In the desert, a dozen miles southeast of Biskra, is the town of Sidi Okba, the religious center, as Biskra is the commercial capital, of the Ziban. It owes its sanctity, which draws pilgrims from all parts of Moslem Africa, to the fact that its great mosque contains the tomb of Okba ibn Nefi, the soldier-saint of Islam, who, in the first century of the Hegira, conquered Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic and fell in battle with the Berbers near this place in A.D. 682. It took the Atlantic Ocean to check Okba’s furious onsweep to the West. When he reached its shores he is said to have spurred his horse girth-deep into its waters and, raising his simitar to heaven, exclaimed, “Great God, if my course were not stopped by that sea I would still go on to the unknown kingdoms of the West, preaching the unity of Thy holy name and putting to the sword the rebellious nations who worship any other god than Thee!” He was a mighty soldier, and, had it not been for the providential interposition of the Atlantic, America might be Mohammedan to-day. The last chapter of Okba’s stormy life was marked by one of those chivalrous episodes so common in Arab chronicles. While he was meditating on some plan for circumventing the Atlantic, the Berber tribes he had conquered on his westward march were rising in his rear. Finding his position hopeless, he sent for one of his chiefs, a man whom he had imprisoned for attempting to incite a mutiny in the army. Okba released him and advised him to fly while there was yet time. But the mutineer replied that he preferred to die by his leader’s side. So, embracing as friends, they drew their simitars, broke the scabbards, and turned to face the onslaught of the foe, falling at last, back to back, amid a ring of the Berbers they had slain. To-day the great conqueror lies buried, not far from where he made his gallant final stand, beneath a splendid shrine within the precincts of the imposing mosque which bears his name. Carved on the sepulcher in Cufic characters is the simple but pregnant inscription: “This is the tomb of Okba, son of Nefi. May God have mercy upon him.” No older Arabic structure is known to exist in Africa. * * * * * In the minds of the tourist, Biskra is always associated with the women of the Ouled-Naïl, those dusky damsels of easy virtue who perform their strange sensual dances and ply their age-old trade in the cafés and brothels which line the narrow, dim-lit thoroughfare named, perhaps with a touch of sarcasm, the Rue Sainte. They are the daughters of a tribe which inhabits the mountains of the Ouled-Naïl, a wild, inaccessible, almost unexplored range which stretches from the western end of the Ziban to the vicinity of Djelfa.