Robert Hichens

“ The pipes squealed within like souls in torment. In the square bonfires were blazing fiercely, and the whole desert seemed to throb with beaten drums. Within the café was a crowd of Arabs, real nomads, some in rags, some richly dressed, all gravely attentive to the dancers, who entered from a court on the left, round which their rooms were built in terraces, and danced in pairs between the broad divans.
“Tell me when Oreïda comes,” I said to Safti, while the Caïd spread forth his ample skirts, and turned a cigarette in his immense black fingers. ”

“ We listen to the songs of the negro troubadour, and we smile at Algia’s dancing when the silver moon comes up and the Kabyle dogs round the nomads’ tents begin their serenades. And then I give Safti five francs and my blessing, and he bids me “Bonne nuit!” and his ghostly figure is lost in the black shadows of the palm-trees.
Oh, Safti works hard, very hard in winter. The other day I asked him: “Don’t you get exhausted, Safti, with all this exertion to keep the Sahara home together? You are getting on in years now.” ”

“ When the morning dawns, and the great red sun rises above the rim of the wide and wonderful land which is the only land that Safti knows, he wraps his white burnous around him, pulls his hood up over his closely-shaven head, rolls and lights his cigarette, and sets forth to his equivalent of an office. ”

“ Then he played once more while the moon rose over the palm gardens, and Safti, lighting his pipe of keef with tender deliberateness, remarked placidly:
“He would like to come with us to Touggourt and to die there at Oreïda’s feet, but his father, Said-ben-Kouïdar, wishes him to remain at Sidi-Matou and to pack dates. He is young, and must obey. Therefore he is sad.”
The smoke rose up in a cloud round Smaïn and his flute, and now I thought that, indeed, there was a wild pathos in the music. The moon went up the sky, and threw silver on the palms. The gay cries from the village died down. ”

“ The feet of the camels paddled over the soft brown earth of the narrow alleys between the brown earth walls, and we looked down to right and left into the shady enclosed spaces, seamed with water rills, dotted with little pools of pale yellow water, and saw always giant palms, with wrinkled trunks and tufted, deep green foliage, brooding in their squadrons over the dimness they had made. The activity of man might be discerned here in the regularity of the artificial rills, the ordered placing of the trees, each of which, too, stood on its oval hump. ”