THE BEDROOM TENT WAS equally large, and circular, and quite ten feet high in the center, where the large pole rose like a mast to support it. It too was floored with Oriental rugs, and it contained two iron beds with springs, mattresses, pillows, sheets, blankets and white counterpanes. Chairs, a large washstand with two white bowls and two pitchers, a cake of French soap and towels completed our furnishing there.
Shades of those good old days in our western mountains, where a birch-bough bed was the acme of luxury, and the wash basin was a quiet pool in some rocky stream! Where one’s teeth ached for an hour after brushing them in the icy water, and one’s bath was a struggle between the desire for cleanliness and sheer endurance; when the soap, caught in the current, was whisked away and only discreetly to be pursued beyond the shelter of the bushes; and when the towel casually thrown on the ground came up covered with pine needles and other prickly substances.
For we also had a bath.
Intimation that a bath was required was followed by the introduction into the tent of a broad but shallow canvas tub, and of Assour’s face, smiling and triumphant.
“You see, madams!” he said, on that first bath morning. “I have told you, eh? You ask for bath: I give you bath!”
One could have had that tub filled, no doubt, and splashed away to his heart’s content. But we did not. Already we had learned the value of water in the desert.
Our drinking water we carried with us in cases, bottled. But the cooking and wash water were carried in fanatis, long and sturdy metal tanks with a faucet, and these fanatis had to be replenished every day. At the beginning when we were never far from the canals which are fed by the Nile, this was easy, but later on the distance to be traveled every night in the search for water and grass was considerably increased.
After trekking all day afoot in the hot sand, with the arrival at the camp site the camel boys would unload their camels and start off again. Often the distances they covered before they ate their evening meal were equal to what we had made during the entire day. And they had not only to fill the fanatis and buy grass for the camels; they bought the grass as it stood in the field and then painfully cut it with small curved knives.
They filled great panniers with it, and late in the evening they would return, indomitably cheerful, singing their queer Arab songs, to tie their camels as they reclined on the ground, to heap in front of each a pile of fodder as high as itself, to eat a bit of belated supper, to gather the dry desert bush and maybe a bit of camel dung, and while I was sitting wrapped in blankets in a steamer chair, to gather around their bit of fire in their thin cotton clothes and sing again.
Where the fire had warmed the sand they slept, to be up at the first glow of the chilly dawn, and at work.
Never once did I hear a complaint, or see an indication of discontent.
“Are you all right?” I would ask,
And they would say:
“May Allah watch over you and give you good health and happiness! We are satisfied.”
After dinner, in the evenings, Assour would enter the dining tent with a bow, and ask us if all had been to our taste. And Abou Taleb would stand by listening in painful anxiety, until we had praised the meal and the service. There was great uneasiness when we insisted on cutting the seven courses to five.
“You do not eat,” said Abou Taleb mournfully, “Mohammed, he cry in his tent. He do not cook good enough.”
But we stuck to our five courses: a delicious soup; fish when near the Nile, and an entrée when we left it, a roast of chicken or of mutton usually; a salad with quail or squab, and a pudding or soufflé. But nothing could induce them to shorten the end of the meal; fruits, nuts, raisins and candy must be passed. Aye, and eaten, or distress showed in Abou Taleb’s dark face and the songs outside the cook tent died. The Americans were not happy; they were not well. They did not eat!
So we would eat, and then stagger out, filled to repletion, to our steamer chairs set in the sand. And then Abou Taleb would bring our coffee, Turkish coffee, hot and strong and sweet in its tiny brass coffee pot. And we would sip it out of little cups, and nibble Turkish delight—or drop it into the sand and bury it stealthily, to hurt nobody’s feelings—and yawn and yawn and yawn.
All would be silent, save for the bark and occasional shriek of a jackal, and the steady quiet munching of the camels, behind their heaps of grass. They would eat all night, until every blade was gone and all their six times seven stomachs were filled.
But sometimes we played cards.
“You like learn old Arab card game?” Assour asked one night.
“We’ll try anything once, Assour,” we said.
So we went into the dining tent and Assour got out the cards. “Very exciting game,” he said. “Some people play for much money, but I do not, I am a holy man.” By which he meant, I think, a religious one. Do I not remember those first days of Ramadan, when the good Mohammedan does not eat nor drink from before dawn until after sunset? And Assour, poor dear lad, trying not even to swallow his spittle, and politely and clandestinely expectorating behind my back?
The game was Basra, and it was some time before we could become accustomed to dealing from the right to left instead of from left to right. They do so many things wrong, from our point of view; pull a saw instead of pushing it, read of course from right to left, and even run their horse races in reverse.
But as Assour taught us this old and exciting Arab game, the truth began to dawn on us. Basra was nothing other than the casino of our childhood days. With only one variation: Assour would unblushingly cheat if he got the chance, and be entirely unashamed if he were caught at it.
But mostly we would just sit and let the peace of the desert soak into our tired minds and bodies. And perhaps Smeda would come then and sit on his heels near us on the sand, without speech or movement. Then I would say:
“Won’t you sing a little, Smeda?”
And he would sing. Thin, incredibly mournful, always minor, without phrasing or harmony as we know it, it yet fitted the time and place. For Smeda’s song was of his love for this, his desert, and of his joy in coming back to it again. Now and then the others would join in, their shawled and turbaned heads uplifted; and Abou Taleb, melting the ends of candles out of their brass sticks at Mohammed’s charcoal fire, would throw small and temporary spotlights of burning wax over this quaint and lowly chorus.
Then, in the night wind, on the gaudy walls of the dining tent Cleopatra’s barge would rise and fall on its green Nile; the canvases of the steamer chairs would snap in their frames; the camels, still saddled against the cold, would lie with their long necks outstretched along the desert sand, resting, and Mohammed would put away the feathered fan with which he blew his fire. The stars shining brightly overhead, perhaps the Head would continue Assour’s lessons in primitive astronomy, with an apple for the earth, an orange for the sun, and a walnut for the moon.
“Now,” he would begin briskly, “what is it, Assour, that makes the moon small, sometimes a crescent, as it is tonight, and again large and round?”
“Allah,” Assour would state, promptly and devoutly.
Of such simple joys were our evenings compounded.
I would go into my tent, where two candles on a chair beside my bed provided my reading light. But long after I had settled down I could hear the astronomy lesson going on outside and Assour’s voice.
“A Muezzin”—a priest—“has tell me,” he would say, “that by the Koran an ox uphold the earth on his horn. But perhaps he not know,” he would add politely.
And then the Head’s voice again, and finally Assour’s, still polite, but slightly plaintive.
“I see, sair,” he would be saying. He always said “sair” to the Head. “But then what is on the top? The very top, where the stars end?”