcen, it has no grand mosques; it is not Tunis, it has no great souks and bazaars; but it is quaintly native in every crooked street huddled around the military post and the hotels. The life of

the leather and silver workers, and of the butcher, the baker and the seller of blankets and foodstuffs is, as yet, unspoiled and uncontaminated with anything more worldly than oil-lamps. The conducted tourist has not yet reached Bou-Saada, and consequently the native life of the place is all the more real.

Here is an account of a cafÉ acquaintance made at Bou-Saada. Zorah-ben-Mohammed was a pretty girl, according to the standards of her people, with a laugh like an houri. She confessed to eighteen years, and it is probable that she owned no more. The rice powder and the maquillage were thick on her cheek, whilst the rest of her face was frankly ochre. For all that she was a pretty girl and came perilously near convincing us of it, though hers was a beauty far removed from our own preconceived standards.

Great black eyes and a massive coiffe of raven-black hair topped off her charms. Below she was clad in a corsage of gold-embroidered velvet and an ample silk pantalon that might indeed have been a skirt, so large and thick were its folds. Bijoux she had galore. They may have been of gold and silver and precious stones, or they may not; but they were precious to her and added not a little to her graces. Bracelets bound her wrists and her ankles, and her finger-tips were dyed red with henna.

Zora or Zorah Fatma, or in Arab, Fetouma, are the girlish names which most please their bearer, and our friend Zorah was a queen in her class. Zorah served the coffee in the little Moorish cafÉ in Bou-Saada’s market-place, into which we had tumbled to escape a sudden sandstorm blown in from the desert. Her powers of conversation were not great; she did not know many French words and we still fewer Arab ones, so our respective vocabularies were soon exhausted. We admired her and made remarks upon her,—which was what she wanted, and, though the charge for the coffee was only two sous a cup, she was artful enough to worm a pourboire of fifty centimes apiece out of us for the privilege of being served by her.

As we left, Zorah, with her professional little laugh on her lips, cried out, “redoua, redoua!” (to-morrow, to-morrow!) “Well—perhaps!” we answered. “Peut-Être que oui! Peut-Être que non!”

A visit to the marabout at El Hamel, fifteen kilometres from Bou-Saada, is one of the things to do. We descended upon him in his hermit shrine, and found him seated on a great carpet of brilliant colouring and reclining on an enormous cushion of embroidered silk,—not the kind the Tunisian workers try to sell steamship-cruising tourists during their day on shore, but the real gold-embroidered, silky stuff, such, as dressed the characters of the Arabian nights.

Hung about the marabout’s neck was his chaplet of little ebony beads, and behind his head hung an embroidered silken square, its gold olive branches and fruit glittering with sun’s rays like an aureole.

Grouped about the marabout in a squatting semicircle and listening to his holy words were a half-dozen or more faithful Mussulmans. One of them was very old, with a visage ridged like a melon rind, and a fringe of beard that once was probably black, but was now a scant gray collaret. His face was the colour of brown earth, but he was manifestly a pure blooded Arab; there was not even the telltale pearly-blue tint in the eyes which always marks the half-bred Berber-Arab type. Another, rolled snug in an old burnous, was by his side, his eyes quite closed and his head and body rocking as though he was asleep. He probably was. A third was younger, of perhaps three and thirty, but he was quite as devout as his elders, though he was more wide-awake, and looked curiously and interestedly upon us as we stood in the doorway of the little white temple of a sanctuary awaiting the time when the marabout should be free of his religious duties.

Our visit was appreciated. We had brought the holy man a few simple gifts of chocolate, matches, and a couple of candles, and donated twenty copper sous to his future support. After the adieux of convention were exchanged, we jogged our little donkeys back to the town by a short cut through the bed of the Oued Bou-Saada.