SIRENS OF THE SANDS
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 the window of a second-class 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-Naïl,” said he, adjusting his monocle and staring at
her critically, very much as though he were appraising a horse. “An
Ouled-Naïl'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-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.]
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.”
“But why is it impossible?” you ask.
“Because we have no gold, m'sieur,” is the polite response.
“Where is it, then?” you inquire, scenting a robbery or an anticipated
run on the bank.
“On the Ouled-Naïls, m'sieur,” the cashier courteously replies.
And he speaks the literal truth. Every centime that a dancing-girl
can beg, borrow, or earn goes toward the purchase of massive
silver jewelry, anklets, bracelets, and the like, and these in turn
are exchanged for gold pieces—whether French napoleons, English
sovereigns, or Turkish liras she is not at all particular—which,
linked together in that golden armour of which I have already spoken,
envelops her lithe young body from neck to hips. When her portable
wealth has attained to such dimensions it is usually the sign for the
Ouled-Naïl to retire from business, going to her desert husband with
her dowry about her neck.
When it is remembered that the native quarters of these towns in the
edge of the Sahara are frequented by savage desert tribesmen who
know little and care less about civilisation and the law, is it to
be wondered at that time and time again these unprotected girls are
done to death in the little rooms up the steep, dark stairs for the
sake of the gold which they display so lavishly as part of their
allurements? During my stay in one of these Algerian towns an Arab,
stealthily coming up behind an Ouled-Naïl as she was returning one
night from the dance-hall through the narrow, deserted streets, drove
a knife between her shoulders and, snatching the little fortune which
hung about her neck, fled with it into the desert. But the arm of
the French law is very long, reaching even across the sand wastes
of the Great Sahara, and months later, when he thought all search
for him had been abandoned, the fugitive felt its grasp as he sat,
cross-legged, in the distant bazaars of Wadai. After that came the
trial and the guillotine, for in Algeria, as in the other lands which
they have conquered, the French have taught the natives by such grim
object-lessons that punishment follows swift on the heels of crime.
Now, if that same crime had been committed fifty miles to the
eastward, across the Tunisian frontier, the murderer would, in all
likelihood, have gotten off with thirteen months in jail—that is, if
he was caught at all. For, though the regency of Tunisia is French in
pretty much everything but name, it has been deemed wise to maintain
the fiction of Tunisian independence by permitting the Bey a good
deal of latitude so far as the punishment of his own subjects is
concerned, his ideas of justice (_la justice du Bey_ it is called,
in contra-distinction to _la justice française_, which is a very
different sort of justice indeed) usually working out in a fashion
truly Oriental. In Tunisia all death sentences must be confirmed by
the Bey in person, the condemned man being brought before him as he
sits on his gilt-and-velvet throne in the great white palace of the
Bardo. In the presence of the sovereign the murderer is suddenly
brought face to face with the members of his victim's family, for such
things are always done dramatically in the East. The Bey then inquires
of the family if they insist on the execution of the murderer, or if
they are willing to accept the blood-money, as it is called, a sum
equivalent to one hundred and forty dollars, which in theory is paid
by the murderer to the relatives of his victims as a sort of indemnity
if he is allowed to escape with his life. If, however, he does not
possess so large a sum, as is frequently the case, the Bey makes it
up out of his private purse. Nine times out of ten, if the victim was
a woman, the blood-money is promptly accepted—and praise be to Allah
for getting it!—for in Africa women are plenty but gold is scarce. In
case the blood-money is accepted the murderer's sentence is commuted
to imprisonment for twelve months and twenty-seven days, though just
why the odd twenty-seven I have never been able to learn. But it
may have been that it was an only son, or a husband, or a chieftain
of importance who was murdered, and in such cases the relatives
invariably demand the extreme penalty of the law.
“Do you insist on his blood?” inquires the Bey, a portly and
easy-going Oriental who has a marked aversion to taking life, even in
the case of murderers.
“We do, your Highness,” replies the spokesman of the family, salaaming
until his tarboosh-tassel sweeps the floor.
“Be it so,” says the Bey, shrugging his shoulders. “I call upon
you to bear witness that I am innocent of his death. May Allah the
Compassionate have mercy upon him! Turn him toward the gate of the
Bardo,” which last is the local euphemism for “Take him out and hang
him.” Five minutes later the wretch is adorning a gallows which has
been set up in the palace gardens.
Due north from the land of the Ouled-Naïls, and hemmed in by the
snow-capped peaks of the Atlas, is the Grand Kabylia, a wild, strange
region, peopled by many but known to few. Whence the Kabyles came
nobody knows, though their fair complexions, red hair, and blue eyes
lead the ethnologists to suppose that they are a branch of that
equally white and equally mysterious Berber race who occupy the
Moroccan ranges of the Atlas. Thirteen hundred years ago they came to
North Africa from out of the East, bringing with them a civilisation
and a culture and institutions distinctively their own. Retreating
into their mountain fastnesses before that Arab invasion which spread
the faith of the Prophet over all North Africa, they have dwelt there
ever since, the French, who conquered them in the middle of the
last century only after heavy losses, having wisely refrained from
interference in their tribal laws or customs, which remain, therefore,
almost unmodified.
Though the Kabyles, of all the Moslem races, treat their women
with the greatest respect, neither imprisoning them in harems nor
hiding them beneath veils and swaddling-clothes, they share with the
mountaineers of the Caucasus the somewhat dubious distinction of
selling their daughters to the highest bidder. Between the Circassians
and the Kabyles there is, however, a distinction with a difference,
for, whereas the former sell their daughters in cold blood and take
not the slightest interest in what becomes of them thereafter, the
Kabyle parent expects, even if he does not always insist, that the man
who purchases his daughter shall marry her. A fine, upstanding Kabyle
maiden of fifteen or thereabouts, with the lines of a thoroughbred,
the profile of a cameo, and a skin the colour of a bronze statue, will
fetch her parents anywhere from eighty to three hundred dollars, at
least so I was told at Tizi-Ouzou, the _chef-lieu_ of the district,
and the man who told me assured me very earnestly that, the crops
having been bad, a girl could be bought very cheaply, and begged me to
think it over.
Though the Mauresques of Algeria, the Jewesses of Tunisia, and the
fair-skinned beauties of Circassia combine a voluptuous figure with an
altogether exceptional beauty of complexion and features, the women of
Kabylia, with their flashing teeth, their sparkling eyes, their full
red lips, their lithe, slender bodies, and their haughty, insolent
manners, suggest a civilisation older and more sensuous, and entirely
alien to our own. The humblest peasant girl, grinding the family flour
between the upper and the nether stones in the doorway of a mud hovel,
possesses so marked a distinction of feature and figure and bearing
that it is not difficult to believe that Cleopatra or Helen of Troy
might well have come from this same race.
The approach of a Kabyle woman is heralded in two ways: first, by a
strong-scented perfume, which, like the celebrated _parfum du Bey_ of
Tunis, is composed of the blended scents of a score or more different
kinds of blossoms, the odour changing from carnation to rose, to
heliotrope, to violet, and so on every few minutes (no, I didn't
believe it either, until I tried it); and, secondly, by the clink
and jingle of the bracelets, anklets, necklaces, and bijoux of gold,
silver, turquoise, and coral with which they are loaded down, and
which sound, when they move, like an approaching four-in-hand. Good
specimens of this Kabyle jewelry are becoming increasingly difficult
to obtain, by the way, and bring high prices in the shops of Tunis and
Algiers, being eagerly sought after by collectors.
Personally, I am quite unable to picture an admirer making love to one
of these insolent-eyed beauties, for they are headstrong and hot of
temper, and if the gentleman happened to say the wrong thing he would
very probably find the _yataghan_, which every Kabyle maiden carries,
planted neatly between his shoulders. They seem to be fond of cold
steel, do these Kabyles, for at the conclusion of a wedding ceremony
the bridegroom, walking backward, holds before him an unsheathed
dagger and the bride, following him, keeps the point of it between her
teeth. Another wedding custom of Kabylia, no less strange, consists of
the partial martyrdom of the bride, who, clad in her marriage finery,
stands for an entire morning with her back to a stone pillar in the
village square, her eyes closed, her arms close at her sides, and her
only foothold the column's narrow base, the cynosure of hundreds of
curious eyes. Despite the stern stuff of which the Kabyle women are
made, it is small wonder that the bride usually faints before this
peculiarly harrowing ordeal is over.
As far removed from these half-savage women of Ouled-Naïl and of
Kabylia as a Philadelphia Quakeress is from a Cheyenne squaw are those
poor prisoner women of whose pale, half-hidden faces the visitor to
the North African coast towns sometimes gets a glimpse at the barred
window of a harem, or meets at nightfall hastening home from their
sole diversion, the weekly excursion to the cemetery. You can see
them for yourself any Friday afternoon if you will loiter without the
whitewashed gateway to the cemetery of Bou-Kabrin, on the hill above
Algiers, for they believe that on that day—the Moslem Sabbath—the
spirits of the dead re-visit the earth, and hence their weekly
pilgrimage to the cemetery to keep them company. When the sun begins
to sink behind the Atlas these white-veiled pyramids of femininity
reluctantly begin to make their way back through the narrow, winding
lanes of the native city, disappearing one by one through doors which
will not open for them until another Friday has rolled around. Picture
such a life, my friends: six days a week encloistered behind jealously
guarded doors and on the seventh taking an outing _in the cemetery_!
That many of these Mauresque women of the coast towns are very
beautiful—just as many others are exceedingly ugly—there is but little
doubt, though they are so sheeted, shrouded, veiled, and draped from
prying masculine eyes that a man may know of their beauty only by
hearsay. I imagine that the dress of the Mauresque woman was specially
designed to baffle masculine curiosity, for if Aphrodite herself were
enveloped in a white linen sheet from head to waist, and in enormous
and ridiculous pantaloons from waist to ankle, she could go where she
pleased without being troubled by admirers. Not only is a Mauresque
woman never permitted to see a man—or rather, the man is not permitted
to see her, for despite all precautions she sometimes manages to
catch glimpses of people through the lattices of her harem windows—but
she may not receive a visit from her father or brother without her
husband's permission. When she is ill enough to require the services
of a physician—and she has to be very ill indeed before one is
summoned—incredibly elaborate are the preparations. All the women
of her household are ranged about the bed, while her servants hide
her under the bedclothes almost to the point of suffocation. If her
pulse has to be felt a servant covers her hand and arm so carefully
that only an inch or so of her wrist is visible. If she has hurt her
shoulder, or back, or leg, a hole is made in the bedclothes so that
the doctor may just be able to see the injured place, and nothing
more. Should he have the hardihood to insist on looking at her tongue,
the precautions are still more elaborate, the attendants covering the
patient's face with their hands and just leaving room between their
fingers so that her tongue may be stuck out. I know a French physician
in Tunis who told me that he was once called to attend the favourite
wife of a wealthy Arab merchant, and that while he was conducting the
examination the lady's husband stood behind him with the muzzle of a
revolver pressed into the small of his back.
[Illustration: JEWISH WOMEN IN THE CEMETERY OF TUNIS.
“They believe that the spirits of the dead revisit the earth, and
hence the weekly pilgrimage to the cemetery to keep them company.”]
Always over the head of the Arab woman hangs the shadow of divorce.
Nowhere in the world does the law so facilitate the separation of man
and wife. If a man grows weary of his wife's looks, of her temper,
or of her dress; if he wishes to replace her with another; or if
he is tired of married life and does not wish a wife at all, he has
but scant difficulty in getting rid of her, for in North Africa a
divorce can be had in fifteen minutes at a total cost of a dollar
and twenty cents. In theory, either husband or wife may divorce the
other by a simple formality, without assigning any reason whatever.
As a matter of fact, however, actual divorce by the man is rare, the
Moslem husband usually preferring to get rid of his wife by a process
called repudiation, which bears with great injustice and cruelty on
the woman. If he tires of her for any reason, or merely wishes to
replace her, he drives her away with the words “Woman, get thee hence;
take thy goods and go.” In this case, although the husband is free
to remarry, the woman is not and can only obtain a legal release by
returning to the man the money which he paid for her. The woman may
apply to the courts for divorce without her husband's consent only
if she is able to prove that he ill-treats or beats her _without
sufficient reason_, if he refuses her food, clothes, or lodging, or if
she discovers a previous wooing on her husband's part, all previous
betrothals, or even offers of marriage, whether the other lady refused
or accepted him, being considered ground for divorce.
The next time you happen to be in Tunis don't fail to pay a visit to
the divorce court. It is the most Haroun-al-Raschidic institution
this side of Samarkand. A great hall of justice, vaulted and floored
with marble and strewn with Eastern carpets, forms the setting, while
husbands in turbans and lawyers in tarbooshes, white-veiled women and
green-robed, gray-bearded judges complete a scene which might have
been taken straight from the _Arabian Nights_. The women, closely
veiled and hooded, and herded like so many cattle within an iron
grill, take no part in the proceedings which so intimately affect
their futures, their interests being left in the hands of a voluble
and gesticulative _avocat_. On either side of the hall is a series of
alcoves, and in each alcove, seated cross-legged on a many-cushioned
divan, is a gold-turbaned and green-robed _cadi_. To him the
husband states his case, the wife putting in her defence—if she has
any—through her lawyer and rarely appearing in person. The judge
considers the facts in silence, gravely stroking his long, gray beard,
and then delivers his decision—in nine cases out of ten, so I was
told, in favour of the husband. Should either party be dissatisfied,
he or she can take an appeal by the simple process of walking across
the room and laying the case before one of the judges sitting on the
other side, whose decision is final. A case, even if appealed, is
generally disposed of in less than an hour and at a total cost of six
francs, which goes to show that the record for quick-and-easy divorces
is not held by Reno.
It is characteristic of the Moslem view-point that infidelity on
the part of the husband is no cause for divorce whatsoever, while
infidelity on the part of the wife, owing to the strict surveillance
under which Moslem women are kept and the prison-like houses in
which they are confined, occurs so rarely as to be scarcely worth
mentioning. Should a Moslem woman so far succeed in evading the
vigilance of her jailers as to enter into a liaison with a man,
instead of a divorce trial there would be two funerals. To put his
wife and her paramour out of the way without detection is a matter of
no great difficulty for an Arab husband, for if any one disappears
in a Mohammedan country the harem system renders a search extremely
difficult, if not, indeed, wholly out of the question. In fact, it
has happened very frequently, especially in such populous centres as
Tangier, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Cairo, that a man has enticed
his rival into his house, either keeping him a prisoner for life or
slowly killing him by torture. Though the French authorities are
perfectly well aware of such occurrences, neither they in Algeria
and Tunisia nor the English in Egypt feel themselves strongly enough
intrenched to risk the outburst of fanaticism which would inevitably
ensue should they violate the privacy of a harem.
I am perfectly aware of the fact that it has become the fashion among
those travellers who confine their investigations of African life to
the lanes about Mustapha Supérieur, to the _souks_ of Tunis, and to
the alleys back of the Mousky, to pooh-pooh the idea that slavery
still exists in North Africa. As a matter of fact, however—though
this the European officials will, for reasons of policy, stoutly
deny—slavery not only exists _sub rosa_ in Algeria and Tunisia and in
Egypt, but slave markets are still openly maintained in the inland
towns of Morocco and Tripolitania, the French and Italian occupations
notwithstanding. When a wealthy Moslem wants slaves nowadays he does
not send traders to Circassia or raiders to Uganda, but he applies to
one of the well-known dealers in Tetuan, or Tripoli, or Trebizond,
a marriage contract is drawn up, and all the ceremonies of legal
wedlock are gone through by proxy. By resorting to these fictitious
marriages and similar subterfuges, the owner of a harem may procure
as many slaves, white, brown, or black, as he wishes, and once they
are within the walls of his house, no one can possibly interfere to
release them, for, the police being under no conditions permitted to
violate the privacy of a harem, there is obviously no safeguard for
the liberty, or even the lives, of its inmates. As a result of this
system, a constant stream of female slaves—fair-haired beauties from
Georgia and Circassia, brown-skinned Arab girls from the borders of
the Sahara, and negresses from Equatoria—trickles into the North
African coast towns by various roundabout channels, and, though the
European officials are perfectly well aware of this condition of
things, they are powerless to end it. The women thus obtained, though
nominally wives, are in reality slaves, for they are bought for money,
they are not consulted about their sale, they cannot go away if they
are discontented, and their very lives are at the disposal of their
masters. If that is not slavery, I don't know what is.
In those cases where the European authorities have ventured to meddle
with native customs, particularly those concerning a husband's
treatment of his wife, the interference frequently has had curious
results. A wealthy Arab from the interior of Oran, starting on a
journey to the capital of that province, bade the wife whom he
adored an affectionate good-bye. Returning several days before he
was expected, he seized the smiling woman, who rushed to greet him,
tied her hands, and dragging her into the street gave her a furious
beating in the presence of the astounded neighbours. No, she had not
been unfaithful to him, he said, between the blows, nor had she been
unkind. He not only was not tired of her, so he assured the onlookers,
but she was a veritable jewel of a wife. Finally, when his arm grew
tired and he stopped to take breath, he explained that, passing
through a street in Oran, he had seen a crowd following a man who was
being dragged along by two gendarmes. Upon inquiry he learned that he
was being taken to prison for having beaten his wife. Therefore he
had ridden home at top speed, without even waiting to complete his
business, so that he might prove to himself, to his wife, and to his
neighbours that he, at least, was still master in his own house and
could beat his wife when he chose.
And here is another incident which illustrates the fashion in which
the French administrators in Algeria deal with those ticklish
questions which involve Arab domestic relations. A farmer and his wife
were travelling through the interior; he was on a donkey and she, of
course, on foot. Along came an Arab sheikh on horseback and offered
the woman a lift. She accepted, and presently, growing confidential,
admitted that she was unhappily married and detested her husband. Her
companion proposing an elopement, she readily agreed. Accordingly,
when they came to a by-road, this Lochinvar of the desert put spurs
to his horse and galloped off with the lady across his saddle-bow,
paying no heed to the shouts and protestations of the husband toiling
along in the dust behind. Though he succeeded in tracing the runaway
couple to the sheikh's village, the husband quickly found that plans
had been made against his coming, for the villagers asserted to a man
that they had known the eloping pair for years as man and wife and
that the real husband was nothing but an impudent impostor. Unable to
regain his wife, he then appealed to the French authorities of the
district, who were at first at somewhat of a loss how to act in the
circumstances, for the Europeans in North Africa are always sitting on
top of a powder barrel and a hasty or ill-considered action may result
in blowing them higher than Gilderoy's kite. Finally, an inspiration
came to the _juge d'instruction_ before whom the matter had been
brought. Placing the dogs of the real husband in one room, and those
of the pretended husband in another, he confronted the woman with them
both. Now, Arab dogs are notoriously faithful to the members of their
own households and equally unfriendly toward all strangers, so that
though her own dogs fawned upon her and attempted to lick her hand,
those of the sheikh snarled at sight of her and showed every sign of
distrust. The judge promptly ordered her to be returned to her lawful
husband—who, I fancy, punished her in true Arab fashion—and had the
village placarded with a notice in Arabic which read: “The testimony
of one dog is more to be believed than that of a townful of Arabs.”
To appreciate how much more effective than any amount of fines or
imprisonment this notice proved, one must remember that the deadliest
insult an Arab can give another is to call him a dog.
Perhaps it is because they live so far from the contaminating
influence of civilisation, or what stands for civilisation in North
Africa, that the lives of those women who dwell beneath the black
camel's-hair tents of the Sahara are far freer and happier than those
led by their urban cousins. Which reminds me of a little procession
that I once met while riding through southern Algeria. It consisted of
an Arab, his wife, and a donkey. The man strode in front, his rifle
over his shoulder. Then came the donkey, bearing nothing heavier than
its harness. In the rear trudged the wife, carrying the plough. Though
the Arab women may, and probably do, till the fields yoked beside
a camel, a donkey, or an ox, their faces are unveiled and they are
permitted free intercourse with the men of their tribe. Even among
the nomad desert folk, however, women are regarded with indifference
and contempt, the Arabs saying of a boy “It is a benediction,” but
of a girl “It is a malediction.” With the Arabs a woman is primarily
regarded as a servant, and long before a daughter of the “Great
Tents” has entered her teens she has been taught how to cut and fit a
burnoose, to sew a tent cover, and to make a _couscous_, that peculiar
dish of half-ground barley, raisins, honey, hard-boiled eggs, and
mangled fowl, stewed with a gravy in a sealed vessel, of which the
Arabs are so fond. By the time she is ten her parents have probably
received and accepted an offer for her hand—and praise Allah for
ridding them of her!—and by the time she is twelve she is married
and a mother. When a match has been decided upon—and it is by no
means an uncommon thing for an unborn child to become conditionally
engaged—several days of haggling as to the price which is to be paid
for her ensue, the bridegroom eventually getting her at a cost of
several camels, cattle, or goats, her value being based upon her
looks and the position of her parents. On the day of the wedding the
bride—on whose unveiled face, remember, the bridegroom has never laid
eyes—concealed within a swaying camel-litter which looks for all the
world like a young balloon, preceded by a band and accompanied by
all her relatives, is taken with much ceremony to her new home. When
the long-drawn-out marriage feast is over, the hideous racket of the
flutes and tom-toms ceases and the wedding guests depart. Alone in
her tent, the bride awaits her husband, who will see her face for the
first time. Seating himself by her side, her husband makes her take
off, one by one, her necklaces, her rings, and her anklets, so that,
unadorned, she may be estimated at her true worth. If, thus stripped
of her finery, she is not up to his expectations, the man may even at
this late hour declare the marriage off and send the girl back to her
parents. Should he be satisfied with his latest acquisition—for it
is more than likely that he already has three or four other wives—he
produces a club, which he places on the floor beside her, a custom
whose significance requires no explanation. An Arab husband does
not confine himself to a stick in regulating his domestic affairs,
however, for only a few months ago the French authorities of Oran
divested a desert sheikh of the burnoose of authority because, in a
fit of jealous rage, he had cut off his wife's nose.
[Illustration: AN ARAB BRIDE GOING TO HER HUSBAND.
“Followed by rejoicing relatives, the bride is taken to her husband's
home in a swaying camel litter which looks like a young balloon.”
_Photograph by Em. Frechon, Biskra._]