TOMB OF ISABELLE EBERHARDT

A must-see is the moving tomb of Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904) in the Muslim cemetery of Sidi Boudjemâa, west of Aïn Sefra.

She was born in Geneva in 1877 to a German-Jewish mother and a father of Armenian origin. In 1897, she joined her brother in Algeria, who had enlisted in the Foreign Legion. Seduced by Islam and the nomadic way of life, she converted and married Slimane Ehni in El-Oued in 1900, disguising herself as a man to better discover the country, where she spent just seven years, dying in Aïn Sefra in October 1904 during a flood of the oued. The texts she wrote during her stay, collected in Écrits sur le sable (Grasset), are one of the best testimonies of Algerian life and the practice of Islam at the beginning of the ^20th century, without lapsing into the orientalism that was still prevalent in French artistic circles.

Also worth reading: Un amour d'Algérie by Marie-Odile Delacour and Jean-René Huleu (Joëlle Losfeld, 1998). The two journalists, who fell in love with Isabelle, went to Algeria to follow in her footsteps after working on the publication or republication of her texts. Un désir d'Orient: jeunesse d'Isabelle Eberhardt, 1877-1899 and Nomade j'étais: les années africaines d'Isabelle Eberhardt, 189-1904 by Edmonde Charles-Roux (Grasset, 1988 and 1995): 1,400 pages and never-before-seen photos to live for a few moments alongside the intriguing adventuress. Si Mahmoud ou la Renaissance d'Isabelle Eberhardt by Catherine Stoll-Simon.