(From _The Pictorial Review_)
The day had been dead hot. Under the weight of the afternoon one
would have thought it could never be cool again in the Mzab. But
immediately the sun had dipped behind the cliff that guards the
western rim of the oasis the thin air emptied itself, and the
night-chill, penetrating and treacherous, flowed over the dry bottom
of the _oued_.
The town stirred. Under my gallery there came and went a word-fight
between Berber muleteers from the north. After that I heard the
evening call of the muezzin dropping down from the mosque-tower on
the crowded hill, arid, sinuous, like the note of another wooden
well-wheel shrilling above the desert floor. Then somewhere under a
house arose the hollow voice of a tambour struck with a thumb, and a
man sang. In a rift of silence a wandering breeze threshed all the
date-fronds in the _oued_-bottom with a phantom of distant applause.
Nearer at hand a foot-scuffle in the dusk. A choked laugh. And all
around in the heavy shadows of that quarter the subdued giggling, the
rustling, and jewel-clanking of the women of dark delight.
“What’s wrong with the Ouled Naïl girls to-night?” I asked along the
gallery. Abd, son of Abdallah the Mozabite, rose to his feet on the
tiles near the stair, a white wraith.
“_Kain kairouan ja, sidi._” (There is a caravan come.)
Drums banged; women scurried. The momentous night was established and
stars sprinkled the sky, large and restless stars, always flickering
a little to the eye in that air without body.
I sat at an island crossroads of the western Sahara, where the pale,
blurred sand-courses, like the wakes of ships, come up the bald skin
of the globe from the green mysteries that lie months away on the
other side of the south.
“Abd!” I called, “where does the caravan come from, east or west?”
Abd was gone. On the tiles I heard the fall of a Christian boot.
Borak, the Englishman, came toward me in the shadows.
“I wonder you’re not out,” he said. “The caravan comes from the
south.”
“Not----!”
“Rather! This is a real one--like the old days again. Right away up
from under. You’d better have a look at the beggars; you’re romantic,
you know. Might not have another chance in a year.”
I put on my coat and went with him. Borak has been too long in
Africa, one part and another. He has forgotten that it is the Dark
Continent. As we walked he went on in his habitual vein of banter.
“It’s a tidy lot of heroes for you. You may imagine. Seven
‘moonlights’ on the trek, and I lay a pound sterling not a man in the
crowd has washed in the thirty weeks.”
“Thirty weeks!” I couldn’t help echoing it. “Lord!”
“There ought to be a story there, eh? As a matter of fact there
isn’t. I insist again that there’s more story, more poetry and
romance in the life of a Whitechapel coster than you’ll hear in a
year listening to these people. They lack imagination. They want the
mental whip of civilization; that’s it in a nutshell.”