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“Indeed, Sidi, it is. Ask the Caid.”

I asked that enormous potentate, who was devouring the withered lady with his eyes. He wagged his head in assent. Just then the dancer paused before us, and thrusting forward her greasy forehead, enveloped us with a sphinx-like smirk. As I hastily pressed a two-franc piece above her eyebrows Safti addressed her animatedly in Arabic. I caught the word “Smain.” The lady smiled, and made a guttural reply; then, with a somnolent wink at me, she waddled onward, flapping the blood-red hands and stamping heavily upon the earthen floor.

“Smain loves that!” I said to Safti.

“Yes, Sidi. Oreida is famous, and very rich. She has houses and many palm-trees, and she is much respected by the other dancers.”

A week later Safti and I were again at Sidi-Matou, on our way homeward through the desert. The moon was at the full now, and when we rode up to the Bordj the open space in front of it, between us and the village, was flooded with delicate light. Against it one tree, which looked like Paderewski grown very old, stood up with tousled branches. In the village bonfires flared, and the dark figures of skipping children passed and re-passed before them. We heard youthful cries echoing across the sands. Soon they faded. The lights went out, and the wonderful silence of night in the desert came in to its heritage.

I sat on the edge of an old stone well before the Bordj, while Safti smoked his keef. Near midnight, quivering across the sands, came the faint sound of a flute moving from the village towards the deep obscurity of the palm gardens. I knew that air, those trills, those little runs, those grace notes.

“It is Smain,” I said to Safti.

“Yes, Sidi. He will play all night alone among the palms. He is in love.”

“But with Oreida! Is it possible?”

“Did he not say that she was like the first day after the fast of Ramadan? When an African says that his heart is big with love.”

The flute went on and on, and I said to myself and to the moon, as I had often said before:

“He that is born in the Sahara is an impenetrable mystery.”

SAFTI’S SUMMER DAY.

By Robert Hichens

Safti is a respectable, one-eyed married man who lives in a brown earth house in the Sahara Desert. He has a wife and five children, and in winter he works for his living and theirs. 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. This is the white arcade of a hotel where unbelieving dogs of travellers come in winter. I am an unbelieving dog of a traveller, and I come there in winter, and Safti comes there for me. I, in fact, am Safti’s profession. Byrne, and others like me, he lives. For a consideration he shows me round the market, which I knew by heart six years ago, and takes me up the mosque tower, from which I gazed over the flying pigeons and the swaying palms when Safti was comparatively young and frisky. Together we visit the gazelles in their pretty garden, and the Caid’s Mill, from which one sees the pink and purple mountains of the Aures. We ride to the Sulphur Baths, we drive to Sidi-Okba. We take our dejeuner out to the yellow sand dunes, and we sip our coffee among the keef smokers in Hadj’s painted cafe. 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.