The soldiers flocked round the singer and listened with deep interest to this patriotic and religious hymn.
A marabout, a friend of Ben Faka’s, came nearly every evening to our tent, and sang for hours in the same style; but his voice was so harsh and shrill, and the burden of his song so tedious, that one of our chief annoyances was the having our ears assailed for such a length of time by his deafening psalmody.
On the 2nd of October it froze even within the tents in this mountainous region, and there was no grass left for the camels near Tekedemta; accordingly the Sultan sent them to the table land to the southward where there was excellent pasture. These mountains abound in game of every kind, which the soldiers caught and ate unknown to Abd-el-Kader. The market established by the Sultan at Tekedemta is well supplied with game, and with fish from the Ouet Mina which is full of them, and of a sort of tortoise which lives in the mud and is equally disagreeable to the taste and the smell, whereas the land tortoises, which are nearly as numerous, are delicious when properly cooked.
Abd-el-Kader carried on the works at the redoubt with great ardour; fifty workmen were constantly employed upon them. To celebrate the inauguration of the new Tekedemta, the Sultan had the cannon brought to the redoubt, where it was loaded with stones and fired off three times, but so unskilfully that the stones flew into the midst of the camp to the great peril both of man and beast. At each discharge the marabouts and the workmen cried out “The Sultan is great!”
Abd-el-Kader has since sent seven cannons from Mascara to Tekedemta: they were old Spanish six and eight pounders, which had all been spiked, and were mounted on very bad carriages of Arab manufacture. Fifteen or twenty families have emigrated from Mascara to Tekedemta, at the Sultan’s command: but it will not be easy to induce the whole population of Mascara to leave their habitations and to settle in a cold, unhealthy spot to which all provisions must be fetched on mules from the distance of a day’s journey, and where they consequently are very dear. Abd-el-Kader hopes to breathe new life into these remains of past greatness and splendor, but the descendants of the men who founded and built this city are unable to tell the prisoner or the traveller so much as the very name of the Sultans who had their capital in these mountains.
CHAPTER VIII.
Marches—The five marabouts—Cards and chess—Night march—The Sultan’s arrival at the camp—His wife—Female camp—Zaka the cup-bearer—Abd-el-Kader’s Court of Justice.
On the 30th of September, at sunrise, Abd-el-Kader gave the signal of departure. After a march of two hours we reached a desert country; the road was extremely bad, and frequently broken by ravines. To our left ran a long chain of wooded mountains, which we had not yet left behind us, when Ben Faka ordered a halt, and pitched the camp on the banks of the Ouet Mina.
The next day, the 1st of October, whilst I was watching the negroes who were taking down the Sultan’s tent and loading it on the mules, I saw Ben Faka with three haicks under his arm, followed by three Italian prisoners. I went towards them and asked whither they were going, but before they had time to answer me Ben Faka, in a voice broken by rage, commanded me to leave them, and to mount my mule. I was struck with a sinister presentiment as to the fate of the three unhappy prisoners. From afar I saw Ben Faka give them the haicks, of which they had long stood in need, as they had nothing to wear but their ragged shirts. My three companions in misfortune then took the road to Tekedemta. The Sultan sent them to the works there, and it was only by his especial orders that Ben Faka had given them the haicks. At Tekedemta the poor fellows were exposed to every kind of privation and ill usage; one of them sunk under it. The two survivors afterwards gave me an account of their sufferings, which would appear incredible to any one who did not know the Arabs as well as I do. This separation was most painful to me; we had endured together hunger, cold, insults, and blows; we had talked together of our sorrows, our hopes, and our hatred of the Arabs.