While in Tangiers our party was much broken up. J. and Patsy made several riding trips with Israel, leaving me to potter about the Socco with Ali, or to prowl with Mme. Hortense in the bazaars, where I bought a long, salmon colored cloth gabardine with wide sleeves and fascinating silk buttons and loops; and a fine sulham like the one the Arab gentleman wore. Both are men’s garments, though they pass muster very well, on the other side of the Straits of Gibraltar, for a woman’s.
Our greatest pleasure we all enjoy together,—a dinner at one of the foreign villas on the heights. It was nearly dark when I mounted Zuleika and rode under the stars and a thin crescent moon to our friend’s house. All the company except ourselves belonged to the diplomatic circle. They were as agreeable, well dressed, and well bred as such people are the world over. The dinner was excellent, the talk, for me, of absorbing interest. After dinner, as we were sitting talking together in the pretty drawing-room, admiring the Arabic curios our host had collected, we heard, faintly first, then gradually growing louder, the sound of a shepherd’s pipe, like the flute in Tristan and Isolde.
“I thought you might like to hear a little Arab music,” said our host, leading the way to an open-air concert room. In the corner made by two sides of his house, rugs were spread upon the ground, lanterns hung among the rose covered walls, and six native musicians squatted on the ground. Their instruments were a lute, a tambourine, a reban,—two-stringed fiddle—and the shepherd’s pipe. The leader was a handsome dark man with dreamy eyes, and the face of an enthusiast. He threw back his head and began a song that was like a wail; the others joined in from time to time like a chorus.
“They are singing,” said the host, “the Lament for Granada!”
When anybody says Tangiers to me suddenly, this is what I see! The Arab musicians sitting cross-legged on the ground under the stars, and the thin crescent moon. I hear the high wail of the Moorish pipe, the throb of the drum struck by the hand, the voices of the Moorish minstrels mourning for the Moors’ lost paradise, singing the Lament for Granada.
X
MADRID
“SEÑORA, this is my mother,” said Pedra the Vestal, who took care of our sitting-room fire.
“I am glad to make your acquaintance,” said Pedra’s mother; she shook my hand heartily, and looked at me with keen, kind eyes. “In regard to the washing, I will call for it on Mondays and bring it back on Fridays. If mending is required, there will be an additional price.”
“Where do you wash the clothes?”
She was astonished at the question. “In the river, where else?”