IN THE ARGAN FOREST
EVENING AT HANCHEN
CHAPTER XI
IN THE ARGAN FOREST
Life, even at its greatest and best, may be compared to a froward child, who must be humoured and played with till he falls asleep, and then the care is over.
—Goldsmith.
Early morning found the Tuesday market in full swing, and the town of Hanchen already astir in honour of the occasion. To realise the importance of the weekly gathering, it is well to remember that a market in the country here is the only substitute for the bazaar of the towns. Every douar within a ten-mile radius of Hanchen sends men and women to the Tuesday market to buy and sell. So it befell that the hillside slope, which was bare on the previous afternoon, hummed now like a hive, and was well nigh as crowded. Rough tents of goats' or camels'-hair cloth sheltered everything likely to appeal to the native mind and resources,—tea, sugar, woollen and cotton goods, pottery, sieves, padlocks, and nails being to all appearance the goods most sought after by the country Moor. Quite a brisk demand for candles prevailed; they were highly-coloured things, thick at the base and tapering to the wick. There was a good sale too for native butter, that needed careful straining before it could be eaten with comfort, and there were eggs in plenty, fetching from twopence to threepence the dozen, a high price for Morocco, and brought about by the export trade that has developed so rapidly in the last few years. For the most part the traders seemed to be Berbers or of evident Berber extraction, being darker and smaller than the Arabs, and in some cases wearing the dark woollen outer garment, with its distinctive orange-coloured mark on the back. Women and little children took no small part in the market, but were perhaps most concerned with the sale of the chickens that they brought from their homes, tied by the legs in bundles without regard to the suffering entailed. The women did rather more than a fair share of porters' work too. Very few camels were to be seen, but I noticed one group of half a dozen being carefully fed on a cloth, because, like all their supercilious breed, they were too dainty to eat from the ground. They gurgled quite angrily over the question of precedence. A little way from the tents in which hardware was exposed for sale, bread was being baked in covered pans over a charcoal fire fanned by bellows, while at the bottom of the hill a butcher had put up the rough tripod of wooden poles, from which meat is suspended. The slaughter of sheep was proceeding briskly. A very old Moor was the official slaughter-man, and he sat in the shade of a wall, a bloody knife in hand, and conversed gravely with villagers of his own age. When the butcher's assistants had brought up three or four fresh sheep and stretched them on the ground, the old man would rise to his feet with considerable effort, cut the throats that were waiting for him very cleanly and expeditiously, and return to his place in the shade, while another assistant spread clean earth over the reeking ground. Some of the sheep after being dressed were barbecued.