The Circe of the deserts

by Paule Henry-Bordeaux

The start took place at daybreak, in the sharp morning air, and they marched under a uniform sky, of an implacable and dull blue. The tawny sands muffled the shoes of the horses, and in the great solitude, the glistening void of the desert, the smallest objects, a tuft of prickly grass, a fox, the flight of a partridge, assumed an extraordinary importance. On a sudden, the alarm disturbed the caravan. An attack was imminent. From the extremity of the horizon a troop of horsemen was rushing towards them at full gallop. Wild excitement! Rumours! Lady Hester, however, examined with her eye the extreme line of the desert, and immediately assured her companions that there were many horses in the distance, but that they were without riders. This assertion, subsequently verified, sensibly increased her prestige with the Bedouins, whose piercing eyes were accustomed, like those of sailors, to watch without intermission for the dangers of them seas of sand.

There were many distractions to relieve the monotony of the journey; there were little organised robberies. If the servants, clothed anew from head to foot, had the misfortune to feel warm and to take off their cloaks or draw out their handkerchiefs, the agile Nasr supervened and claimed his due. There were also mimic combats. All in a body, standing erect on their high stirrups, they raised a shout, savage, swift, strident, which the horses obeyed in starting off at full gallop. The mirrors with which the saddles were decorated flashed in the sunlight. The Bedouins brandished their lances. The horses increased their speed to join the mares. The horsemen approached yelling at the full strength of their lungs their war cries; their bodies were almost touching; and at the moment when the inevitable shock was causing the spectators to gasp with fear, a turning movement executed with excessive rapidity checked the career of their excited mounts. The love of fighting made some of them forget the game, and the blows became real; blood flowed in thin furrows, while the heaving flanks of the cruelly abused horses were covered with sweat and their mouths filled with red foam.

Then the caravan encountered the tribe of the Sebah, which was descending the slopes of Mount Belaz, which was simply a hill of sand. It was a magnificent and unknown spectacle. Not a fold of the ground which was not covered with moving specks. It seemed that a page of ancient history had come to meet the travellers. The desert on the march! In the first years of the Hegira the nomads marched thus with slow and weary steps towards uncertain goals. How had it changed, in fact? The strong camels were still adorned with the haudag—compromise between the palanquin and the basket—from which emerged the heads of women and children, and the weaker camels carried the carpets rolled into a ball, which appeared at a distance enormous nests. The men, mounted on their mares, surrounded by wild colts, shook their keffiyes of vibrating colours; the women, the ring in the nose, well-tattooed lips, wrapped in their red cotton cloth spotted with white, resumed instinctively the antique poses. And then there were the beautiful naked children. Nothing gives more the impression of eternity and immobility than the free life of the desert. And, carried back for several centuries, Lady Hester, Bruce and Meryon watched the tribe disappearing in the distance, until it became like a handful of confetti dispersed over the sands and the call of the camel-drivers: "Yalla! Yalla!" died away.

And when the steppes became larger still with the blue shadows brought by the night, the caravan came to a halt. Sometimes alone near springs half-covered by sand, sometimes welcomed by an encampment of Beni Hez or Beni Omar. The Bedouins unfolded, as fancy dictated, their black tents of goats' hair, lighted by a thousand holes. The women hastened to prepare the evening meal, and baked gently over the embers the soft, flat loaves. A gigantic cauldron was filled with water, butter and rice—water collected most often in the holes and with which a kitchen-maid in England would have refused to wash her floor, so muddy was it, and butter which a prolonged sojourn in skin bottles had rendered as rancid and bitter as could possibly be desired. All that was boiled pell-mell, and the mud cheerfully incorporated with this mixture. The admirers watched the progress of the cooking and squatted on their left legs, raising their right knee to the height of the chin. They plunged their hands into the dish and drew from it a heap of food, which they threw into the air and dexterously pressed in order to cool it and to make the juice run out of it. And their thumbs adroitly guided the enormous shovelful to its destination. When they were satisfied, they surrendered their places to others, and, after having plunged their greasy fingers into the sand, they passed them nonchalantly over their abayes. For they were dirty, thoroughly dirty; they employed their hands for nameless purposes—such as to wipe their feet when they were wet—while the neighbourhood of springs failed to stimulate them to elementary ablutions. Sometimes there was mutton, sometimes also treacle as dark as raisiné. And always coffee. The person who prepared it ground the berries in a little mortar; at this music the whole camp hurried up. Wiping the cups with an old rag—water is too precious to be wasted—he sent round the bitter and scorching liquid.

Lady Stanhope's companions rejoiced greatly at her foresight by which they profited after having complained about it.

"Nothing in the world has ever been so well organised," she exclaimed, laughing, "which shows that I am a worthy pupil of Colonel Gordon, for I am at once quartermaster, adjutant and commissary-general. We are living as comfortably as if we were at home, and the Duke of Kent would not give more orders to the minute and would not watch more severely their execution. Really, it is the only way of accomplishing an enterprise of this kind with some pleasure."

And the doctor, although pretending to have taken a fancy to camel's milk, was very pleased to have a closed tent and sugar in his coffee.

Lady Hester had found the best formula for travelling in the East: that which consists of living the life of the Arabs without sharing their tents infested with vermin, of becoming impregnated with the picturesqueness of their manners without mimicking them, of admiring the patriarchal simplicity of their repasts without partaking from the common pot. People who have never roved the world except from the depths of their arm-chairs, do not understand this reserve; it is so much less poetical! But the greatest travellers are those who watch their luggage with the greatest care. One can very well enjoy the pleasure of a Bedouin camp without being covered with fleas and without having one's stomach turned by meats more or less dirty and decomposed. Only few persons have the courage of their opinions.

Lady Hester had courage of all kinds. Thus, she really knew the Bedouins, not the Bedouins of exportation and of comic opera, but the dirty Bedouins, the Bedouins to the life, braggarts, plunderers, cheats, rancorous haters, as witness the one who having had his pipe filled with camel dung, by way of tobacco, by a Christian humorist, gave the village over to fire and sword, and exterminated all the caravans within reach of his vengeance! But so ready in praises, so apt in compliments, singularly discerning—do they not call her "the Queen?"

From time to time, there was certainly a shadow. The Bedouins showed their true character in declaring that if the pacha's troops had had the audacity to penetrate into the desert, they would have sent them—stark-naked and without beards—to their affairs. Was it not, after all, the fault of those who treated them as fools and related to them cock and bull stories at a time when they are most susceptible and more difficult to manage than all the nations of old Europe.