“He that is born in the Sahara is an impenetrable mystery.”
SAFTI’S SUMMER DAY.
Safti is a respectable, one-eyed married man who lives in a brown earth house in the Sahara Desert. He has a wife and five children, and in winter he works for his living and theirs. When the morning dawns, and the great red sun rises above the rim of the wide and wonderful land which is the only land that Safti knows, he wraps his white burnous around him, pulls his hood up over his closely-shaven head, rolls and lights his cigarette, and sets forth to his equivalent of an office. This is the white arcade of a hotel where unbelieving dogs of travellers come in winter. I am an unbelieving dog of a traveller, and I come there in winter, and Safti comes there for me. I, in fact, am Safti’s profession. Byrne, and others like me, he lives. For a consideration he shows me round the market, which I knew by heart six years ago, and takes me up the mosque tower, from which I gazed over the flying pigeons and the swaying palms when Safti was comparatively young and frisky. Together we visit the gazelles in their pretty garden, and the Caïd’s Mill, from which one sees the pink and purple mountains of the Aures. We ride to the Sulphur Baths, we drive to Sidi-Okba. We take our déjeuner out to the yellow sand dunes, and we sip our coffee among the keef smokers in Hadj’s painted café. We listen to the songs of the negro troubadour, and we smile at Algia’s dancing when the silver moon comes up and the Kabyle dogs round the nomads’ tents begin their serenades. And then I give Safti five francs and my blessing, and he bids me “ Bonne nuit! ” and his ghostly figure is lost in the black shadows of the palm-trees.
Oh, Safti works hard, very hard in winter. The other day I asked him: “Don’t you get exhausted, Safti, with all this exertion to keep the Sahara home together? You are getting on in years now.”
“Ah yes, Sidi; I am already thirty-two, alas!”
He was thirty-five when I first met him; but he is as clever at subtraction as a London beauty.
“Good heavens! So much! But, then, how can you keep up the wear and tear of this tumultuous life? You must have an iron strength. Such work as you do would break down an American millionaire.”
Safti raised his one dark eye piously towards Allah’s dwelling.
“Sidi, I must labour for my children. But in the summer, when you and all the travellers are gone from the Sahara to your fogs and the darkness of your days, I take my little holiday.”
“Your holiday! But is it long enough?”