Dagonet Abroad

by George R. Sims

I didn’t think there could be much more to stand; but a very old Arab gentleman stepped into the ring with a huge sharp-pointed sword in his hand. The sword was passed round, and we all felt the edge and the point. Miss Jones wouldn’t let it go for at least two minutes. The sword was then held on the ground, point upwards, by two strong men, who lay down to do it. The old Arab gentleman then coolly proceeded to roll up his shirt round his neck, so as to leave his entire stomach bare. He then turned to the audience to show them that it was bare. At last Miss Jones of Clapham was disconcerted. Truth compels me to admit that she ejaculated, ‘Oh, mamma!’ and for one short moment she looked as though she would like to retire. But she recovered herself in a moment, and nearly knocked an elderly French gentleman’s hat over his eyes in her endeavour to get a nearer view. The Arab ‘undressed,’ after trying the sword to see that it was firmly fixed, stepped back a foot or two; then, with a little run, sprang in the air, and, throwing himself out, fell with his bare stomach flat on to the point of the upright sword. He was absolutely impaled, and in this position he spun round and round. I turned away, and fancied I was on board ship again. If only there had been a steward handy, I should have called him to my assistance with the accompanying crockery; but Miss Jones of Clapham gave a little giggle, and cried out in maiden wonderment, ‘Lor, ma! however can he do it?’

I stopped to see no more. Calling on Achmet to accompany me, I quitted the dancing girls and the juggling Arabs and the self-mutilating dervishes, and went out into the Rue Ben Ali. As I left the courtyard of the Moorish house, I looked up, and high above me in the starlight, upon the galleries of the house, I saw veiled Arab women looking down upon the scene. I wondered what they thought of the unveiled, bare-faced English girls who assisted, without a blush or a shudder, at such disgusting and depraved exhibitions. When I told Achmet that many of these young English girls would not be allowed to go to a stage-play in England, except at the Crystal Palace, for fear their modesty should be shocked, he opened his large Eastern eyes to such an extent that they looked like a couple of full moons. He says the Arabs can’t understand the Giaour women at all, and I don’t wonder at it. The French people in the town are themselves shocked at the idea of unmarried girls assisting at these exhibitions; but they are the first things that the English girls ask to be taken to see. If I had a son, I should be very sorry for him to accompany me to one. But English mothers take their daughters, and so I am driven to the conclusion that either I am extra squeamish, or that they are extra innocent. But the innocence that can detect nothing improper in the dance of the Moorish girls ought to be wrapped in cotton-wool, and taken back to the Garden of Eden in the days before Eve ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That is the only place, and the only period, in which anyone would accept it as genuine.

In bygone times the Assaouaï were a powerful religious fraternity. The founder of the order was an Arab, one Sidi Mohammed Ben Aïssa, and the members, whose mission it was to fan the fanaticism of the people in times of war, were all Arabs. But the Assaouaï of to-day are a mixed lot of Arabs, Berbers, and Negroes. Nevertheless, they still exercise considerable power over the imagination of their fellow-countrymen in the more remote districts of Morocco and Tripoli, where they are often the secret agents of rebellion. But in Algeria, owing to the revolts fomented by them, ending all in slaughter and defeat, they have lost their prestige; they are no longer ‘invincibles,’ only showmen living upon the profits of their performances.

The climate of Algeria is fearfully trying to the temper. If the Archbishop of York and the Archbishop of Canterbury came to stay here together, they would have words in a week. I won’t say they would come to blows in a month, because they are Archbishops; but I think that two bishops would probably fight. Everybody in Algeria who is not a native becomes irritable and hasty and snappy very soon after landing. I, of course, retain my usual placidity of manner; but Albert Edward is awful. He bullies the landlords of our hotels; he challenges the post-office officials to come outside and fight; he even presumes at times to lecture me smartly upon my unreasonableness; and when he scolds the waiters, I blush for very shame. I generally go afterwards to these poor people and apologize for his violence. But I have to do it in secret, for I am myself afraid of him. The other day he fell over a piece of broken pavement in the Rue Bab el Zoued at Algiers, and his new hat went flying into the mud. This accident he declared was due to the culpable negligence of the authorities, and before I could stop him he had rushed off to the Hotel de Ville, rung up the concierge, and was flourishing his stick about, and giving most insulting messages to the mayor. His language to the clerk at the Poste-Restante was really shocking. Here I must say he had an excuse.

The method of doing business at the Poste Restante is not calculated to put an Englishman in a good temper. If he comes and gives in his card, he is handed all the English letters, and told to help himself. From Mustapha (the English colony, and at once the Clapham and South Kensington of Algiers) there comes a porter from the hotels. He generally takes all the English newspapers as a matter of course. The idea that anybody not residing on the Mustapha (a height above the town) should have anything from England is scouted as absurd. My English papers I only recovered after employing mounted Arabs to scour the hills in every direction, inquiring at every villa and every hotel and every farm where an English person resided.

I received a batch of letters nine days after their leaving London. They were due in four. I believe that they had been given to a sailor who came from an English yacht in the bay for letters, and mine evidently went for a short cruise before they were brought back. One thing I would impress on English people coming to Algiers—don’t have your letters sent to the Poste Restante. If you do your time will be wasted, your correspondence delayed, and your temper will become as uncontrollable as my companion’s.

The Post-office clerks cannot read English names. To show the hash that is made of them, I will quote from the list of fashionable arrivals at an hotel given in a local paper. The arrivals are all classified under the heads of French, Spanish, Italian, English, etc. Here is the English list literatim et verbatim:

‘The Mistress Macandraw, Mr. Boom, Mr. Fegin, Mr. Fosdick, Mr. Dosgoity, Mr. Billies, Mr. Plumb, Mr. Sliebel, the O’Rori, the Mistress Lady Jon.’ If the names are right, it is about the queerest collection of surnames I ever came across.

Achmet has just come in to tell me that a lion has appeared at a village some miles from where I am now encamped, and that his roaring has kept the inhabitants awake all night. I am off. To see a real live lion looking about for his breakfast, free and unfettered, is an unfulfilled ambition of my life. Hastily we grasp our firearms, leap upon our Arab steeds, and dash across the desert towards the hill where the lion is seeking whom he may devour. Whether I shall be able to let you know the result of our day’s sport will depend very much upon which gets the better of the encounter—we or the lion.

Achmet, who brought me my letters and newspapers, also told me there had been an execution in Algiers of an Arab who had been found guilty of a very cruel murder. The guillotine is a fearful punishment for a Moslem, because the guillotine cuts the head off, and Mahomet takes the faithful when they are dead by the hair of the head in order to lift them up into Paradise. The poor fellows who are cut in two at the neck are in a fearful state, because when Mahomet takes hold of them by the hair of the head the body will naturally remain behind on earth. In the Mahomedan Paradise a gentleman with only a head would not be able to thoroughly enjoy himself.