Outside a café: Biskra

A century brings change, yet memories of the past can still bring life to a quickly forgotten past. Exactly one hundred years ago, if you were to visit your doctor and pick up the latest issue of National Geographic Magazine, you would find a story about Biskra, the oasis in Algeria. Pre-Valentino’s The Sheik, this is rather pedestrian travel dialogue from an author who survives in the text only as a Mrs. But the pictures are truly marvelous and make returning to this century-old magazine well worthwhile. Webshaykh

A visit to the market place during the morning is one of the sights of the town and oriental in every tone. Squatting groups and bronzed-legged Bedouins, in brown and white camel’s-hair burnouses, are selling cous-cous, dried peppers, and of course dates. Bunches of fresh grass and green barley and thistles are heaped in one corner of the inclosure, Moorish slippers here and a pile of red fezzes there, and souvenirs for the tourist not lacking. For fifty centimes one may purchase a set of graceful gazelle horns, and curious knives and Arabian guns tempt the collector on the way. An ebon negress is selling oranges, an Arab boy in a red fez, and not much else, carries a basket of purple fruit in green leaves, while cloaks, burnouses, turbans, and yakmahs, purple, blue, deep red, and spotless white all crushed together, make a kaleidoscopic color in the whitewashed square. Bags of henna leaves, for staining the nails in Arab fashion, send forth their pungent odor, and the aroma of coffee and cigarettes fills the air. A Kabyle girl in red gown, tattooed bluely as to her forehead and cheeks, stained yellow as to her finger tips, passes us, cigarette in mouth, her bangles and anklets clanking as she goes. Continue reading A Century Ago in Biskra →