9

He turned and spoke to the servant, telling him to hurry ahead and bid the eunuch send the women to the roof. Then we walked slowly together, slowly.

A door splendidly patterned with great nail-heads admitted us to a vaulted lobby. A blank wall faced us, but another door, set at right angles to the first, so that no look from the street could reach it, opened into an arcaded court, roofed by the evening sky. My host led across this court to a room on the right, where red glass lamps hung from a ceiling of pale tracery. He seated me on a divan in a gilded niche and began to thank me again for my heroic rescue of his bird. I thought him a little mad for making such a fuss about a gold-finch, but I didn't mind because I was so pleased at suddenly finding myself inside a rich Arab's house. There was no mistaking the magnificence of the old gentleman's establishment. The walls of the room, gleamed with the liquid blues and greens of tiled panels overarched by a creamy labyrinth of ornament. The divan was covered by a rug as soft as velvet, and from the court-yard, unseen waters measured, and the scent of orange-blossoms flowed in from some outer blueness of evening.

Two long-eyed boys in variegated dress, presently came across the court, their bare feet slipping softly over the tiles. One carried a damascened tray with jewelled coffee-cups, the other an ignoble lamp of imitation bronze, with a ground-glass globe, the very mate of the one my mother gave the char-woman when my poor grandmother's things were divided. The sight of that lamp rather relieved me. The scene was becoming too cheaply operatic, and I was beginning to feel that even in this lost corner of Barbary there might be enterprising natives who got up Oriental effects for foreigners.

The lamp so completely reassured me that even when a handsome negress in a gold turban and rainbow draperies crouched down on a heap

10

of cushions and began to twang a tortoise-shell lute my credulity was not too severely strained. But I didn't know then what was coming...

My host showed a polite desire to know what had brought me to a place which, even since the French occupation, has been rarely visited by Europeans, but when I told him I was on my way to the phosphate-mines his interest languished. He had appeared to have heard that a European company was to develop them, but the matters were too such were too evidently too remote from his senior and luxurious existence to rouse his curiosity. He was more concerned to know how any one of my hyperborean origin had happened to learn his language, and when he found I had some knowledge of its literature his interest increased, and he recited a number of Arabic love-poems with a zest which contrasted somewhat oddly with his patriarchal

mion, his appearance, told

He explained to me that he had large estates in the South from which he drew his revenues, and that, aside from the practices of religion, and the satisfaction of his natural instincts, his chief pleasure was derived from walking outside the gates at sunset with his gold-talented or listening to the narratives of skilful story-tellers. He added that he supposed my father had had the same tastes, as it was clear that I had been brought up in an atmosphere of wealth and refinement; and, unwilling to dispel this impression, I thought it simpler to acquiesce.

On my parting to take leave he protested at my haste, and began to be told my name; and when I had mentioned it he smiled, moved me to weep, and told me that his was Jackson.

Seeing my astonishment, I uttered an exclamation of surprise, and he added with pride:

"My great-great-grand-father was a blacksmith from Godalming who commanded a company of the Bey El Mansour's renegades. You have perhaps heard of that famous body-guard? They wore gold bonnets with many-coloured ostrich-feathers and tunics of silver mail. They lived in the

II

Bey's

accompany'd
palace, in chambers of mother-of-pearl and surrounded the boy whenever he
rode out. My ancestor amassed great wealth, married a Sheikh's daughter
who had many herds, and built a house by the sea where he spent an honoured
Genoese captives and lute-players from the South."

Here he heaved a great sigh and added: "All would be well
with me were it not for the troubles caused me by my young son Ali, a
handsome youth whom I should like you to see and converse with. He has
lately had to repudiate his favourite wife, a Georgian of great beauty,
because she was discovered wearing a pair of European socks with patent
sock-suspenders. You know our younger women have an unwholesome passion
for your European adornments, and it was but too evident that the unhappy
girl, to gain these coveted baubles, had succumbed to the pursuit of a
Scotch engineer on a trading vessel, that had recently touched here. I caused
her favourite slaves to be immediately strangled, and her family have
taken her back and repaid the large sum given for her — but my unhappy
son, who was not yet sated with her, cannot forget her falseness, and in
his despair, has taken up with a Bedouin woman of the tribe beyond the
salt marsh where the pink flamingoes breed. If he were to seek her in
the street of the Painted Houses I should not oppose him, for the Bedouins have arts learned from the sorceresses of the South, though compared
with our women they are as grass, compared to the pomegranates of our gardens; but he asks to bring her under my roof, and
even talks of bribing her husband with camels to repudiate her, that he
may take her as his wife. You may imagine, now, when I met you, I had ridden out to see an old Sheikh who is camp-
ing near the town, to beg him to organize for my son a gazelle-hunt
among the mountains, in the hope of thus distracting him. But love is
like the bite of the desert-adder, and Time, the only charmer who can
draw its fangs."

I3

"Oh, no—" (I found myself absurdly blushing). "I don't expect to get married just yet— not for two or three years, in fact." My host bowed his head in polite acquiescence, with a puzzled smile. Then, without further comment, I sat across the court and under a dark archway. "The nightingales should be beginning," he said gently.

We stood in a rustling obscurity from which streams of scent poured down on us. Under a black arching branch I could just discern the pale lines of tiled paths edged with running water. And suddenly, in the velvet canopy above us, a nightingale began...

On his threshold Mr. Jackson pressed my hand and laid it on his breast. "Remember," he said, "that I and my house are always at your service." He saluted me gravely, and then added with a look of paternal benevolence: "Mr. Elsom, you are a remarkably personable and intelligent young man, fitted to shine in the most distinguished company, but you seem afflicted by an extraordinary timidity. At what age did your father buy you your first negress?"

15

Arab houses, where not a human being lingers by the barred doors or a
light shows through the high slits of windows, to some adjoining street
(for quarters and classes there are interwoven) where the house-
fronts twinkle with lanterns and the painted Turkish balconies are full
of women. There are women in the doorways too, singly or in lolling in
groups in their alcoves with blue and pink alcoves behind them, and chains of flowers
hanging from their complicated head-dresses. Young men draped like sta-
tues, and wearing rosettes of pink rosebuds behind their ears, stroll up
and down between these hospitable thresholds; and on the terraces of the
coffee-houses apostolic-looking persons squat on the matting, intently
gambling with date-stones. The women are very young, and many are
pretty— if one fancies the style— with round flattish faces, dead-
black hair and dead-white complexions. Some smile, some look indiffer-
ent, but none of them pursue. Now and then they leave their painted
doorways and slip across to one of the cafés where dancing is going on,
and where, through the mob of turbans about the door, one sees,
under a heavily-built girl in outstanding skirts and tinsel
under the lamp-smoked arches
head-dress balancing her body monotonously to a racking thrum-thrum
of instruments. These lumpish dancers with innocent Kalmuck faces and
black-bordered eyes belong, I'm told, to the famous dancing tribe of the
Ouled-Naïls, whose territory is far to the south-west. One wonders why
they have been predestined to the nimble art when everything about them
is as heavy as an archaic sculpture, excepting the slim brown hands
emerging from their broad bracelets of spiked silver— hands that flut-
ter and undulate like tied birds with a perpetual triple movement inpossi-
ble to imitate or describe.

Between these dance-houses and the other doorways there is an
incessant come-and-go of striped chattering figures, of cake and flower
sellers, negro lads with long-handled coffee-pots, wild beggars in earth-

19

and out of the gate into the blue hollow of the night. I followed, wondering.

From the gate we passed abruptly into the country. A road mele track, which, in this region, grey bushes eat, on every side, into the little islands of irrigated ground. At noon, under a hot sun, these dun-coloured wastes seem might strike one as shabby and dismal, but when the darkness veils and enlarges them they acquire a peculiar majesty of age and infiniteness.

I walked on, half forgetting my object, through the still enchantment of the night. The moon had nearly set, but the sky seemed to brood on me with a great weight of stars and the air was like flower-petals in my face. I knew from the stars that we had turned south, and that if I walked far enough I should meet the desert. The idea had already made my brain Evolved through the southern haze from the rock above the tingle as I strained and now, trudging along in the soft dust and under the silken night, it took me by the cords of the heart.

We must have trumped a mile or more beyond the town when my black imp turned off into the scrub. I let her gain a few yards on me and followed. Every step I took crushed out a breath of balm, made of concentrated quintessential savours of a stunted sun-baked vegetation. I wondered more and more where the witch-child could be going, but she seemed so knowing her way about much a part of the night that I had no doubt as to her right to roam in it. Presently I heard a shrill yelping of dogs, and on the level greyness I saw a cluster of darker patches, like the skins of animals stretched to dry, and knew that we were coming to a nomads' camp. I had seen these flat black tents before, on the road from Sfax, and, caught

23

being a sort of primordial dial of the ages, that you really begin to
get the desert feeling... a feeling I don't know how to describe except
as one of fusion and release, of being dissolved and called back into
the first clear element that a god's dream of a world might have floated
in...

Today, at our noon halt, I lay a long time under a bush watching some beetles bustling about between two tufts of camel-weed. Now and then I rolled over on my back and saw a single hawk against the blue. Above and below, the same immensities, with the same minute activities going on in them. That is another aspect of the desert. There is room in it for all the millions out of all the graves, and not too much room for the small, est homogeneous business of living. I remember feeling, when I went into my first big resonant Italian church, that what gave me the real sense of its bigness was not the length of the nave or the mystery of the altar, but the fact that there was room in it not only for all the heavenly hierarchy but for a whole, populace unconscious of them: maimed beggars, gossips and idlers, lovers squeezing hands behind columns, nesting birds, children gaping and playing, swallows swooping under the vaults, dogs trotting about freely and familiarly. Well, it's the same here. The desert is the only place large enough and humane enough to neither cramp nor to overpower... I suppose that is why it seems to me so perfectly natural to be here, travelling with this pale plump young man who is a blacksmith, with almond eyes, whose great-great-great-grandfather was a Godalming, and who is on his way to hunt gazelles in the Mountains of Alabaster because one of his wives... But what would they say at home if I tried to explain the situation?

We have halted under an aged terebinth by a well for an hour's rest in the heat of the afternoon. We sleep tonight in a fortified Arab house as it is called, on the edge of the dry salt-bed we are

24

to cross tomorrow. Our camels are lying in brown bushes near the like empty bags of sacking are at well, and the hobbled horses and mules are nibbling at a patch of thin green in a hollow. My young host Sidi Ali sits on his camel-bags sitting the coffee which his favourite dancing-boy has prepared for him. He is affable but sad, and from the languorous expression of his eyes I judge that he will presently summon Okba, the scribe, to write down a quatrain he has just composed for the beautiful Bedouin from whom his father has so ruthlessly separated him. He generally reads me his poems, and some of them are rather pretty. One is something like this:

Her eyes seen through her trembling lashes are like running water
through pomegranate leaves...

And another:

Where are the orange-blossoms that I smell all night long?

They are in the throat of the nightingale that keeps me awake, and
in the kiss that I dream of when I fall asleep...

When Sidi Ali is not composing poetry he is fond of listening
to the endless and inane tales of one of the camel-drivers, rambling
stories of Beys and Djinns and captive princesses, or to the salacious
fallacy of a Soudanese juggler who has attached himself to our train.
Sidi Ali is scrupulous in the performance of his religious duties, and
punctually measures his draped length on the sands in the direction of
Macca with a grace that would make our supplest "stage-falls" seem
clumsy. The day before yesterday we were joined for a few hours by a
Saint on his way to a religious house in the next oasis. The Saint,
a poor wild-witted thing with watery eyes and yellow throttling hands,
was immediately placed on our swiftest camel (Sidi Ali taking his ser-
vant's horse), and at the midday halt was served first and hidden to
bathe his feet before our host. His ecstatic ramblings were listened to

25

with pious awe by the assembled group— and when he had fallen asleep after a copious repast Sidi Ali called for the negro juggler, and placidly turned his attention to other matters.

Among our escort is the young servant whom I rescued from Mr. Jackson's chastisement, He is a slim pallor boy with long eye-brows, hazel eyes that float on blue-white eye-balls, and the look of candid cunning of a half-domesticated animal. He is very grateful to me for my protection, and seems disposed to return it by taking me into the secrets of the family. The strictest discretion would doubtless forbid my encouraging his confidences, but everything that is happening to me is so out of the ordinary run of experience that the usual rules of conduct have long ceased to apply to it; and besides— though I don't know why I need invoke any other plea— he does not hand his facts out crudely, but insidiously weaves them into his general talk about the road we are travelling, the habits of the country, and the life of rich Arabs like his employer.

I have found out, in this indirect fashion, that the expedition planned by Mr. Jackson to separate Sidi Ali from his latest love may have a totally different result. The ingenious Khalif had in fact organized the party with the assistance of the Sheikh to whose clan the husband of the lovely Bedouin belongs, thinking that, having earned this considerable gratuity, the band would at once move South, and this calculation was correct. But Sidi Ali has bribed his escort to delay the march at a point before the roads disjoin, and we are thus likely to be overtaken by the Bedouins in a day or two, instead of preceding them and turning to the South-west before their slower train can overtake us.

This will be the lover's opportunity; and as Hadj pictures his young master's passion as of the most uncontrollable violence, dramatic incidents are likely to result, even.

26

"But I have always been told," I objected, "that among the Bedouin wives are generally faithful, and that infidelity is punished by death. Your master is an exceedingly handsome and valiant young gentleman, but is it likely that he will be able to carry off the young woman— even if she is willing— without endangering her life and his?"

The gentle wonder with which Hadj considered me made me feel that only respect for my rank restrained his amusement. "Do lovers stop at think of such trifles?" he asked ingeniously; and I felt as I used to when I was a little boy and put a silly question to my elders. Yet Hadj must be ten years younger than I.

"Why should she want him for a lover?" I insisted irritably. "He is as soft as a cream cheese, and in a few years will have its shape. The Bedouin men are straight and hard, and ride like arrows. Their women are free and go among men with faces uncovered. Why should she want to shut herself up in a painted prison with a pack of gossiping slaves?"

Hadj smiled again and pointed to a chest covered with embroidered leather that lay among the saddle-bags. "How do I know? The nomad women work all day, and their soles grow as hard as their husband's saddle-leather. In that box there are carpets of silk and sandals of velvet. A woman may be willing to cover her face if the veil is so fine that it makes men want to lift it... Do you mind if I go to sleep now? It is very hot, and I should like to dream of fountains running over marble."

At dawn, in the Bordj.

We got here last night by moonlight. The sky was like a dome of mother-of-pearl. Under it lay the grey-blue wilderness, with this square walled house rising on a ridge against the south. At each angle of the walls if a round tower, and in one of the walls an arched doorway, barred and spiked. The bolts were drawn and we rode into a great court full of draped figures. A blaze of light came through one of the archway's of the

27.

house, where food was being cooked for us. Slaves came out with torches
and then the Sheikh, a Biblical old man with half a dozen fierce sons
about him, lean as jackals. They welcomed my plump young host, who
looked like a girl among them, and we were led into a vaulted