Airs for infancy, youth, and prime,
Times both shrill and mellow.
Fiddle away,
Or grave or gay,
For faces pink or yellow—
Scrape your song a lifetime long,
Fiddle away, old Fellow!"
Not a soul moved. Outside in the dusk a stunted black cow thoughtfully chewed the maize stalks of which the enclosure round the tent was built, and a kid rubbed his head up and down against a child's bare leg. Beyond this the darkness had nothing to conceal. We were in the middle of a bare, largely uninhabited, desert land known only to a few wandering Arab tribes. Outside, the mysterious open vault of the dark sky with its many hundred points of light; inside, the mysterious recess of the dark tent with the fifty-three pairs of gleaming eyes, every one fixed upon ourselves. Now and then, as a flash of lightning in the sky at night will expose the immediate surroundings to view, so a sudden spark from the fire revealed the setting of the eyes—the solemn, dusky, Arab faces.
A splutter on the fire as the pot boiled over put an end alike to the tune and to the meditations called up by it. The man transferred the ground berries to a copper jug and, pouring the boiling water on to them, placed this second pot on the hot ashes. We had been sitting there for an hour watching these preparations, and it seemed as if we might now reasonably entertain hopes of tasting the results. Our expectations in this direction were also enhanced by the appearance of three tiny cups which had been unearthed from a dark corner, and handed to one of the men nearest the fire. He proceeded to rinse them out one by one with hot water, displaying a care and absorption in the process which contrasted strangely with the simplicity of his task.
The coffee on the fire came to the boil, the coffee-maker poured it back into the original pot, which he again set on the ashes. He then handed the empty jug to the cup-washer, who rinsed each cup out carefully with a few drops of the coffee left for this purpose. Very quietly, very precisely, he placed each cup on the ground within reach of the coffee-maker, and retreated into the background.