Women of the “Great Tents.” The wife and daughter of a nomad sheikh of the Algerian Sahara.
SOME SIRENS OF THE SANDS.
The peculiar dances of the Ouled-Naïls demand many years of arduous and constant practice. A girl is scarcely out of her cradle before, under the tutelage of her mother, who has herself been a danseuse in her time, she begins the inconceivably severe course of gymnastics and muscle training which is the foundation of their strange and suggestive dances. From infancy until, scarcely in her teens, she bids farewell to the tent life of the desert and sets out to make her fortune in the cities along the African littoral, she is as carefully groomed and trained as a colt entered at the county fair. Morning, noon, and night, day after day, year after year, the muscles of her chest, her back, her hips, and her abdomen are developed and trained and suppled until they will respond to her wishes as readily as her slender, henna-stained fingers. Her lustrous, blue-black hair is brushed and combed and oiled and brushed again; she is taught to play the hautboy, the zither, and the flute and to sing the weird and plaintive songs the Arab loves; to make the thick, black native coffee and with inimitable dexterity to roll a cigarette. By the time she is thirteen she is ready to make her début in the dance-hall of some Algerian town, whence, after three or four or possibly five years of a life of indifferent virtue, she returns, a-clank with gold pieces, to the tented village from which she came, to marry some sheikh or camel-dealer and to bear him children, who, if they are boys, will don the white turban and scarlet burnoose of the Spahis and serve in the armies of France, or, if they are girls, will live the life of their mother all over again. It will be seen, therefore, that the profession is an hereditary one, which all the women of the tribe pursue without incurring, so far as I could learn, a hint of scandal or a trace of shame. It is a queer business, and one to which no other country, so far as I am aware, offers a parallel, for whereas the geishas of Japan, the nautches of India, and the odalisques of Turkey are but classes, the Ouled-Naïls are a race, as distinct in features, language, and customs as the Bedouin, the Nubian, or the Jew.
That the men of the Ouled-Naïl (which, by the way, is pronounced as though the last syllable were spelled “Nile”) look upon the lives led by their sisters, daughters, and sweethearts with much the same toleration and approval that an up-State farmer shows for the village maid who goes to the city to earn a living as a waitress, a stenographer, or a shop-girl, is proved by a little incident which Mr. S. H. Leeder, the English author-traveller, tells of having once witnessed on the station-platform at Biskra. A tall young tribesman of the Ouled-Naïl, the son of a sheikh of some importance, was leaving Biskra, to which town he had been paying a short visit with his mother. He was taking back with him one of his countrywomen, a dancing-girl named Kadra, who had been a resident in the Rue Sainte, as Biskra's Tenderloin is known, for two or three years, and was quite celebrated for her beauty, with the intention of marrying her. Here was this girl, after such an amazing episode in her career, quietly dressed, veiled to the eyes, and carefully chaperoned by the prospective bridegroom's mother, returning to assume a position of rank and consideration among her own people, while several of her late companions, tears of sorrow at the parting pouring down their unveiled and painted faces, clung to and caressed her with every sign of childlike affection. And such marriages, I have been assured by French officials, are not the exception but the rule in the Ziban. Never was the truth brought home to me more sharply that “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” than in the land of the Ouled-Naïls, where, unlike our own, it is never too late to mend; not even for a woman.
Barring the two who appeared in the production of “The Garden of Allah,” the only genuine Ouled-Naïls ever seen in the United States were those who, owing to the enterprise of some far-seeing showman, were responsible for introducing that orgy of suggestiveness known as the danse du ventre to the American public at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, a dance which, thanks to numerous but unskilled imitators, French, Egyptian, and Syrian, spread from ocean to ocean under the vulgar but descriptive nickname of “the houchee-kouchee.” As a matter of fact, the danse du ventre, as seen in the questionable resorts of our own country, has about as much in common with the real dance of the desert people, as performed on a silken carpet spread before the tent of some nomad sheikh, as the so-called “Spanish fandango” of the vaudeville stage has with the inimitably beautiful and difficult dances to be seen at Señor Otero's dancing-academy in Seville. The dance of the Ouled-Naïls is the very essence of Oriental depravity. It is the dance of the pasha's harem; it is the dance of those native cafés which the European tourists are always so eager to visit; it is the dance which every little girl of the tribe is taught—long years before she knows its meaning.
Depraved though they are, the Ouled-Naïls never depart in their dress from that which would be considered perfectly proper and respectable even by Mr. Anthony Comstock. The painters of every country seem to have taken a peculiar delight in depicting Arab dancing-girls as conspicuously shy of clothing, but, picturesqueness aside, the décolleté gown of an American woman would embarrass and shock these daughters of the sands as much as it would all Moslems, for though they may be somewhat lacking in morals they are never lacking in clothes. The women of the Ouled-Naïl are considerably below the medium height and, owing to the peculiar fashion in which their gaudy-hued tarlatan skirts are bunched out around the waist and are shortened to display their trim ankles and massive silver anklets, they appear even smaller than they really are. Their hands and feet are small and wonderfully perfect—if one is able to overlook the nails stained crimson with henna; arched eyebrows meet over eyes as big and lustrous and melting as those of a gazelle; while their wonderful blue-black hair, plaited into ropes and heavily bejewelled—whether the “jewels” are genuine or not is no great matter—is brought down over the ears in the fashion which made Cléo de Mérode famous.
But the really distinguishing feature of the Ouled-Naïl's costume is her jewelry. She has so much of it, in fact, that there is no gold to be had in Algeria. Ask for napoleons instead of paper money at your bank in Algiers and you will meet with a prompt
“Impossible, m'sieur.”