The hotel was in a wide place, so thickly planted with acacias and chestnut trees as to resemble a shabby park. An Arab servant showed them to adjoining rooms, plain but clean, and a half-breed girl brought tins of hot water and vases of syringas. As for roses, she said in hybrid French, no one troubled about them—there were too many in Tlemcen. Ah! but it was a land of plenty! The gentlemen would be happy, and wish to stay a long time. There was meat and good wine for almost nothing, and beggars need not ask twice for bread—fine, white bread, baked as the Moors baked, across the border.
As they bathed and dressed more carefully than they had dressed for the early-morning start, strange sounds came up from the square below, which was full of people, laughing, quarrelling, playing games, striking bargains, singing songs. Arab bootblacks clamoured for custom at the hotel-door, pushing one another aside, fiercely. Little boys in embroidered green or crimson jackets sat on the hard, yellow earth, playing an intricate game like "jack stones," and disputed so violently that men and even women stopped to remonstrate, and separate them; now a grave, prosperous Jew dressed in red (Jewish mourning in the province of Oran); then an old Kabyle woman of the plains, in a short skirt of fiery orange scarcely hiding the thin sticks of legs that were stained with henna half-way up the calves, like painted stockings. Moors from across the frontier—fierce men with eagle faces and striped cloaks—grouped together, whispering and gesticulating, stared at with suspicion by the milder Arabs, who attributed all the crimes of Tlemcen to the wild men from over the border. Black giants from the Negro quarter kept together, somewhat humble, yet laughing and happy. Slender, coffee-coloured youths drove miniature cows from Morocco, or tiny black donkeys, heavily laden and raw with sores, colliding with well-dressed Turks, who had the air of merchants, and looked as if they could not forget that Tlemcen had long been theirs before the French dominion. Bored but handsome officers rode through the square on Arab horses graceful as deer, and did not even glance at passing women, closely veiled in long white haïcks.
It was lively and amusing in the sunlight; but just as the two friends were ready to go out, the sky was swept with violet clouds. A storm threatened fiercely, but they started out despite its warning, turning deaf ears to the importunities of a Koulougli guide who wished to show them the mosques, "ver' cheap." He followed them, but they hurried on, pushing so sturdily through a flock of pink-headed sheep, which poured in a wave over the pavement, that they might have out-run the rain had they not been brought to a sudden standstill by a funeral procession.
It was the strangest sight Stephen had seen yet, and he hardly noticed that, in a burst of sunlight, rain had begun to pelt down through the canopy of trees.
The band of figures in brown burnouses marched quickly, with a sharp rustling of many slippered feet moving in unison, and golden spears of rain seemed to pierce the white turbans of the men who carried the bier. As they marched, fifty voices rose and fell wildly in a stirring chant, exciting and terrible as the beat-beat of a tom-tom, sometimes a shout of barbaric triumph, sometimes a mourning wail. Then, abruptly, a halt was made in the glittering rain, and the bearers were changed, because of the luck it brings Arab men to carry the corpse of a friend.
Just in front of the two Englishmen the body rested for an instant, stretched out long and piteously flat, showing its thin shape through the mat of woven straw which wrapped it, only the head and feet being wound with linen. So, by and by, it would be laid, without a coffin, in its shallow grave in the Arab cemetery, out on the road to Sidi Bou-Medine.
There were but a few seconds of delay. Then the new bearers lifted the bier by its long poles, and the procession moved swiftly, feverishly, on again, the wild chant trailing behind as it passed, like a torn war-banner. The thrill of the wailing crept through Stephen's veins, and roused an old, childish superstition which an Irish nurse had implanted in him when he was a little boy. According to Peggy Brian it was "a cruel bad omen" to meet a funeral, especially after coming into a new town. "Wait for a corpse," said she, "an' ye'll wait while yer luck goes by."
"They're singing a song in praise of the dead man's good deeds, and of triumph for the joys he'll know in Paradise," explained Nevill. "It's only the women who weep and scratch their faces when those they love have died. The men rejoice, or try to. Soon, they are saying, this one who has gone will be in gardens fair as the gardens of Allah Himself, where sit beautiful houris, in robes woven of diamonds, sapphires, and rubies, each gem of which has an eye of its own that glitters through a vapour of smouldering ambergris, while fountains send up pearly spray in the shade of fragrant cedars."
"No wonder the Mohammedan poor don't fear death, if they expect to exchange their hovels for such quarters," said Stephen. "I wish I understood Arabic."
"It's a difficult language to keep in your mind, and I don't know it well," Nevill answered. "But Jeanne and Josette Soubise speak it like natives; and the other day when Miss Ray lunched with us, I thought her knowledge of Arabic wonderful for a person who'd picked it up from books."