IN BISKRA.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIV, 22 March 1924, Page 7

IN BISKRA.

DAUGHTERS OF THE DESERT.

(By

H. V. Morton.)

BISKRA (Algeria). At 7 o’clock every night the drums begin throbbing in the narrow streets of Biskra. White walls, moonlight, shadows blue and purple, feathered palm trees standing jet black against the velvet sky, and always, hour after hour, the steady, relentless throb-throb-throb-bing of the drums. The American whom I met earlier in the evening beneath the minaret of the local mosque called after dinner, as he promised, to show me the dance of the Ouled Nail girls. With him was an Arab wrapped in a white burnous. He was clean shaven, thin, aristocratic, and his name is Ahmed Zen Dagui. If there is a Sahara Debrett Zen Dagui would appear in the first few pages. He helped to stage “The Garden of Allah” at Drury Lane and lived in London for a year, cooking all his own food in an hotel in Fitzroy place and, much to his annoyance and discomfort, walking about in a tweed suit. He was born and bred in the desert, of a family which traces its descent right back to Mohammed. His earliest memory is, when a baby, of being placed naked on the back of an Arab horse which his father lashed and sent cantering off over the yellow sand. “I remember crying and clinging to the mane,” said Zen Dagui, “and then 1 remember how the saddle cut my bare legs. Then I remember liking it, and, most of all, I remember how, when the horse came home, I did not let my father see that I had been crying.”

"What Zen Dagui thought about London I do not know. He just waves a thin hand whose nails are yellow with henna and says with an impenetrable smile: “It is a very wonderful place.” The three of us set out through th«l narrow streets drenched in greenish moonlight. Streets of white ghosts. Arabs with their burnous over their heads, looking like white monks, padded silently past us. From the streets of the Ouled Nail came the sound of drums and flutes.

Every one who reads Hichcns knows that the Ouled Nail is a desert tribe whose women go into the towns to dance. The Arabs of Biskra are crazy about these girls, and never tire of watching them. The first cafe we entered was a white-washed barn of a building with a platform at one end on which three musicians w’ere playing a drummer, a flautist and a fiddler. Tbe cafe was crowded with white robed Arabs drinking coffee. Suddenly the music broke into an ear-splitting barbaric tune as an Ouled Nail girl came dancing into the space in the centre of the floor. The Arabs gazed at her without any trace of feelini’ like a herd of cows. I did not. I showed my surprise. I expected something more or less attractive— -a moon of delight which we read of in the Thousand and One Nights. Instead she was small, fat, greasepainted. coarse, and her dress was a kind of crinoline. On her feet were yellow Arab slippers without heels. She wore stockings over which jingled two immense solid silver anklets. Two half moon earrings as big as tea plates glittered in her ears, and round her neck was a string of twenty-franc gold pieces.

The dance was remarkable for spasmodic movements of the abdomen in time with the drum beats and for a curious neck movement. Otherwise the girl merely drifted round the room on ball-bearing hips exchanging pleasantries with her friends. The dance was supposed to be alluring. One Arab, a tall fellow with a jet black beard, became so affected that he strode out and. with a face as expressionless as a chunk of granite, solemnly tucked a 20 franc note into the girl’s headdress and padded out into the street like a. big white cat. Girl after girl took the floor. Some were thin, some were fat, and none would have made Pear] White jealous. One of them was almost beautiful, but she had the world’s finest squint. It was so perfect a squinfr'that every Arab in the room thought she was smiling only at him. We wandered into cafe after cafe, drinking tea with mint in it, seeing the same early Victorian Ouled Nails dancing a dance whose meaning escaped me utterly. There was only one thrill. In a negro cafe a hideous negro woman was dancing with an empty champagne bottle balanced on her head. Whatever the dance was it came from the jungle. An English girl sat fascinated in a corner among a group of hotel visitors. When the dance ended with a wail of the pipes and a double thud on the tom-tom an English voice said: — “Wouldn’t she go down well in London ” I believe she would. On the way back through the moonlit streets we came to the edge of the oasis, and there, from the feet of the last palms as far as the eye could see. lay the desert, silent under the whit" moon. I can tell you this: The call of the desert is not an empty word. It exists. That yellow ocean of sand lures you, seems to call to you, whispers of hot gold days of sun and cool white nights, of mystery, iff space and quiet in which a. man may think, and of —unutterable peace.