Over this erection was thrown, in Khassonké fashion, a piece of a very transparent kind of gauze made by the natives, covering it like a blue spider’s web, and this headdress remained firmly fixed day and night for a whole week.
Fatou-gaye wore dainty little sandals of leather, like the cothurnus of the ancients, with thongs passing between the first and second toes.
Her dress consisted of the scanty, tight-fitting pagne, which the Egyptians of the time of the Pharaohs bequeathed to Nubia. Above this she wore a bou-bou, a great square of muslin with a hole for the head, and falling like a peplus below the knees.
For ornaments she had heavy silver rings, riveted on wrists and ankles, and besides these, scented necklets of soumaré, for Jean’s slender means did not suffice for the purchase of necklets of amber or gold.
Soumarés are plaits, consisting of several rows of threaded little brown seeds. These seeds that ripen on the banks of the Gambia have a penetrating, aromatic odour, an odour peculiar to themselves, one of the most characteristic odours of Senegal.
Fatou-gaye was very pretty with this towering, barbaric headdress, which gave her the appearance of a Hindu deity, decked out for a religious festival. Her face had none of the characteristics, the flat nose, the thick lips, of certain African tribes, which in France are taken for the generic type of the entire black race. She was of a very pure Khassonké type, with a little, straight, delicate nose, with thin, rather narrow, very sensitive nostrils, a well-shaped, charming mouth, splendid teeth, and above all, great, lustrous, blue-black eyes, expressing, according to the mood of the moment, a curious gaiety or a mysterious malice.
III
Fatou never did any work. Jean had presented himself with a perfect odalisque.
She knew how to wash and mend her bou-bous and pagnes. She was always as spotless as a black cat, dressed in white, partly from an instinct of cleanliness, partly because she realised that Jean would not tolerate her otherwise. But apart from this care of her person, she was incapable of any work.
Since the poor old Peyrals were no longer able to send their son the small sums that little by little they had saved for him, since “nothing had gone well with them,” as old Françoise had written, so that they had even been obliged to have recourse to the spahi’s slender purse, Fatou’s budget was becoming very difficult to balance.