THE DESERT WOMAN.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3573, 9 December 1926, Page 4

THE DESERT WOMAN.

During a repent stay in Algeria undertaken for the purpose of studying the ruins of Latin Af'riqi, I visited some places that remain in my memory as being connected with a remarkable woman, Isabelle Eberliardt, known all over Algeria as Si Mahmound Saadi. She lies ' buried by order of Mashat Lyautey, in Ain-Sefra, in the Mussulman cemetery among the red-gold sand dunes, and spent many months of her nomad life in El-Oued, the “city of a thousand dunes,” and most charming of all the towns of the oasis of the Sahara. She was a daughter of a Russian general who became a Mozlem. After his death her mother took, her to Bale, where she was educated as a boy by her great uncle, a. refugee from the old Russia. Mime. Eberhardt went to Mone, in Algeria when Isabelle was 19, ancl died there after having embraced Islam, a step which was also taken by her daughter. ; Isabelle had two great desires: she craved a free life away from the worries of civilisation, and she was ambitious to make her name as a writer. Her first adventure was that of riding alone on horseback through Tunisia, Eastern Algeria, and part of the Sahara; she dressed herself as an. Arab and called herself Si Mahmoud, giving herself out as a young Turk, fresh from a French university. Si Mahmoud lived with the wild tribes, talking freely over a cup of herb scented tea, with her little pipe of kif to her lips; she was one of themselves. The fact that she was a devout Moslem, in great favour with the Marabouts, and an initiate of the Brotherhood of the Kanya, also gave them confidence. No, European has entered more intimately into native life than did this fearless woman. Her writings so terse and economical in style, rise sometimes to great dramatic power, and are instinct with the real life of the desert.

She married a Mohammedan, to whom she was devoted, but she was soon after the victim of an attack by a lunatic in the desert, and, when the case was tried in court, and the man punished, she was ordered to leave Algeria, on the plea that it was unseemly for a, Russian _ woman to go about dressed as a man. The suspicion lurking behind the order was that she was a political) agent. Si Mahmoud indignantly refuted this accusation, saying that her only aspiration was to own a good horse and to lead a quite life away from ambitious projects of every sort. She returned to the land she loved, after an interval spent in France, and continued her work as a journalist employed by the Algerian Press. She was to be found praying in mosques, hunting the gazelle, and galloping over the desert as her ancestors must have ridden over the steppes of Russia. Isabelle Eberhardt should have done great things, but she perished in an inundation at Ain-Sefra, while trying to save the life of her husbandj, when, only twenty-seven years old.