III
A drive in the oasis was always worth having; the sky was the purest blue, it was brisk desert air in the nostrils, and notwithstanding my misadventure with the Jewish village I yielded to Absalom’s programme and went to see how the negroes fared at their own rendezvous. It was a lesson to me not to prejudge even a trifling adventure in a new land. The sight was piquant. The village was a little collection of conical roofed huts with brush fences round each one; a few palms feathered the sky over it, and groves of them made the horizon lines, except where the sparkling sea stretched off beneath the bluff. The place was alive with women and children in striped burnooses and nondescript folds, whose rough edges and nutty colors seemed to belong to the complexions and stiff hair, of all varieties of turn, that one saw on every side. They were very poor people, of course, but their miserable state did not make so harsh an impression as in the case of the Jewish village; there was a happy light in their faces and a fitness in the environment of hut and brush under the palms in the sun which made the scene a part of nature. It was a bit of equatorial Africa transplanted and set down here—a Soudanese village in its native aspect, even to that touch of grimace, as of human nature laughing at itself, which negroes have in their wild state. I had a flash of such an experience at Gabès; in the oasis, just below the beautiful sweep of the cascades, there suddenly sprang up before me in the bush a young negress, as wonderfully clad as unclad. It was as if a picture in my geography had come to life. I might have been in a jungle on the banks of the Niger. It was the same here; the degrees of latitude seemed to have got mixed; the scene belonged much further south under a tropic sky, and I lingered about it with interest and curiosity.
Then I turned to the market close by—not a great market like that of the city but the oasis market. It did not cover a large space, but was prettily situated, and banked at one side by a fine palm grove, which gave it character and country peace. There were two or three hundred people there, scattered among the usual squares of goods and vegetables, variegated with straw work, skin bottles, and Soudanese helmets; but there was an uncommon number of animals—camels and cows, sheep and goats. There was slaughtering going on near the palm grove. It seemed that the purchaser picked out the particular sheep he preferred, and it was made mutton before his eyes. It reminded me of Greek Easter days. The scene, however, was by no means sanguinary; it was a country fair amid the quiet palms asleep in the blue—the life of the people in their own land in their ancestral ways.