ZORAH-BEN-ABDALLAH was a perilously pretty girl, judged by any standard that you please. She was unveiled—a strange thing for an Eastern woman—and the clearness of her café-au-lait complexion was emphasised by carmine lips and by blue-black hair, bewilderingly becoiffed and bewitchingly bejewelled; her eyes Scherazade would have envied. She was leaning from compartment in the ramshackle train which plies between Constantine and Biskra and was quite openly admiring the very tight light-blue tunic and the very loose scarlet riding-breeches of my companion, a young officer of chasseurs d'Afrique who was rejoining his regiment at El-Kantara.“She's a handsome girl,” said I.

“Not for an Ouled-Na?l,” said he, adjusting his monocle and staring at her critically, very much as though he were appraising a horse. “An Ouled-Na?l's face is her fortune, you know, and in the Ziban, where they come from, she wouldn't get a second look.”

“She would get several second looks on Broadway,” said I, taking another one myself. “I once travelled twelve thousand miles to see some women not half as pretty.”

That is why I went to the Ziban, that strange and almost unknown zone of oasis-dotted steppes in southernmost Algeria. Hemmed in between the Atlas Mountains and the Great Sahara, it forms the real Algerian hinterland, a region vastly different in people, manners, and customs from either the desert or the littoral. Here, in this fertile borderland, where the red tarbooshes and baggy trousers of the French outposts are the sole signs of civilisation, is the home of the Ouled-Na?ls, that curious race, neither Arab, Berber, nor Moor, the beauty of whose dusky, daring daughters is a staple topic of conversation in every harem and native coffee-house between the Pyramids and the Pillars of Hercules.

Rather than that you should be scandalised later on, it would be well for you to understand in the beginning that the women of the Ouled-Na?l are, so far as morality is concerned, as easy as an old shoe. It comes as something of a shock, after seeing these petite and pretty and indescribably picturesque women on their native heath, or rather on their native sands, to learn that from earliest childhood they are trained for a life of indifferent virtue very much as a horse is trained for the show-ring. But it is one of those conditions of African life which must be accepted by the traveller, just as he accepts as a matter of course the heat and the insects and the dirt.