Fountains in the Sand | Page 8

as an appetizer, or by way of
change and amusement. Their corroding juices are responsible for half
the stomach troubles of the race; a milk diet would work wonders as a
cure, if the people could be induced to do things by halves; but they
cannot; it is "all peppers or all milk," and, the new diet disagreeing with
them at first, they return to their peppers and a painful disease.
It is this lack of measure and reasonableness among them which
accounts for what I believe to be a fact, namely, that there are more
reclaimed drunkards among Arabs than among ourselves. They will
break off the alcohol habit violently, and for ever. And this they do not
out of principle, but from impulse or, as they prefer to call it,
inspiration; indeed, they regard our men of fixed principles as
weaklings and cowards, who stiffen themselves by artificial rules
because they cannot trust their judgments to deal with events as they
arise--(the Arab regards terrestrial life as a chain of accidents)--cowards
and infidels, trying to forestall by human devices the unascertainable
decrees of Allah.
Allah wills it! That is why they patiently bear the extremes of hunger,

and why, if fortune smiles, they gorge like Eskimos, like
boa-constrictors.
I have seen them so distended with food as to be literally incapable of
moving. Only yesterday, there swept past these doors a bright
procession, going half-trot to a lively chant of music: the funeral of a
woman. I enquired of a passer-by the cause of her death.
"She ate too much, and burst."
During the summer months, in the fruit-growing districts, quite a
number of children will "burst" in this fashion every day.
Mektoub! the parents then exclaim. It was written.
And no doubt there is such a thing as a noble resignation; to defy fate,
even if one cannot rule it. Many of us northerners would be the better
for a little mektoub. But this doctrine of referring everything to the will
of Allah takes away all stimulus to independent thought; it makes for
apathy, improvidence, and mental fossilification. A creed of everyday
use which hampers a man's reasoning in the most ordinary matters of
life--is it not like a garment that fetters his hands?
Mektoub is the intellectual burnous of the Arabs....
There is some movement, at least, in this market; often the familiar
story-tellers, surrounded by a circle of charmed listeners; sometimes,
again, a group of Soudanese from Khordofan or Bournu, who parade a
black he-goat, bedizened with gaudy rags because devoted to death;
they will slay him in due course at some shrine; but not just now,
because there is still money to be made out of his ludicrous appearance,
with an incidental dance or song on their own part. Vaguely perturbing,
these negro melodies and thrummings; their reiteration of monotony
awakens tremulous echoes on the human diaphragm and stirs up hazy,
primeval mischiefs.
And this morning there arrived a blind singer, or bard; he was led by
two boys, who accompanied his extemporaneous verses--one of them
tapping with a pebble on an empty sardine-tin, while the other
belaboured a beer-bottle with a rusty nail: both solemn as archangels;
there was also a professional accompanist, who screwed his mouth
awry and blew sideways into a tall flute, his eyes half-closed in ecstatic

rapture. Arab gravity never looks better than during inanely grotesque
performances of this kind; in such moments one cannot help loving
them, for these are the little episodes that make life endurable.
[Illustration: At the Termid]
The music was not altogether original; it reminded me, with its
mechanical punctuations, of a concerto by Paderewski which contains
an exquisite movement between the piano and kettledrum--since the
flute, which ought to have supported the voice, was apparently dumb,
although the artist puffed out his cheeks as if his life depended upon it.
Only after creeping quite close to the performers could I discern certain
wailful breathings; this brave instrument, all splotched with variegated
colours, gave forth a succession of anguished and asthmatic whispers,
the very phantom of a song, like the wind sighing through the branches
of trees.

Chapter IV
STONES OF GAFSA
There are interesting walks in the neighbourhood of Gafsa, but I can
imagine nothing more curious than the town itself; a place of some five
thousand inhabitants, about a thousand of whom are Jews, with a
sprinkling of Italian tradespeople and French officials and soldiers.
Beyond naming the streets and putting up a few lamps, the Government
has left it in its Arab condition; the roadways are unpaved, hardly a
single wall is plumb; the houses, mostly one-storied, lean this way and
that, and, being built of earthen-tinted sun-dried brick, have an air of
crumbling to pieces before one's very eyes. A heavy