“Have a care, friend!” cried a voice from the darkness. “Thou art welcome. I would that thy countenance were known—that thou hadst come while it was yet day, but praised be God who sent thee to thy servants to herald the rain.”
We leaped from our saddles and sprang under cover just in time to escape a cascade from the clouds that would have drenched our very bones.
* * * * *
My host told me in the morning that he was about setting out in company with all the men of the douar to meet a distinguished hadj who had just made his third pilgrimage to the Kaaba and Medina, one of the Brotherhood of Lidi-Abd-el-Kader-el-Djilani, who was now regarded as almost a saint.
Upon their return, there was to be a festival. In the afternoon, a banquet of cuckoos, several roast sheep and honey-cakes would be served; this would be followed by target-practice and dancing—that is, there would be dancing-girls to entertain us. The tent occupied by these girls was in the remotest part of the semi-circle which the douar described. I could see it at a distance; the borders were drawn up and something red showed from beneath.
I was talking to a youth who asked me in good faith whether I believed in God and whether it were true that the Europeans married their sisters. He was evidently studying me as a kind of savage beyond the reach of Mohammed. Several young women passed by us, bending beneath the weight of black leathern bottles. The water glued their thin robes to their skin. They wore no undergarments, and the wind which tossed their torn clothing, revealed their whole figures in clear profile. Some were bearing on their heads bundles of briars which they steadied with their hands. Their arms were long and well shaped; their throats had no voluptuous fullness; their figures were almost straight up and down. They looked to me like primitive caryatids of Asia.
My host had a daughter who was barely sixteen; his niece was about twenty. These girls were eyeing me from afar and could not resist their curiosity to see and speak to the Roumi, who was evidently bored by the youth talking to him. Under the pretext of bringing me some water, they came up, one behind the other. They looked very pretty with their abundant hair intertwined with coral and their smooth cheeks mingling the hues of amber and rose. The Roumi took the bowl and drank with his eyes on his pretty servitors. As the eldest seemed surprised at this impertinence, he apologized for daring to drink in her presence, and, the ice being broken, they chatted freely. They sank their dark eyes into the depths of mine, and smiled till their beautiful teeth dazzled me.
“Why do you not cut off your moustache up to your lip? Why don’t you shave half of your head? you look like a monkey with all that hair falling over your face! Of what kind of cloth are your clothes made? Let us see, please, how it is sewed together. Did your wife make it? Tell us now—won’t you?—if your wives look like us?”
The elder who plied all these questions was half reclining in the sand, resting her body on her right hand and leaning forward so as to gain my ear. I answered her with the first lines of a song:
“Thy eyes are black without kohol,
Thy cheeks are red without fard!”