IT WAS OUR TENTH and last evening in the desert. Even then, as we sat in the sunset, we could see to our left far away the trees and gardens of Senures, where Robert Hichens took Bella Donna to camp under the date palms with her husband while she dreamed of her lover, and where we too were to camp the next day.
We sat long outside the tent that night over our coffee and Turkish delight, while the little jackals barked, and the moon rose and shone on those waters where once the sacred crocodiles had lain, bedizened, in the mud.
We rode to Senures the next morning. Once again fertile land, with the spring plowing going on, and every variety of animal hitched to the plows; once again the long processions going out to the fields from the little mud villages; once again children of eight and ten leading enormous pack camels, called hubble-hubbles, from the resemblance of the gurgling noise they made to that of the water pipe so named; once more the greeting “Saida,” and its cheery return.
One elderly gentleman added to his greeting from the door of his house an invitation to coffee, but Assour glanced at the sun and then politely declined. On and on. The date palms were coming closer, the sun getting higher and hotter. Then Senures at last, and luncheon under a palm tree, while we waited for the rest of the caravan.
It was at Senures that Dahabeah saw her first railway train, and gave every evidence of hysteria. A narrow-gauge line runs into the town, and along it screaming and humping came the train. With a low moan of terror Dahabeah prepared to seek the desert again, but Abdul Baggi grabbed her tail and, so to speak, there she was. She trembled violently, however, for some time. It was the next day that Missouri sadly behaved on a similar occasion. The Head was half-way on her when she heard a train, and proceeded to do some first-grade bucking and pitching in the midst of three thousand clay water jars, ready to be loaded. The Head, however, was saved.
But there was no balking the fact. We were in civilization again, and evidences of it began the moment the tents were up in our grove of palm trees.
First came a variety of dogs, and then of children. Accustomed as we were by that time to eccentric hair cutting, one child with a large square patch shaved on top of his head caught my eyes and I asked Assour the reason.
“Just for fancy,” said Assour blandly, “Maybe there been a wedding, or something.” And went away.
Which left me as much in the air as the little boy who teased the old sailor to tell him how he lost his leg.
“If I tell you, will you promise not to ask another question?”
“Sure, I’ll promise.”
“Well, then, it was bit off.”
After the dogs and the children came the visiting barber. He brought a set of strange and archaic tools, and having shaken hands all round and taken up a sitting position in a bowl-shaped depression in the sand, proceeded to wait for customers. As fast as our men finished their work they went to him, squatting on the ground before him and facing him. The ancient razor tortured their sun-burned faces. The same antique brass bowl of water did for all.
Ali’s mustache was trimmed once more to its tidy points. Katil’s curly head emerged from the clippers like a cottage with bare walls and a thatched roof, and from some place unknown an elderly gentleman with a three-weeks’ growth of beard and a yellow turban joined the waiting list and took his turn with the rest.
When each customer had finished he paid what he considered the job to be worth—one piaster, or two, five or ten cents. Whatever he received, the barber took it courteously and without comment. When he had finished he packed up his belongings and politely departed, joining that throng of now returning laborers who were on their way back from the day’s work along the main road before us.
It was a strange and growing procession. From narrow dikes along the canals, from tiny paths among the palm trees, came again the precious livestock driven in to safety for the night. Nervous water buffalo shied at our white tents and lumbered off wildly into the alfalfa; cows, donkeys, sheep, goats and camels, men, women and children, each treading on the heels of the one before, moved compactly and sedately back into the town. And the mud walls of the town swallowed them up and we saw them no more.
The old dyer, his arms purple to the elbows, who had been beating his black dyed cloth in the ditch nearby us, accompanying each blow with a sharp “hish” through his teeth, wrung out his last garment and putting it with the others on a tray, started home with the tray balanced on his head; the women who had been washing vegetables for the market just above, him eased their bent backs and started off likewise. And a lady who had been for some time sitting chin deep in the ditch above the vegetable washers, her clothes neatly stacked on top of her head, ended this ceremonial of purification as dusk fell and quietly slipped away.
Dinner and coffee in the moonlight under the palm trees. And then the paying off, the bakshish. As each man received his percentage he shook hands and said:
“May Allah give you long life and make you happy.”
The next morning, before we left, I went to visit Dahabeah. After all, she had done fairly well by me. By trips and so on she had carried me a hundred miles, and now that I was through with her I liked her.
“Good-bye, old girl,” I said. “Let’s forget it and part friends.”
I made a last and cautious effort to pat her on her moth-eaten head, but she only snarled at me and showed her teeth. And so I left her under Bella Donna’s palm trees, and got into a Ford car!