I saw many women and girls bent under the weight of baskets of charcoal, or firewood, or loads of hay, and some late arrivals coming in heavily burdened in this fashion were accompanied by their husband, who rode at ease on a donkey and abused them roundly because they did not go quickly enough. Mules and donkeys, with fore and hind leg hobbled, were left in one corner of the market-place, to make up in rest what they lacked in food. Needless to say that the marketing was very brisk, but I noted with some interest that very little money changed hands. Barter was more common than sale, partly because the Government had degraded its own currency until the natives were fighting shy of it, and partly because the owners of the sheep and goats were a company of true Bedouins from the extreme South. These Bedouins were the most interesting visitors to the Tuesday market, and I was delighted when one of them recognised Salam as a friend. The two had met in the days when an adventurous Scot set up in business at Cape Juby in the extreme South, where I believe his Majesty Lebaudy the First is now king.
The Saharowi was an exceedingly thin man, of wild aspect, with flowing hair and scanty beard. His skin was burnt deep brown, and he was dressed in a blue cotton garment of guinea cloth made in simplest fashion. He was the chief of a little party that had been travelling for two months with faces set toward the North. He reminded Salam of Sidi[51] Mackenzie, the Scot who ruled Cape Juby, and how the great manager, whose name was known from the fort to Tindouf, had nearly poisoned him by giving him bread to eat when he was faint with hunger. These true Bedouins live on milk and cheese, with an occasional piece of camel or goat flesh, and a rare taste of mutton. When Salam's friend came starving to Cape Juby, Sidi Mackenzie had given him bread. The hungry man ate some and at once became violently ill, his stomach could not endure such solid fare. Having no milk in the fort, they managed to keep him alive on rice-water. It would appear that the Saharowi can easily live on milk for a week, and with milk and cheese can thrive indefinitely, as indeed could most other folk, if they cared to forswear luxury and try.
ON THE ROAD TO ARGAN FOREST
The little party was travelling with some hundreds of sheep and goats, which were being tended a little way off by the children, and, large though their flocks seemed, they were in truth sadly reduced by the drought that had driven one and all to the North. The Saharowi explained to Salam that all the wandering Arabs were trekking northwards in search of land that had seen the rain; and that their path was strewn with the skeletons of animals fallen by the way. These nomads carried their wives and little ones, together with tents and household impedimenta, on the camels, and walked on foot with the grown children in charge of the flocks. The sheep they had sold to the butcher were in fair condition, and fetched from four to five shillings in English money, or the equivalent of this sum in goods, for when a Saharowi approaches civilised lands he is generally in need of some of the products of civilisation, or thinks he is, though, at need, he manages excellently well without them.
Among the miscellaneous gathering that the Tuesday market had attracted to Hanchen I noticed a small company of acrobats from the Sus, and a medicine man of fierce aspect, who sat by himself under a rough tent, muttering charms and incantations, and waiting for Allah to send victims. This wonder-worker had piercing eyes, that seemed to examine the back of your head, long matted hair and a beard to match. He wore a white djellaba and a pair of new slippers, and was probably more dangerous than any disease he aided and abetted.
For the amusement of the people who did not care for acrobatic feats and stood in no need of the primitive methods of the physician, there was a story-teller, who addressed a somewhat attenuated circle of phlegmatic listeners, and a snake-charmer who was surrounded by children. Sidi ben Aissa undoubtedly kept the snakes—spotted leffas from the Sus—from hurting his follower, but not even the saint could draw floos from poor youngsters whose total wealth would probably have failed to yield threepence to the strictest investigator. Happily for them the charmer was an artist in his way; he loved his work for its own sake, and abated no part of his performance, although the reward would hardly buy him and his assistant a meal of mutton and bread at their labour's end. The boys of Hanchen were doing brisk business in the brass cases of cartridges that had been fired on the previous day, and without a doubt the story of the wonders of a repeating gun lost nothing in the telling.
