The Edge of the Desert

by Ianthe M. Dunbar

The garden itself looked like a child’s game in the road, just bare twigs sticking up in small heaps of dust; but that was December and Hassan saw it in his mind’s eye by March, pink with almond blossom and starred with the bloom of apricots. Further along the road a gloom fell upon him, and at last he turned from the box seat beside the driver.

“Do you see that truly magnificent garden on the other side, and the beautiful house with three rooms? That was once mine.”

There was a dramatic pause. I enquired delicately how he had been forced to part with it.

“Because the owner of it died, and it was sold for more francs than would stretch from here to the city.”

It was indeed a beautiful property. Many olives and apricot trees were in it and there was a good well, and at his house he had a little business where he sold cakes and coffee and such like. And as many travellers and Bedouins pass up and down the way to Kairouan, he had made money. “Mais oui, it is the road that brings money,” and he sank into a brooding silence.

However, he recovered his cheerfulness when he took me to see his town house. He was anxious I should make a picture of his wife and family, but when we arrived it was to find the former had gone to the baths, taking the smaller children with her. I had seen her before, but now I was introduced to the eldest daughter, a pretty girl of thirteen whom we found at her loom weaving carpets. Her father explained she was busy making money towards her wedding, which would probably take place in a year or two. He would select the bridegroom, and she would not even have seen him beforehand. The little bride-to-be smiled up shyly at me. Her hair was curling and very black, and her complexion olive. Beautiful dark eyes, fringed with long lashes and underlined with kohl gave character to her face, with its straight nose inclined to the aquiline and the full well-drawn mouth. She gave promise of unusual beauty, and already looked three or four years older than she was, to my English eyes. She made a charming picture dressed in a dark short sleeved bodice over a pink cotton under-shift, full cotton pantaloons drawn in at the ankle, and her slim brown feet tucked under her. A faded red handkerchief was tied over her hair, and her bare slender arms moved backwards and forwards as she bent forward deftly knotting in the pieces of wool on the fabric. She worked with the swiftness of long practice, her pretty henna-stained fingers picking out the colours required from a pile of coloured wools in front of her. The little room she sat in was quite bare except for the loom and the matting spread on the beaten earth floor.

On coming in from the door in a quiet street, we had bent down to get through the opening into the room on the left. The walls were whitewashed, roughly decorated with crude coloured drawings of the lucky hand of Fatma. Through this living-room one stepped into a small courtyard, with a collection of green plants in pots in one corner, and a clothes line stretched across it on which flapped a few coloured garments. Two more rooms and a tiny cooking-place opened off it. I was shown the bedroom with great pride. There were rugs on the floor, and two large beds built into recesses. Coloured illustrations from European magazines adorned the walls, and a very well drawn portrait of Hassan’s father done by some French artist to whom he had acted as guide. There was a portrait of a very wooden and staring-eyed Bey and another of his predecessor. Hassan stood in the room watching my face for an expression of surprise and delight which I managed to produce. To my remarks he waved his hand round his possessions. “It is nothing,” he said, “you should have seen my country house.”

There was another woman in the living room, Hassan’s sister, who with her husband occupied the other bedroom, a discontented-looking handsome girl, about twenty-two, more gaudily dressed than the little carpet-weaver. She squatted on the floor cracking almonds with her white teeth and putting the kernels into a small earthenware bowl. A smouldering good-looking piece, thoroughly bored with life and probably meditating a speedy change of husbands.

I met some English missionaries who had been in the country for thirty years, and they told me that divorce is very common amongst the inhabitants. It is even rather the rule than the exception, and it is almost as often resorted to on the part of the wife as on that of the husband. It can be procured for the most trifling causes, and the divorcée does not lose social caste. She returns to her father’s house and usually remarries, though in that case the father cannot command as good a payment for her as he received from her first husband. Should there be children the question of their maintenance is settled by the Kaïd. The missionaries naturally were brought more in contact with the lower classes, amongst whom they thought divorce was commoner than in the wealthier circles. The poorer women go out closely veiled, but those of better birth live almost entirely in their houses and on the very rare occasions when they do go out, it is in a closed carriage with all the blinds down. However, they rarely resent their seclusion in the harem; they look on it as an enhancement of their value, and these missionaries had never heard any complaint of the system.