Smaïn; and Saftis Summer Day

and Safti's Summer Day, by
Robert Hichens

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Title: Smaïn; and Safti's Summer Day 1905
Author: Robert Hichens
Release Date: November 8, 2007 [EBook #23411]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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Produced by David Widger

SMAÏN; and SAFTI'S SUMMER DAY.
By Robert Hichens
Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers

Copyright, 1905
"When the African is in love he plays upon the pipe."
Sahara Saying.

SMAÏN
Far away in the desert I heard the sound of a flute, pure sound in the
pure air, delicate, sometimes almost comic with the comicality of a
child who bends women to kisses and to nonsense-words. We had
passed through the sandstorm, Safti and I, over the wastes of saltpetre,
and come into a land of palm gardens where there was almost
breathless calm. 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. But no man was seen; no flat-roofed huts appeared; no robe,
pale blue or white, fluttered among the shadows; no dog blinked in the
golden patches of the sun--only the sound of the flute came to us from
some hidden place ceaselessly, wild and romantic, full of an odd
coquetry, and of an absurdity that was both uncivilised and touching.
I stopped to listen, and looked round, searching the vistas between the
palms.
"Where does it come from?" I asked of Safti.
His one eye blinked languidly.
"From some gardener among the trees. All who dwell in Sidi-Matou are
gardeners."

The persistent flute gave forth a shower of notes that were like drops of
water flung softly in our faces.
"He is in love," added Safti with a slight yawn.
"How do you know?"
"When the African is in love he plays upon the pipe. That is what they
say in the Sahara."
"And you think he is alone under some palm-tree playing for himself?"
"Yes; he is quite alone. If he is much in love he will play all day, and,
perhaps, all night too."
"But she cannot hear him."
"That does not matter. He plays for his own heart, and his own heart
can hear."
I listened. Since Safti had spoken the music meant more to me. I tried
to read the player's heart in the endless song it made. Trills, twitterings,
grace notes, little runs upward ending in the air--surely it was a boy's
heart, and not unhappy.
"It is coming nearer," I said.
"Yes. Ah, it is Smaïn!"
Safti's one eye is sharp. I had seen no one. But as he spoke a tall youth
in a single white garment glided into my view, his eyes bent down, his
brown fingers fluttering on a long reed flute covered with red
arabesques. His feet were bare, and he moved slowly.
Safti hailed him with the accented violence peculiar to the Arabs. He
stopped playing, looked, and smiled all over his young face. In a
moment he was on our side of the earth wall, and talking busily, staring
at me the while with unabashed curiosity. For few strangers come to
Sidi-Amrane, and Smaïn had never wandered far.

"What does he say?" I asked of Safti.
"I tell him we shall be at Touggourt tomorrow night, and shall stay
there a week. He answers that his heart is there with Oreïda."
"What! Does his lady-love live at Touggourt?"
"Yes; she is a dancer."
Smaïn smiled. He did not understand French, but he knew we were
speaking of his love affair, and he was not afflicted with shyness. As he
accompanied us to the village he played again, and I read his nature in
the soft sounds of his flute.
All that day he stayed with us, and nearly all that day he played. Even
when he guided me through the village, where, between terraced
houses, pretty children--the girls in deep purple, with yellow flowers
stuck in their left nostrils, the boys in white--danced with a