In the Tail of the Peacock

by Isabel Savory

"Why should I turn a Christian? See—I may steal, I may lie, I may commit murder; my sins may reach as high as from earth to heaven, and at the day of my death God is merciful. He will forgive me all, because I witness to Mohammed as his Prophet. Your religion is a narrow little religion; mine covers everything. You go home and go away by yourself and witness to Mohammed as his Prophet, and all your sins will be forgiven."

It is a sign of their being low down in the intellectual scale when the members of society talk for the most part of "persons," just as it is a sign of a higher tone when the conversation runs chiefly upon "ideas." Among the women at Fatima's tea party there was no sort or kind of exchange of thought of any description, nor was there general conversation. They talked in a desultory way to each other about their children, their clothes, their food, their money, and each other—sometimes they included Miss Banks, but never touched an interesting point.

If a woman unable to read or write only meets women also unable to read or write, and knows but one man, her husband, who feeds her and values her much like a tame doe-rabbit, it is unreasonable to expect to find in her much intelligence and energy. Wives, when asked if they did not wish to do more, would not like to read or write or work, only laughed derisively. The idea was absurd: they could not understand any one wishing to exert herself in a novel and unnecessary way.

On my left, still sat the stoutest woman in the room—the holy Sharīfa. She lost her snuff-box, and roused herself to hunt all over her enormous person for it—a work of time; but a friend had borrowed it, and it was passed back to her. She sat on the divan, cross-legged like some gigantic idol of ancient Egypt, many yards in circumference at the base, her fat little hands folded across the embroideries and gold-worked buttons and worked edges of the many gorgeous waistcoats and kaftans, which seemed piled one on top of each other on her immense frame. Her head, the size of two footballs rolled into one, was swathed in violet and scarlet silk: straight whiskers of hair, dyed jet-black, were combed a few inches down each cheek, and then cut short. The whole "idol" sat very still, speaking but rarely, and then in a harsh croak like some oracular and forbidding bird: "it" had the appearance of being comfortably gorged.

Meanwhile, Fatima signed or murmured to the slaves, and the sweetmeats were carried round, and the fragile cups refilled; and there went up a great aroma of sweet mint tea.

Through the wide doorway the patio and its colonnades of many pillars lay cool and shaded; cages of singing canary-birds hung from the ceiling; the fountain rippled in the middle; a tall girl in green and white sauntered across in her slippered feet, carrying a tray; a gaily dressed slave passed silently; and the whole thing might have been a dream. . . .

Past the patio lay the courtyard, all one large garden, with tiled walks and red-gold oranges and heavy foliage set against the blue sky. Broad date-palms, mimosa, and climbing creepers sometimes shook in a breath of wind. The clear tanks, full of ever-running water and lined with maiden-hair fern, moved with gold-fish, which matched the oranges; a pet monkey played amongst the lemons on a lemon-tree; a green parrot nodded to us from a bower of pink almond blossom.

We wandered round the sleepy, silent courtyard, and in and out the chequered greenery, hot with windless, sun-filled air, back through the black-and-white courts, until at last the great outside door shut upon Fatima, her tea party, and the eternal mysticism of the East:—we were without the gates of Paradise, and in an atmosphere of rude realism once more.

Soon after that afternoon of many calls with Miss Banks, a day up in the Anjera Hills, to the north of Tetuan, gave some idea of the strip of country which lay between us, and the sea, and Gibraltar. This country possessed the fascination of being little known. No one troubled to go up there, except its own wild inhabitants. Our own Consul had never been. The missionaries had not climbed so high, nor so far, this side the river.

Now the Tetuan sok (market) is greatly dependent upon the country people belonging to the Beni Salam tribe, who live up in the Anjeras; and from the flat white roof of our garden-house we had watched through a pair of glasses on market mornings, strings of women, winding by a precipitous path down the hillside, which is abrupt and mountainous, themselves dropping as it were from an upper world. They scrambled slowly down, one after the other, descending many hundreds upon hundreds of feet; then filed slantwise over the slopes, right into the rocky Mussulman cemetery, across that, and thence into the city by the Báb-el-M`kabar.