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-Naïls, 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-Naïl 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. Breaking home ties almost before they have entered their teens, they make their way to Biskra, to Constantine, and to Algiers, yes, and to Tripoli on the east and to Tangier on the west, dancing in the native coffee-houses or in the harems of the rich and not infrequently earning considerable sums thereby. The Ouled-Naïl promptly converts all of her earnings that she can spare into gold, linking these gold pieces together into a sort of breastplate, not at all unlike that jingling, glittering affair which Mary Garden wears in her portrayal of _Salome_. When this golden garment becomes long enough to reach from her slender, supple neck to her still more supple waist, the Ouled-Naïl retires from business, returns to the tents of her people in the edge of the Great Sands, hides her pretty face behind the veil common to all respectable Moslem women, and, setting her daintily slippered feet on the straight and narrow path of virtue, leads a strictly moral life ever after. [Illustration: Ouled-Naïl dancing-girls. “Petite, piquant, and indescribably picturesque.”] [Illustration: Women of the “Great Tents.” The wife and daughter of a nomad sheikh of the Algerian Sahara. SOME SIRENS OF THE SANDS.]