When they recovered, the story-teller was rewarded with rum and tobacco from that staunch Moslem MacBride, with sweetmeats and mint tea from the ladies. He enjoyed his evenings. During the winter they sat indoors before charcoal braziers in which burned sticks of aromatic wood, but on the hot summer nights they took to the roof to catch the sea breeze. Star-bright, languorous nights they were.
Below them the white town, ghostly glimmering, sloped away to the coast and the flats. Above them the slender minaret, while on the lazy wind came the drone of breakers and the faint sweet scent of spice gardens. Voluptuous, sea-murmurous nights, milk-warm, satin-soft under a tent of star-silvered purple.
Sometimes Schems-ed-dah fingered a gounibri and sang plaintive desert songs of the Bedouin women, the two other girls, snuggling, half-asleep, against MacBride’s broad chest, crooning the refrains.
Sometimes Ayesha, stirred by moonlight, would dance, clicking her bracelets, tinkling tiny brass cymbals between her fingers, swaying her graceful body backwards and sideways, poising on her toes, arms outstretched, like a sea-bird drifting, stamping her heels and shuddering from head to toe.
Besides story-telling, Ortho occasionally lifted up his voice in song. He had experimented with his mother’s guitar in times gone by and found he could make some show with the gounibri.
He sang Romany ditties he had learnt on his travels, and these were approved of by the Moorish girls, being in many ways akin to their own. But mostly he sang sea songs for the benefit of MacBride, who liked to swell the chorus with his bull bellow. They sang “Cawsand Bay,” “Baltimore,” “Lowlands Low” and “The Sailor’s Bride,” and made much cheerful noise about it, on one occasion calling down on themselves the reproof of the muezzin, who rebuked them from the summit of the minaret, swearing he could hardly hear himself shout. Eleven months Ortho remained in congenial bondage in Sallee.
Then one morning MacBride sent for him. “I’m goin’ to set you free, Saïd, my buck,” said he.
Ortho was aghast, asked what he had done amiss.
MacBride waved his hand. “I ain’t got nothin’ against you as yet, but howsomdever I reckon I’d best turn you loose. I’m goin’ to sea again—as reis.”
“Reis!” Ortho exclaimed. “What of Abdullah Benani?”