Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/608

588 rates of sale are seemingly inordinately high, is incapable of dispelling the feeling of desert loneliness that pervades both mind and body; nor yet more conducive to hilarity is the daily visit of the "pet of the desert," the name given to a somewhat aged and feeble lion, once a monarch of the surrounding sands, which, attended or unattended, saunters about the open squares and roadways, neither disturbing the peace of the community nor in any way disturbed by it. Aged women pet it, little children fondle it, but the great mane no longer rises in wrath, nor does the bushy tail lash the body in the fury of excitement. Impending darkness has settled upon the eyes of the once noble animal, and before long it will be only a chain and scent that will direct its course. The lion was not in Biskra at the time of our visit, and we thus missed the town's most interesting inhabitant.

We remained only a few days in Biskra, but in that time sufficiently familiarized ourselves with the locality to know its most distinctive and special features. Even during the greatest heat of the day it was hardly inconvenient to follow the long lines of roadway; and where these passed within the shade of overhanging palms, or alongside the cool meandering waters of natural streams or artesian wells, there was little in the temperature to suggest that we were sightseeing in presumably very nearly the hottest part of the earth's surface and in its hottest season. During nearly all hours of the day caravans or parts of caravans file out on the long central avenue which leads through the oasis and continues across the open sand fiats that follow upon the last palm. This is the great caravan route to the region of Lake Tchad. Near the southern end of the town is the Ethiopian village where one sees the life of the true African, though not the true negro—the people whom we associate with the dynasties of Egypt and Nubia, the people who constituted the followers of Cleopatra, and who probably were in the line of parentage of Cleopatra herself. It is here, as well as in the oases farther south, that one sees the stately nut-brown women who figure in the characteristic scenes of ancient Africa, their loose draperies of dark blue, their pendants of gold still hanging and glittering as in days of old. Their high earthen water pots, borne erect on the head or shoulder, still go to the well as they did thousands of years ago, and the litlelittle [sic] infant continues to cling to the mother's back, suspended in the folds of the parent's tunic.

We found these people, especially the younger women, exceedingly shy, and hardly any amount of coaxing could induce them to stand for a photograph. Sitting in front of their mud houses, rolling out corn or some manufacture from corn flour, they would rise the moment they obtained a glimpse of the camera box, and not even