North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

IV

I spent the evening in the Café Maure of the Ouled-Naïls. They are la femme of the Sahara, daughters of a tribe whose centre is at Djelfa, not far from Laghouat, leagues away to the west, and thence they are dispersed through the desert, adept dancing-girls who perform in cafés; and in that primitive society, it is said, no reproach attaches to their mode of life, which yields them a dowry and brings them at last a husband. The custom is not peculiar to the Sahara; I have read of its existence in Japan and in the north of Scotland in the eighteenth century. I had met with them before, and was familiar with their figures, but always in a tourist atmosphere; here they were on their own soil, and au naturel, and I expected a different impression.

The room was rather large, with the furnace and the utensils for coffee in the corner near the entrance; four or five musicians, on a raised platform, were discoursing their shrill barbarian art, but it pleases me with its plaintive intensity and rapid crescendos, in its savage surroundings; a bench went round the wall, and there were tables, at one of which Hamet and I sat down, and coffee was brought. There were not many in the room—a sprinkling of soldiers, mostly in the blue of the tirailleurs, Arabs, old and gray-bearded, or younger and stalwart like Ali, whom I had lost sight of and now found here, much more attractive than I had thought possible, with a desert rose in his mouth and a handsome comrade. A few women with the high head-dress and heavy clothes they wear were scattered about. Close behind me, and to my left, was a wide entrance to the dark shadows of the half-lighted court whose cell-like rooms I had inspected in the morning, and men and women were passing in and out, singly and in groups, all the evening. For a while there was no dancing—only the music; but at some sign or call a full-grown woman, who seemed large and heavy, began the slow cadence and sway of the dance. I had often seen the performance, but never in such a setting; at Biskra and in the north it is a show; here it was a life. She finished, and I beckoned to a young slip of a girl standing near. She came, leaning her dark hands on the table, with those unthinking eyes that are so wandering and unconcerned until they fill with that liquid, superficial light which in the south is so like a caress. I offered her my cigarettes, and she smiled, and permitted me to examine the bracelets on her arms and the silver ornaments that hung from her few necklaces; she was simply dressed and not overornamented; she was probably poor in such riches; there was no necklace of golden louis that one sometimes sees; but there were bracelets on her ankles, and she wore the head-dress, with heavy, twisted braids of hair. A blue star was tattooed on her forehead, and her features were small but fine, with firm lines and rounded cheek and chin; she was too young to be handsome, but she was pretty for her type and she had the pleasant charm that youth gives to the children of every tint and race. She stood by us a while with a little talk, and as the music began she drew back and danced before us; and if she had less muscular power and vivacity than the previous dancer, she had more grace in her slighter motions. She used her handkerchief as a background to pose her head and profile her features and form; and all through the dance she shot her vivid glances, that had an elasticity and verve of steel, at me. She came back to take our applause and thanks, and talked with Hamet, for her simple French phrases were exhausted; there was nothing meretricious in her demeanor, rather an extraordinary simplicity and naturalness of behavior; she seemed a thing of nature. The room began to fill now; three women were dancing; and she went over to the bench by the wall opposite, and I noticed a young boy of eight or ten years ran to sit by her and made up to her like a little brother. There were three or four such young boys there.

The scene was now at its full value as a picture; not that there was any throng or excitement, and to a European eye it might seem only dull, provincial, rude; the rather feebly lighted room was obscure in the corners and the walls were naked; the furnace corner, however, was full of dark movement, the sharp music broke out afresh, the dance was almost sombre in its monotony, seen mechanically and without any apparent interest by the Arabs, wrinkled and grizzled, banked together or leaning immobile on the bench by the wall; and the cavernous shadow of the court behind me made a fine background to the figures or groups that disappeared or emerged, or sometimes stood stationary there in the semi-obscurity. To my color and shadow loving eye it was an interesting scene; and its rudeness enhanced its quality. I noticed many a slight thing: a tall negro stalked along the opposite wall with a handful of candles which he offered to a woman and found no welcome for, and he went away apparently exceeding sorrowful. And I sat there long in the midst of it, thinking of striped tents by the city wall in the sand near the graves; of streets in the Orient and the north where the women sit by the door-post like idols; and especially reconstructing in imagination the scenes of a romance by an Arab, which I had lately read, depicting the life of an Ouled-Naïl along these very routes where I had been passing, a book full of desert truth—“Khadra,” it is called. Toward ten o’clock we rose to go, and I caught the eye of the young girl I had talked with, and had a smile for good-by.