This photochrome print from El Kantara, Algeria, is part of “Views of People and Sites in Algeria” from the catalog of the Detroit Publishing Company (1905). It depicts the river in mid-season, not quite a dry wadi, nor yet the torrent that carved such a ravine. The town was described in the 1911 edition of Baedeker’s The Mediterranean, seaports and searoutes: Handbook for Travellers as “one of the most important caravan-stations in E. Algeria,” a place that owed its prominence and fame to “the grand gorge of the Oued el-Kantara, called by the natives Fumm es-Sahara (‘Mouth of the Desert’).” The ravine depicted in the photograph “suddenly emerges from a wild Alpine region, flanked by the red limestone rocks of Jebel Gaous and Jebel Essor, into a highly picturesque palm-oasis…and careers rapidly down to the Sahara.”