“When the African is in love he plays upon the pipe. That is what they say in the Sahara.”
“And you think he is alone under some palm-tree playing for himself?”
“Yes; he is quite alone. If he is much in love he will play all day, and, perhaps, all night too.”
“But she cannot hear him.”
“That does not matter. He plays for his own heart, and his own heart can hear.”
I listened. Since Safti had spoken the music meant more to me. I tried to read the player’s heart in the endless song it made. Trills, twitterings, grace notes, little runs upward ending in the air—surely it was a boy’s heart, and not unhappy.
“It is coming nearer,” I said.
“Yes. Ah, it is Smaïn!”
Safti’s one eye is sharp. I had seen no one. But as he spoke a tall youth in a single white garment glided into my view, his eyes bent down, his brown fingers fluttering on a long reed flute covered with red arabesques. His feet were bare, and he moved slowly.
Safti hailed him with the accented violence peculiar to the Arabs. He stopped playing, looked, and smiled all over his young face. In a moment he was on our side of the earth wall, and talking busily, staring at me the while with unabashed curiosity. For few strangers come to Sidi-Amrane, and Smaïn had never wandered far.