Smaïn; and Saftis Summer Day | Page 3

floor.
"Smaïn loves that!" I said to Safti.
"Yes, Sidi. Oreïda 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 Smaïn," I said to Safti.
"Yes, Sidi. He will play all night alone among the palms. He is in
love."
"But with Oreïda! 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 Caïd'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 déjeuner
out to the yellow sand dunes, and we sip our coffee among the keef
smokers in Hadj's painted café. 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."
"Ah yes, Sidi; I am already thirty-two, alas!"
He was thirty-five when I first met him; but he is as clever at
subtraction as a London beauty.
"Good heavens! So much! But, then, how can you keep up the wear
and tear of this tumultuous life? You must have an iron strength. Such
work as you do would break down an American millionaire."
Safti raised his one dark eye piously towards Allah's dwelling.
"Sidi, I must labour for my children. But in the summer, when you and
all the travellers are gone from the Sahara to your fogs and the darkness
of your days, I take my little holiday."

"Your holiday! But is it long enough?"
"It lasts for only five months, Sidi; but it is enough for me. I am strong
as the lion."
I gazed at him with an admiration I could not repress. There was,
indeed, something of the hero about this simple-minded Saharaman.
We were at the edge of the oasis, in a remote place looking towards the
quivering mirage