So saying I took my coffee and roll and carried it across to the bash agha’s table, where I sat down and explained my action. He smiled, but I realized that he was smiling to please me, and that he saw nothing in the inconvenience caused to his nephew, who might wait all day for his coffee if necessary.
On the way back we called on various caïds and rich farmers, who gave us quantities of sweet mint tea. At one house the old bash agha, who had accompanied us, found an aged kadi who played chess, so he insisted on having a game while we all had to wait, regardless of the fact that it was getting near dinner-time.
How different from the customs of Europe, where age is, if anything, jeered at. Fancy giving a lift to some one’s grandfather after a day in the country and having to wait while he played a silly game with a local judge whom he met in some one else’s house!
And so the pleasant visit wore on. Each day we did something different, each day we had enormous meals until finally I was obliged to leave. Looking back on the visit the thing which strikes me the most is the complete lack of fuss during the whole of my stay. Everything was done quite haphazardly and yet without a hitch. I suppose it is the effect of centuries of such existence which remains as a background and which is carried on generation after generation. A few modern inventions have appeared which facilitate things a bit, but otherwise the same life is led with exactly the same ideas as it was twelve hundred years ago, and it seems difficult to see any radical change ever taking place. In this mode life runs smoothly for the Arabs; complications do not trouble them, so why change?
3. A Week-end with a Marabout
The Marabout of Kourdane asked me to spend a week-end with him to discuss the possibilities of organizing a moufflon shoot in the Djbel Amour. I was interested in the prospects of getting a moufflon, but still more interested to see Kourdane.
Situated in the Sahara some fifty kilometers from Laghouat, at the foot of the Djebel Amour Range, this country home of marabouts was created by a Frenchwoman known as Madame Aurélie, whose maiden name was Aurélie Picard, the daughter of a gendarme. She had met the Marabout of Aïn Mahdi at Bordeaux when he had been exiled during the insurrection of 1870. She married him in France, and when he was allowed to return to Algeria she came too, and became a great personage in the country. At his death she married his brother, and continued as lady of this desolate area, loved and respected by all. Finally the second husband died too, and she remained on alone for a while in the wonderful house she had built. She is still alive, but she rarely returns to the scenes of her greatness for two reasons; in the first place, the present marabouts are not quite the saints they should be, and secondly, they are all a little jealous of her reputation.
As I had never seen this desert castle I accepted with alacrity, and left with a friend one Saturday morning in a car. The road on leaving Laghouat is to the north, but soon it turns southwest across a desolate land of sand and rocks. I had decided to lunch with an old friend of mine, the Caïd of Tadgemout. I reached the ksar at noon: a sad, desolate little village partly in ruins, perched on the top of a rocky eminence overlooking a small oasis, very green in the midst of the desert. The road climbed up behind the rock and emerged before the caïd’s house, which dominates the oasis. The view from his terrace is one of the most impressive in these parts. In the immediate foreground, the oasis, then a silver thread of water running down the river-bed and away, away, the desert. But unlike most of the Saharan views the horizon is cut all of a sudden by a group of rugged hills standing up grim and bare. Again, looking to the northwest the scene is not at all expected, as one’s eyes rest on the great range of the Djebel Amour, deep blue against the brilliant sky.
Storks Nesting on the Roofs at Constantine