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Business is conducted slowly and with dignity in the East, there is much talk and bargaining, coffee is brought and sipped during the process and then finally, perhaps, a purchase is made. The shopman in his flowing soft-coloured robes, probably wearing a flower over one ear, slowly measures the desired carpet or rug by hand, from the elbow to the tips of his fingers. There is more discussion, and at last the purchaser brings out a worked leather purse and counts out the requisite payment.
But during an auction, the scene was much more animated. Shop assistants rushed up and down carrying goods and bawling at the top of their voices “What offers? what offers?” Customers bid against each other and the noise and bustle were tremendous. Every other moment a panting native rushed back to the owner of the shop to ask if the latest offer were to be accepted. Up the side-passages opening into the central Souk, more auctions might be going on simultaneously, and the crowd was so great that sketching had to be of the snapshot variety.
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Nearly all the men were in white or sand-coloured burnous, with the hood partly pushed back, showing the small twisted turban and close red fez worn underneath. The Tunisian countrymen are in general fine looking men, tall and aquiline featured, with good foreheads and clearlymarked eyebrows. Nearly all have a moustache and a dark closely clipped beard, but one sees a few of fairer type amongst them. They are friendly and courteous. A gamin told one grave and dignified looking figure that I was sketching him, whereupon my model glanced at me, smiled and shrugged his shoulders. I showed him the sketch and he laughed, much amused. Very often the shopkeepers near whom I was sitting with my sketch-book offered me coffee and I always met with hospitality and goodwill. If one asks their permission before settlingdown, it is always granted, and they usually take one more or less under their protection, and try to prevent a crowd from collecting.
I like the Arabs’ fine dignity. Probably their flowing style of dress helps to give this effect, and the hooded cloak makes a becoming setting to their dark faces. Even the tiny boys wear the burnous and go about looking like small elves in their pointed hoods.
Outside the western walls of the city, the graveyards stretched right away as far as the Mosque du Barbier, which lay about half a mile from the town. The tombs were not marked by any inscriptions, and often were only covered by a small rounded slab or just roughly enclosed by an edging of bricks. On these poorer graves a cluster of bricks set sideways in the earth told the sex of the dead: if set close together they mark the resting place of a man, if scattered, that of a woman. There is something inexpressibly forlorn about these Moslem cemeteries, the graves so huddled together, no green, no flowers. The tiny spectacled owl perches on the low headstones or makes his silent flight from one to the other, and beyond the graveyard itself the whole sky flames to brilliant red at the going down of the sun.
The sunsets in Kairouan were magnificent. The whole of the west seemed to burst into fire and the desert glowed with a deep reflected rose. I call it ‘desert’ but it wasnot really this. ‘Le vrai desert’ is far off. But the wide stretches of sandy waste looked the name, and at sunset they turned a wonderful red, with washes of dusty purple, whilst the far hills were first violet and then almost black against the last splendour of the sky.
Coming home through the cemetery one evening, Ali Hassan was anxious to know if I had read the Koran, and begged me to carry one about with me; “it would protect you greatly.” I asked him if the Fast of Ramadan was kept very strictly in Kairouan. He said yes, “except that there are always some who do not follow their religion seriously. They do not pray regularly, neither do they fast carefully for a month at Ramadan. But they will find the difference when they reach the other world. For every Ramadan they have broken here, they will have to fast a year hereafter.Ils auront joliment faim,” he ended with satisfaction. I gather he himself is a scrupulous observer of his religion.
When I left Kairouan, Hassan came to see me off, wishing me happiness and prosperity, and hoping I should return some day. He presented me with one of his most treasured possessions, a picture postcard of himself and his family at the Marseilles Exhibition. There they all were posing under a tent, and labelled ‘Fabrication de Tapis de Kairouan (Tunisie) Maison Ali Hassan.’ Even under these trying conditions I was glad to see Hassan had stillcontinued to look dignified. There was his wife to the left of the picture wearing all the family jewels and watching a sleeping baby that even in slumber seemed to remember it was ‘en exposition.’ The little girls were working at their handloom, whilst Hassan himself sat with a son on either side, and a row of family slippers in varying sizes ranged along the edge of the mat in front of him. He was immensely proud of this work of art.
As my train steamed slowly away from Kairouan, I saw him still on the platform, his portly figure wrapped in the voluminous folds of a white burnous, watching till the distance had swallowed me up.
The country through which the train passed from Kairouan to Sousse was bare and desolate, with scarce scattered Bedouins’ tents now and again that seemed to blend with their surroundings like the nests of wild birds. A few grazing camels wandered near them, herded by ragged children who turned to stare at the train. The plains stretched as far as the eye could reach to the feet of distant hills. We passed one or two shallow lakes, obviously rainfall collected in depressions of the ground, that would dry up as some we had already seen which were now nothing but stretches of cracked and seamed mud, looking like jigsaw puzzles.
Sousse proved to be a picturesque little town on the sea, built about the base of the old Kasba or fort, whose walls stand on a hill above it, looking out over the flat-roofed white houses of the modern town to the waters of the Mediterranean. From the fort itself there was a magnificent view: on one side the curving coastline with its dotted white villages and the gentian sea fading to a pale mist in the distance, on the other, vistas of olive groves and orchards.
The great local industry is the cultivation of olives, and there are factories for the making of oil and soap on the outskirts of the town. The actual care of the trees is almost entirely in the hands of the Arabs, to whom the French owner usually sells the crop in bulk, unpicked. A tree in full bearing is worth three to four hundred francs a year, and an orchard may contain thousands of trees. The Arabs are so improvident that they often spend all the money they make during the harvest, in six months’ time, and then are forced to realise in advance on their next. Frequently they get into the hands of the Jews in transactions in which it is certainly not the latter who suffer.
Beyond the Kasba are the Christian catacombs, which are interesting, and cover a large area. Passage after passage is tunnelled out, with poor little skeletons neatly stowed away on either side as a careful housewife stocks her store cupboard with jam.
The Souks are not so picturesque nor as extensive as those of Kairouan and of Sfax, but the crowd was enthralling to watch. In the native cafés grave men in picturesque draperies were seated along the broad stone ledge on either side the room, sipping coffee or playing a kind of chess, whilst the owner bent over his charcoal fire at the far end, and the assistant sped about on bare feet carrying sheaves of the long-handled coffee holders, just big enough to fill each minute cup. To this is often added a drop of orange flower water or some sweet essence.
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In the brilliant sunshine outside the arcade a peasant squatted on the paved path whittling at flutes made from a cut piece of cane ornamented with red and green paint. He played a few sweet husky notes to show his skill. Opposite to him sat a vendor of oranges, and a seller of the brown flat loaves of native bread sprinkled on the top with seeds, and beyond them a man with a tray of sweetmeats, slabs of toffee, cakes of chopped nuts, brilliantly coloured strips of pink rock, and sugar birds striped red and green and set on wire stems to attract children. All these huddled on the ground, their wares spread round them, whilst at the end of the steep stony street one saw the frowning battlements of the Kasba rising sheer against the sky, and looking downhill caught a glimpse of the blue of the sea and the white sails of fishing boats like drowning butterflies in the harbour. Across the bay were the houses of the little fishing village of Monastir. The country just round Sousse is all olive groves, with huge hedges of spiked cactus, and when I was there in January, shrivelled prickly pears still hung along the edges of the leaves. There had been so many that year that they had not all been picked. The whole country teems with Roman remains, and one sees fragments sticking up out of the ground wherever foundations are being dug for a house.
I went from there to spend the day at El Djem to see the wonderful ruins of its amphitheatre. To reach it, one again travels through a great stretch of bare country. The engine of the train broke down and we were delayed for about two hours en route. We first ran over an Arab, and in his efforts to avoid this, the driver had put on his brakes so suddenly that he injured the mechanism of the engine. None of the passengers seemed to be much perturbed when they heard afterwards of the Arab having been killed. Indeed the man must have been a confirmed suicide, for the country is so bare that a train can be seen coming two miles off, and its progress is deliberate enough to give the most dreamy of pedestrians time to realise his danger. Perhaps it is like the Trans-Siberian railway, where compensation used to be given to the family of the deceased, till it was discovered that the peasants were driving a lucrative trade in aged relatives.
Before reaching El Djem, I saw the huge ruins of the amphitheatre against the sky. They looked immense, with a small Arab village about their feet. In colour they were a warm brown, built of enormous blocks of stone; and the size of the building took my breath away. I am told it is as fine as the Colosseum at Rome, and of course it gains in grandeur from its isolated position. Forlorn and ruined as the building is, with its arches like empty eye-sockets staring into space, there is still somethingmagnificent and defiant about it. Most of the tiers for spectators are still there, part of the Imperial entrance and ranges of arched openings. Below, in the centre, are the prisoners’ cells and the dens for wild beasts, with the openings by which the latter were released into the arena.
I sat on a large block of stone. Pigeons flew in and out of the galleries where Roman ladies used to sit and watch the gladiators and the fights with savage animals below. Grass grew along the edges of the walls, and a tuft of wild thyme waved in the breeze. It was a grey day, and against the sad sky the great edifice seemed to stand brooding over its past splendour.
I went with the Arab custodian across fields, by narrow footpaths edged with spiked battledores of prickly pears, and was shown vestiges of a paved Roman road and the remains of a villa. We passed an old well, used still by the villagers, at which a young girl was drawing water. These village people go unveiled and she stared at us, a slender brown slip of a child in a ragged blue robe caught across her smooth shoulder by silver brooch pins. Her face was pointed, a tiny trident was tattooed on her forehead, and another mark on her chin. She gazed at me with her bright dark eyes the underlids of which were darkened with kohl, and then turned again to the filling of the red amphora-shaped jar she carried. I watched her walk away, graceful and erect, bearing the earthenware vesselof water on her head, her bare feet moving noiselessly along the dusty path.
Numberless children ran out to meet us in the village, laughing merry little things in tattered burnous and blue gown, incredibly dirty and cheerful, with a constant flash of white teeth. Even the tiniest girls wore thick metal anklets, and tots of five or six carried baby brothers astride their hips. The children’s playtime is a short one; at seven or eight years old they are already at work herding cattle or collecting fodder and fetching heavy jars of water from the wells. I have often seen a small girl almost weighed down with the weight of a jar of water. They crouch down whilst an older one lifts it on to their back and passes a cord round their forehead to hold the jar in place. Then, staggering, the poor little thing gets to her feet and starts off, almost bent double. The Arabs are very fond of their children and good to them, but they never seem to realise what heavy work they put on them.
Later, from the small station, I watched the day fade and dusk settling on the countryside. Slow-pacing camels were making their homeward way driven by young boys, whilst here and there a little group of workers was returning from the fields. The sky turned to a clear translucence in the West, the amphitheatre blurred to a formless mass of grey girdled about the knees with a blue haze of smoke from the Arab village. Dogs barked from behind its mudwalls, and the pale stars began to peer from between the clouds. First here, then there, the warm flicker of a fire showed through an open doorway; and all these homely signs of village life seemed to make ever more and more remote the great outline of the ruins. For a time I could still see the sky through the top arches of the building, but even that faded by degrees, till at last night folded her mantle about the vastness of its desolation.
The dark trees along the centre of the boulevard looked almost artificial against the greenish glare of the electric lights. From every café streamed bands of revellers, their brilliant costumes adding to the theatrical appearance of the streets. Dominoes of every colour flitted about; orange, purple, emerald and lemon yellow. Showers of confetti made a pink and blue snow upon the ground, and the moving crowd passed in and out from the dark shadows below the trees to the clear-cut brilliance of the light. Rattles and toy trumpets sounded shrill above the under-note made by the murmur of the populace. From some building came the noise of dancing and the crash of a band. Groups of absurdly dressed figures pushed their way through the restaurants, here a Teddy bear linking arms with a Red Indian or an English jockey escorting a ballet-dancer.
And up and down the roadway went little knots of the poorer people in family parties, father and mother in dominoes from under which appeared cheaply-shod feet, whilst rather shabby small Pierrots trotted by their side. The few fiacres could only move at a foot’s pace, the tramshad ceased running. Behind the noise of the carnival and the hum of voices the town itself was strangely hushed and the tideless sea down by the harbour made no sound. Through the foliage of the trees gazed the quiet stars.
There was a queer unreality about it all, thought the Englishman as he sat at a small table on the raised terrace of a café and looked down on the passers-by. Vaguely it struck him what a fine design it might make, the dark heavy mass of greenery carved against the glittering background of the lamps, and the coloured snake of people that wound amongst the stems, paused, coiled and uncoiled. They shared the unreality of the whole thing. He felt they could not be real, they were just a boxful of dolls taken out to be played with and to be swept back into oblivion when one was tired of them.
The air was soft and warm and it was pleasant to sit there and gaze dreamily at the shifting scene. A few Arabs passed, looking impassively at it all: and it was impossible to read the expression on their dark faces. A group of palms stood black against the star-freckled sky. The whole picture in its strangeness stirred his imagination. This was Africa, even though the country of Tunis were but the fringe of it. No sea stretched between him where he sat and the hot wide spaces of the Sahara. Were one to ride and ride into the far distance, at last one would escape civilisation altogether, would reach to the primitiveroots of humanity. And it was a mere chance that had brought him here.
He loved the sea and hated all liners, so was taking a trip in the Mediterranean on a small steamer. There had been a slight breakdown of the engines, and the ship had put into this little port for repairs. The first night he spent on board watching the twinkle of lights on the shore, but to-day he had landed and found himself in the midst of Carnival rejoicings. He was the only Englishman on board, and it seemed to him that he was the only Englishman in this town. At any rate he had seen no other. He heard French, Italian and Arabic spoken round him, but nothing else. During the afternoon he had wandered about the native town, and climbing up a steep and narrow street that seemed just a gash in the white walls, he had come out on a height near the fort, from whence he looked down on the harbour spread below, dotted with tiny craft, beyond it the restless rim of the sea. He did not know the East, and the picturesqueness of the Arab town delighted him; the hooded groups that sat about the doorways, the statuesque folds of their drapery, the clash of women’s anklets, the glowing sunlight that seemed to pour into every nook and cranny like some rich golden wine. It was all new and strange.
And now to-night there was the feeling of being an onlooker at some fantastic theatre-scene. As he satsmoking and watching, a passing Columbine glanced at him and smiled; the Englishman in the grey tweed suit looked so alien in this stir and flutter. And he was young and good looking. Why should he be alone? But her glance was thrown away upon him. He sat watching the scene, absorbed.
He had been there, perhaps, an hour, and was about to pay for his drink and move on, when a child’s voice made itself heard at his elbow. He turned. By his side stood a small Arab boy, wrapped in a mud-coloured garment, and it was his voice that had aroused his attention. He gave the child a coin, paid his bill and stepped out into the street. And again he found the boy beside him. He was talking in a mixture of broken French and Arabic impossible to follow. What on earth did the child want? He turned on him impatiently and the small figure shrank away, but a few minutes later it was back again, still repeating some unintelligible phrase. Telling him angrily in French to go away, the traveller pushed his way into the crowd. Long festoons of coloured paper had been flung from hand to hand and fragments of them hung dangling in the branches, stirred now and then by a passing breath of wind too faint to set the foliage itself in motion.
It was close on midnight. He wandered down the central street on his way to the harbour. As he drewnear, the tang of seaweed and shipping reached him on the night air; and turning, he looked back at the coloured necklace of lights that ringed the shore. His steamer was due to leave early the next day, and this was the last glimpse he would have of the place. Queer, he thought, how he had dipped for a moment into its life. Like opening the pages of a book, reading a few lines, and then being forced to close it again.
As he stood there, he became aware of a movement in the shadows and instinctively drew himself together. The place was lonely, he was a stranger and might be thought worth robbing. Then his keen eyes made out the figure of the child who had already followed him. The boy came up to him, and this time silently held out a scrap of white paper on which something was written. The Englishman took it to the light of a lamp and read it with difficulty. The paper had evidently been torn from a pocket book, and across it was scrawled in pencil the words “Please come,” with an almost illegible signature underneath them. He stared at the writing, puzzled. He knew no one in the place, and his first idea was that the paper had been picked up somewhere. But the Arab boy was pulling his coat gently and pointing to the town. The man hesitated. Stories of decoyed travellers, of murder and robbery passed through his mind, and again he examined the piece of paper.
The writing was evidently English and it was an educated hand, though faltering and uncertain. The signature was unreadable but he guessed it to be a man’s. He questioned the messenger but could not understand what he said, and the boy kept on pointing to the town and tugging his coat softly. The traveller did not hesitate long. His curiosity was roused and there was something adventurous and romantic about the situation that appealed to his youth. He signified his decision by a nod, and prepared to follow his guide.
Swiftly and silently the latter sped in front, turning now and again to make sure he was followed. His bare feet made no sound and the cloak wrapped round him so merged into the surroundings that more than once he seemed to have disappeared altogether. A late moon had risen and the roadway gleamed in its light. As they neared the central thoroughfare with its glare and gay crowds, the boy struck off into a maze of small streets that led away from it towards the Arab quarter. The sound of revelry became fainter and as they climbed the narrow way they left it behind. Black and white in the moonlight stood the gate of the native town, and they passed through it.
The narrow dimly lit streets were almost deserted. In leaving the modern town they seemed to step suddenly into a different world, a world where men movedmysteriously on secret errands. The stranger found himself trying to hush the frank sound of his own footsteps, to bring himself into line, as it were, with his surroundings. A solitary shrouded figure here and there approached on noiseless feet and passed, absorbed and enigmatic. The roadway became so narrow that there seemed but a knife-blade of light between the black shadows of the overhanging houses which drew together like conspirators. Turning and twisting through the tortuous streets the figure ran ahead, and the Englishman still followed, though inwardly somewhat dismayed at the distance he was being taken.
At last they stopped. A low entrance stood in a recess before them, and the boy softly pushed a door open and went in, leading the other a few steps through darkness to a second one which opened into a small courtyard.
The moon shone clearly upon it, showing the arcaded passage that ran round it on which several rooms opened. From one there came a thread of lamplight. There was a small stone well in the centre of the court and the moonlight lit the dim carving on it and on the slender pillars of the arcade. Evidently the house had once been a building of some importance, but it was now shabby and dilapidated. The paving was uneven with gaping cracks, and the pillars were broken and defaced.
At the sound of their approach the door with the lightwas held ajar and a woman’s muffled figure appeared. The small Arab made a gesture to the Englishman to wait and went into the room closing the door behind him.
A creeper growing in a pot with its leaves trained against the wall gave out a faint scent. There was the squeak and scuffle of a bat in the eaves. From far away came the sounds of merrymakers, so attenuated by distance as to be little louder than the bat’s squeak. And in the silence round the listener pressed the sense of people at hand, of sleepers stirring to far-off sounds. Then the door on which his eyes were fixed opened slowly and a bar of ruddy light slid across the cold whiteness of the moonlight. He was beckoned in.
On entering he found himself in a small and lofty room with a marble floor on which a few poor rugs were spread. There seemed to be no windows and a lamp stood on the ground. The figure of a woman wrapped in a mantle squatted on the floor, and on a couch in an alcove the figure of an Arab raised itself with difficulty on one elbow to look at him.
“What is it? Why have you sent for me?” the Englishman asked impatiently, feeling there had been some hoax, if nothing worse.
At his voice the figure smiled. “It’s rough luck on you bringing you here at this time of night, you must forgive me.”
The traveller stood amazed. The other was no Arab, then! It was an English voice, drawling and weak, but unmistakably that of a gentleman.
“By Jove! you’reEnglish!” said the bewildered newcomer, staring at the strange figure on the couch.
It was that of a tall man in native dress, the face yellowed and lined and so thin that every bone seemed to show. He was evidently very ill, his deep-set eyes burning with fever, his movements weak and uncertain. The Eastern robes hung loosely on his gaunt body and he was half sitting, half lying on the couch, propped up with pillows. Close by him the figure of a woman crouched over a bowl in which she stirred a dark liquid that gave out a pungent smell.
The invalid spoke in Arabic and she got up with a jingle of ornaments and left the room by another door, whilst the boy went back to the courtyard. The visitor watched her ungainly figure moving away, more and more bewildered. What on earth was an Englishman doing here, in these surroundings and with these people?
The other had been regarding him with a faint ironical smile about his lips.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s hard to understand. But there it is. It’s too long a story to tell. Anyway here I am. I’ve lived the life of an Arab for years. What’s the phrase for it?—‘gone under’—yes, that’s it. I’ve gone under. Myname is Dunsford, and there’s something I want you to do for me.” He paused.
“My name’s Forde,” the traveller answered. “What is it you want me to do? Why did you send forme? We have never met before.”
“I know, I know, but I had to get hold of some Englishman—you as well as another—I can’t live much longer, and there’s something I want done. I daresay there are one or two of our countrymen in the place, but I specially wanted a stranger. I don’t want people here poking into my affairs.”
“But,” expostulated Forde, “why not see a doctor? Or have you got one? I could look up someone in the town: I’m only passing through myself, but I could find someone.”
“It’s not a doctor I want. I went to see one some time ago and there’s nothing to be done. I’ve got medicine and things,” the other added impatiently seeing an interruption imminent, “I don’t mind the snuffing out for myself but I’m worried about one of my boys. I mean for after I’m gone. He’s taken after my side,” he went on with a crooked smile, “and he’ll never settle down out here, I want him got out of it.”
Good heavens! Was he going to ask him to take over the child? The newcomer was appalled. But the invalid seemed to read his thoughts.
“It’s all right,” he assured him, “it’s not such a big job I want you to do. I’ve a brother at home, a J.P. and landowner and all that sort of thing. He’s a hard man, but he’s just, and he won’t have a down on the little chap because his father’s been a rotter. He’ll get him to England and give him his chance. But I don’t want to write to him even if I could.” He looked down at his wasted hands. “No, I want you to look him up when I’m safely gone and to tell him about the boy, and he’ll do the rest.”
“But I’m only here to-night and I’m off again to-morrow,” broke in the other. “It’s just an accident I’m in the place at all. The ship put in for repairs, and I shall never be here again.”
“All the better,” was the answer, “if I had wanted someone on the spot I’d have got hold of a consul. But I’ve cut adrift from all my own lot and I don’t want to be mixed up with them again. That’s why I told Ibrahim to find a stranger. And I fancy, by the look of you, that you can keep your mouth shut.” He grinned. “He’s been out looking for weeks past and it’s just your rotten luck that he pitched on you. But you’ll do—you’ll do!”
“But how am I to know?” began Forde, and hesitated.
“Know when I’m downed? I’ve thought it out. The best plan is for you to leave a postcard with me addressed to yourself, and when the time comes the boy will post it. No need to write anything on it:you’llunderstand.”
He stopped exhausted, whilst the young man stared at him. After a minute he went on again.
“I’ve got my brother’s address written out ready. His on one side, and mine on the other, and I’ll give it to you. You’ll do it for me?” he added.
Forde nodded.
“I’d like to show you my son,” the invalid said, “if you wouldn’t mind giving me an arm I think I can manage it.”
The younger man helped him to his feet and supported him to the inner room. Here there were two beds. On one lay two sleeping dark-skinned children, but the father passed them and drew back the coverlet to show the occupant of the further bed. Seldom had Forde seen a lovelier boy. Flushed with sleep, his fair hair touzled and rough, he lay fast asleep, his open shirt showing the dimpled milk-white neck. In his hand he clutched some cherished toy. He lay on his side, his rosy cheek burrowed into the pillow, little feathers of gold about his damp forehead. He seemed about seven.
Dunsford stood looking down at him, a look of mingled pride and pain on his face, and Forde was able to study him unobserved. It was a curious and interesting face, the brow well-shaped and the eyes dark blue and with something wistful about them. The watcher fancied that the sleeping child, when awake, might show much the samewide and faintly-puzzled look. The father too must have been fair, but the hot suns of the East had burnt his skin to a deep tan. Below the close red fez and small twisted turban his fair hair seemed going grey. His extreme thinness made the sharp ridge of his nose stand out like a beak, and there was a deep groove on either side between the nostrils and the hollowed cheeks. He had been recently shaved and only a gleam of grey showed along the narrow jaw. The mouth was compressed, but it seemed more from habit than nature. And now that he was off his guard its natural mobility could be noted. It was a face that showed intelligence and sensitiveness, allied with self will and determination, even a touch of fanaticism. The face of a man who might be fired by an impracticable idea, and who would break himself to pieces in trying to drive it through. He seemed a personality driven in upon himself. His bearing showed distinction as did also his well-kept hands.
As he watched the boy his face broke up and softened. Whatever wall he had built up about his inner self his defences were down before his son. He re-arranged the sheet, it seemed more with the motive of touching the child than for any other reason, and his hand lingered by the pillow. In the silence could be heard the soft breathing of the sleeper, till it was broken by a rustle of draperies as the Arab woman rose from the floor where she had beensitting beyond the bed. At sight of her the man’s face changed. He dropped the coverlet and made a sign to his companion to help him back to the other room.
“You can tell my brother the little beggar’s all right,” he said as he sank back again upon the couch. “Legal and all that, you know. I married his mother,” with a jerk of the head towards the inner room, “before a consul as well as by Mohammedan law. The boy hasn’t been christened but my brother will enjoy getting all that done. Tell him I called him Humphrey after our old grandfather.” He stopped.
Then following his instructions Forde brought him a box which he unlocked. Inside it were some documents tied together, and from the bundle he took a slip of paper with the addresses and gave it to his companion.
“Now there’s only the post card,” he said. “You’ll find one on that table. Address it to yourself: to your home address. Then it is sure to find you.”
The other obeyed and the invalid put the post card carefully away in the box.
“That’s all, my dear fellow, and a thousand thanks. It’s a weight off my mind and I hope it won’t be a great nuisance to you.” He was silent for a time, then “Are you fond of women?” he asked abruptly. “It was over one that I went to pieces long ago.” Forde thought of the huddled shapelessness in the next room.
“I was an Army man,” began the voice again, but checked. “Sorry there’s nothing I can offer you, you don’t take opium?... But I expect you’ll be glad to be off, and I can tell you I’ll sleep easier to-night. You’ll find Ibrahim in the courtyard and he’ll show you the way back.”
The men shook hands and again the invalid declared he wanted nothing. “Only your promise not to say a word of this to my brother or to anyone till the post card reaches you,” he said to Forde, as the latter stepped into the open.
The shadow of the wall had crept a little further across the courtyard, and a few wisps of cloud dimmed the radiance of the moon. The figure of Ibrahim rose from the shadows and moved silently before him, retracing the way that they had come. The glow of illumination had died down, and only a scattered knot or two of revellers were to be seen as they crossed the thoroughfare. Night seemed to have flowed over the town and to have obliterated all tumult in her quiet tide. Down by the jetty gleamed the eye of the steamer, where she lay at her moorings, the water gently lapping her sides. Ibrahim melted away into the shadows as the young man stood a moment on deck before going below, watching the pathway of the moon across the dark water and the silver sleeping town; thinking too of the mysterious house in the heart of the Arab quarter, with its strange secret.
When he awoke in the morning he found they werealready at sea and through the porthole he could see the curves of the coastline and the white semi-circle of the town fading to a faint blur. At first he thought constantly of the happenings of the night, but the interest and excitement of travel by degrees pushed them from his mind.
And then four months later it was all sharply recalled.
He was at home and they were sitting out under the big cedar on the lawn when the second post arrived. “Here’s your lot—catch!” said his brother throwing some letters across to him.
“Oh! can I have the stamp?” shrieked a small nephew, as he saw a foreign postmark.
The budget fell just short of Forde and landed face downwards, the white blank of a postcard staring at him from the grass.
He gazed at it silently. A passing breeze shook the roses on the terrace and a few crimson petals loosened themselves, fluttered a moment and floated soundlessly to the ground. There seemed to him a pause in the warm stir of summer and then a voice cried gaily, “Hullo, who’s your absent-minded friend?”
Sfax, like Kairouan and Sousse, is a walled town and the Souks are even more fascinating than those of Kairouan. The European part of the town is quite separate, and is picturesquely built in the Moorish style, the wide streets planted with palms running across to the harbour with its busy shipping. It is a very flourishing place, the centre of the olive oil industry and also the port for the phosphates which are obtained in such quantities near Metlaoui and other places. These mines seem almost inexhaustible, and new veins are always being discovered. One sees truckloads and truckloads of the stuff, looking like sand, coming along the line. In running the hand through it, one finds quantities of fishes’ teeth, quite whole and perfect and so sharp that they can pierce leather. Some are as large as the teeth of a fox, pointed and white, and there are some that have two fangs or even three. The phosphates are one of the richest products of this country. The ‘ore’ is sometimes shipped direct from Sfax, being loaded into vessels specially prepared to carry it, or it is first chemically treated in the neighbourhood and thenexported as super-phosphate. The mining districts contain a large population of workers, chiefly immigrants, with French managers in authority.
The Souks.I. M. D.
The Souks.
I. M. D.
Outside the northern walls of Sfax was a large space where fodder was stacked, and charcoal and grain sold, and where the laden camels came stepping gravely along the white highway from the country, and here were small groups of men squatting round cooking pots, or Bedouins collecting round two negresses who were stirring beans over a charcoal fire, shredding in red pepper, the firelight playing on their broad features and flashing teeth.
The drone of native pipes from a ragged booth close under the walls, led us in that direction and we found two Soudanese doing a kind of dance, surrounded by a crowd of Arabs. They were in a medley of garments, one wearing an old khaki coat over his accordion-pleated shirt. It had once been white, but was stained and worn to an indeterminate shade. Dirty turbans were on their heads. One stood playing on a curious horned bagpipe, whilst the other revolved slowly round beating a drum, his hideous ebony face thrown back, his mouth opening and shutting, showing the pink interior and a thin tongue that quivered like an animal’s. Those who gave him money placed it in this horrid slot and he pouched it instantly in his cheek, all the time twisting and turning in a sort of dance. The last time I had seen anything of the sort was when I watchedthe ‘shimmy shake’ danced by Europeans on board a liner. There it had been an absurd travesty, civilisation playing at barbarism. Here was the original stuff, primitive and raw, under the intense blue of an Eastern sky, the sunlight pouring down on the scene and making great blocks of shadow under the awning and at the feet of stacked bales of pale yellow chaff.
The crowd were chiefly in neutral tints, broken with the bright crimson of a fez here and there, the warm madder of a cloak dyed in henna, or the brilliant lemon yellow of native slippers.
Along the road a group of Bedouins passed like a classic frieze against the white background of a marabou. Four camels in single file led by a man wrapped in a cloak, each laden camel topped by a huddled blue figure that bent and swayed to the motion. Two or three Bedouin women accompanied them on foot, in loose girdled robes, bearing burdens on their heads. Barefoot and erect they strode past, their olive throats covered with necklaces of coins, their handsome tattooed faces set to the open country. They are impatient even of the scant civilisation of the Souks. They are a people of free spaces and the wide sky; as soon might the kestrel companion with the dove, as these wild natures fraternise with city folk. And as they swung past, the frowning crenellated walls of the city looked down, as they have done for ages past,upon them and the bustle and crowd of the Souks, gazing beyond them to the gentian sea, whose calm they have watched ruffled by the prows of generations of conquerors who have come, have ruled, and in their turn become the dust blown hither and thither by the desert wind.
Bedouin WomanI. M. D.
Bedouin Woman
I. M. D.
I found sketching in the Souks almost impossible at first, the people crowded round me so; but a champion suddenly appeared in the shape of an Arab waiter at the hotel whose eye fell upon my easel. I painted, did I? Et voilà, he too was devoted to art. Had he not accompaniedartists on many expeditions? Was he not an accredited guide, with patrons in Paris et partout? For six months he had been guide to an English lady, a great painter—“Nous avons beaucoup travaillés,” and she had gained a prize in the Salon for one of her large pictures painted here, here, in Sfax. “I will accompany you gladly to the Souks, madame. I can show you all the points from whence one can make an effective picture. And the crowds will no longer trouble you. All the world knows me.” And when I came down in the afternoon there indeed was Rached ben Mohamed, a white burnous thrown over his waiter’s clothes, a cigarette in his mouth. He was as good as his word. From one intricate street to another he led me, pausing to show me a corner here, a group there. “This is a magnificent subject,” he would say, “but not for the afternoon. The shadows are wrong then. You want a morning light. Tiens! I shall finish my work always very early and then I am tout à fait à votre disposition.”
He was an amazing character, much darker than an Arab, and I suspect his mother of having listened to the blandishments of a Soudanese. He talked a peculiar French rather difficult to follow, with terrific rapidity. All the shopkeepers in the Souks seemed to know him, and he was treated with great deference as he swaggered past, wrapped in his burnous, with his crimson fez on one side, talkingof the great artists he had been with, of the six months he spent in Paris, of the expeditions he had organised as guide.
“Comme dessin c’est très joli,” he remarked kindly, on looking at my first hasty pencil sketch in the Souk aux Tapis, “ça donne bien l’impression.”
My heart rather failed me when I heard of the great canvases painted by the French artist. I feared my efforts would be withered in his scorn, but “vous avez vraiment du talent,” he pronounced; and much heartened, I dashed on cobalt and aureolin in a wild effort to reproduce the brilliance of the scene in front of me.
I was painting in the Street of Stuffs. It was a narrow way, sloping down to an entrance to the Souks. A ragged awning was slung from a tumbledown balcony on one side to the roof of a shop on the other. Brilliant handkerchiefs and coloured stuffs hung on either side of the pathway; in the shade of a recess a tailor plied his trade, sitting cross-legged amongst billows of muslin. The sun beat down, slatting the roadway with glowing stripes, a continuous crowd surged up and down, men on their way to the mosque, countrymen staring at the goods proffered for sale, blind beggars tapping their way along and calling “Give, in the name of Allah!” and behind them rose the slender tower of a minaret.
I squeezed in between two shops and painted valiantly,whilst Rached kept the crowd from encroaching on me. He wielded his cane like a scythe from time to time, making a clean swathe amongst the onlookers. And all the time he kept up his lordly air, accepting a chair from one, a cigarette from another, a cup of coffee from a third. He bullied, he cajoled, or he flattered, and always with success. I suspect him of assuring the crowd that I was a person of vast importance. I wondered to myself over his mysterious employment as a waiter, for a large card hung in the office setting forth his prowess as a guide. I gathered from him that if a great artist came along (here a faint underlining of the adjective) he threw up his waitering, engaged a substitute in his place, and turned guide for several months at a time. “Ah yes,” he said, whilst we made our way back to the hotel down a white side street whose walls stood sharp against a blinding sky, “to travel is to live.” He snatched a narcissus from a passing Arab youth and presented it to me with a flourish, leaving the original owner too astonished to protest.