Mascara is charming. Great chalk hills, each crowned with its little mosque or marabout, rise round the town, and, when you have climbed these hills, you come upon broad belts of half wild, half cultivated country, flanked with settlers’ huts or Arab tents. The colouring of the place is thoroughly Eastern; you get here, as in Andalusia, long lines of wild cactus and aloe standing out against a burning blue sky, and those indescribable effects of yellow and white that are only seen where every building is whitewashed and every bit of ground is toasted and bronzed and baked by a blazing sun.
The place itself is quite French, and herein we were a little disappointed, as we had been led to expect a second Tclemcen, bright as Joseph’s many-coloured coat, with Moorish costume. The Arab population is a very shabby one, and is, for the most part, settled outside the town, in wretched huts built of cob and rubble. We went inside the mosque, now used as a granary, where Abd-el-Kader preached war against the Christians, and found it very pretty, but in sad ruin. There were formerly beautiful tiles and arabesques on the walls, not a trace of which remains. Nothing, indeed, remains, but the beautifully-proportioned domes and aisles and the ceiling of inlaid cedar-wood.
From Mascara we made an excursion to Saïda, where we smelt the real air of the Desert, and saw many wonderful things that must be described without hurry. Finding that the diligence to Saïda possessed neither coupé nor berlina, we engaged the whole vehicle to ourselves, and what a concern it was! The glass was out of the windows, the seats were rickety, the floor screeched ominously whenever we got in or out. Never was such a crazy old diligence in the world, and, as we went along, it had spasmodic attacks of creaking and cracking without any rhyme or reason, and we expected nothing more nor less than a total collapse in some wild spot or other—which, however, did not happen.
It takes a day to get from Mascara to Saïda, but not a long day. If there were only tolerable roads and saddle-horses, the journey would be trifling. As it is, you are shaken up and down in a way that turns you sick and blackens and bruises you, and, though a halt of five minutes and a breath of the sweet air of the Desert revives and heals, you get to Saïda tired enough. What added to our discomfort was a high wind that accompanied us all the way, first making us shiver with cold, and afterwards burning us with a sirocco-like heat. We did our best to keep out the alternate cold and heat, but it was difficult work as all the windows were broken. As soon as one improvised curtain was up, another was sure to be down; and at last we solved the difficulty by covering our faces instead. I think the journey to Timbuctoo could hardly be wilder or more solitary than this. For the most part we passed through a totally uninhabited country—some parts all stone and sand; others overgrown with rosemary, wild asparagus, fennel, candied tuft, thyme, and stunted tuya and tamarisk trees. When the dust did not blow, the air was very sweet and invigorating, and sometimes the sky looked suddenly cold and blowy, and we could walk in comfort. After passing a vast and beautiful plain we stopped at a little village or post to breakfast and change horses. It was a curious half French, half Arab sort of settlement; and from the Arab douar in the village close by came lots of little half naked children to look at us. When we had breakfasted we went up to the tents to sketch, and soon had an eager group round us,—a stately Bedouin, his wives, his mother, and their children. Every one wanted to be useful, to hold the umbrella or the palette, or fetch water; and, when nothing remained to do, they watched the artist with smiles of amazement and gratification. The grandmother was a delightful old lady. She was by no means ugly as most old Arab women are, but had quite a nice face with very bright eyes and very intelligent features. She had keen observation too, as I saw, for, without being in the least degree rude and troublesome, she looked at us so narrowly that she doubtless preserves to this day an exact remembrance of what we were, how we looked, and what we said, or what she thought we said to each other. I should like to have adopted that old lady as my grandmother and brought her to England. Her sympathy with the sketcher was quite beautiful, and, when the children giggled and tittered and came so close to her as to hinder her progress and bring forth some such expression as this—“How are we to send these troublesome little things away,”—the old lady understood at once and commanded them to be still, which they were; and as the objects of the landscape were brought out one by one, the dark-brown tents, the bright blue sky, the wavy, yellow plain, the low line of purple hills beyond—she cried aloud in ecstacy.
Whilst we were so occupied, a little urchin of five years, utterly naked, ran out of the tent close by and stood still, as much amused with us as we were with him. All laughed aloud, but the father who looked a little ashamed, and I think it was because he had been to Mascara or some other town, and knew that nakedness was not quite the thing in the great world. The women were like big children, and giggled, showing their white teeth, if you but held up a finger.
When we had done we shook hands all round, and returned to the auberge to see a pitiful sight. It was a little Arab child of fourteen months old sick of the fever; he was riding on the shoulder of his grandfather, a patriarchal-looking old man, with silky white hair and beard. I don’t think I ever saw anything more touching than his care of the little suffering thing. Its poor little face was perfectly livid, its eyes leaden, its limbs shrunken. What could we do for it?
The mistress of the auberge came out and questioned the old man in Arabic a little, then turned to us.
“Ah!” she said, “think of it—that poor baby has neither father nor mother, no one to tend it but that old man, and it has been ill of fever for months; but then we all suffer alike! Three of my five children are ill now; that is, ill every other day with shivering fits and sickness, and there is nothing to do but try quinine. But quinine is very dear, and we have to do without it.”
“Do the Arabs try it?” I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders expressively.