Chapter XVI

“And woman’s holy love is as a star;

Though clouds may hide its brightness, still it shines;

The path it takes is sure, though all unknown,

And fixed and changeless as the march of time.”

“Black war—man’s mad mistake.”

* * * * *

EL FASHER.

A cavalcade. — Love. — Romance. — The market-place. — A big battle. — Morality in Darfoor. — The town. — The Greek merchants. — A bottle of beer. — Wealth. — Half a curiosity. — “Backsheesh.”

WE had much to do at El Fasher, in plotting our work from Om-Badr in order to enable us to decide upon the relative merits of the two routes over which we had travelled, and in taking and reducing our astronomical observations. It was agreed that we should work until a certain hour each day, after which we should wander about in the neighbourhood and glean such information concerning the natives of the country and habits of the people as might be of general interest.

On the day following our arrival, I told Mohommed, the lunch soldier, to go into the town and bring back four donkeys; to hire them upon reasonable terms and, if possible, to make the contract price payable in money, and not in rags. After a time he arrived with four small, sore- backed insignificant animals, without either bridle or saddle, all four for one piastre (2½d.) per day, including a small boy. Mohommed Effendi, Mohommed the guide, the lunch soldier, and myself were to form the party, but before starting it was necessary to improvise a saddle of some sort. The soldier brought my camel-saddle, which, being nearly as large as the donkey itself, did not fit, and I told the soldier he might use it himself. I was obliged to have recourse to my own powers of invention; I first placed on the sore part of the donkey’s back a copy of the _Illustrated London News_, and over that Mohommed Effendi’s large flock bed, which he kindly lent me for the purpose, and which, being more than six feet long and four feet wide, nearly reached to the ground on either side, and overlapped to the extent of about a foot behind, where the view closely resembled the gable end of a small cottage with vast overhanging eaves. The saddle was in every respect comfortable, and offered to the rider many conveniences; I could ride either in the usual and orthodox manner, or could, if so inclined, sit facing either to the near or off side, according as matters of interest arose to the right or left of the path; or again, I could, without much difficulty, turn round and ride facing the gable end of the donkey, and gaze upon the beauties of the prospect through which we had passed. Everything was at length ready, and we started, like Haroon-al-Rasheed, in search of adventures. We proceeded in Indian file—I leading, with the donkey-boy walking at my side holding over my head Mohommed Effendi’s huge white cotton umbrella. The soldier came last, perched on the top of the camel-saddle, which wabbled about very considerably, and caused the bottles and plates in the lunch bag to rattle much, and to make music suitable to so imposing a cavalcade. The officer and the guide rode between without saddles of any kind; each, however, compensated himself for the deficiency by smoking, as he travelled, a very long pipe; the stem rested on the forehead of the donkey, between its ears, and the bowl reached to about six inches below its nose; the smoke was wafted by the gentle breeze into its nostrils, and the patient animal shared with the rider on its mangy back the fragrant odour of the soothing weed.

We wended our way towards the market-place. On our right we passed a young man and woman in earnest conversation at the door of a tuckle. I could guess the subject of their talk; the eloquent look, the stars and the diamonds sparkling in their coal-black eyes, told me it was love, beautiful love.

“With love comes life we have not known before;

As o’er the infant world first fell the light

Of the warm sun and gave its beauty birth,

So o’er the soul first falls the light of love

And charms it into spring. Sweet is the dawn

Of love in youth ere passion’s glow has warmed

Its tenderness and soft its whispered tale.

Sweet then her words which tremulously fall,

And sweet the trembling half-reluctant kiss

Of first—of last—of love which cannot die;

And sweet in love is certainty, and sweet

The flames which rise of passion’s quenchless fire.”

Still in this young couple there was visible through all their love an unmistakable look of anxiety, of fear, perhaps of guilt—it might be crime. A knife was lying near with blood on its blade, and the man’s hand was stained. Was this then, perhaps, an African romance, a pathetic and soul-stirring story of first and youthful love, beginning in smiles and black blushes pure as the moonlit Alpine snow, then little quarrels about trifles, and secret tears and reconciliation paying for the pain, then torrid and relentless tropical passion, and raging jealousy culminating in insane crime and the blood of a murdered rival?

“Yah Mohommed! go and learn for me this story, and come back and say whether it is, as I suppose, a story of love and of appalling crime.”

After a few minutes:

“O Effendim! The man is a butcher and has just killed a cow in the market, and the woman is his neighbour’s wife, and her husband is in the market selling duchn, and they have been into his tuckle and have drunk much merissa.”

A few more yards brought us into the market, which is held in El Fasher every day. There was none of the life, bustle, noise, and enterprise usual in an English market-place; dead silence prevailed, and had it not been for the bright light of the sun, the place would have been burdening in its melancholy. The vendors, men, women, and children, sat on the ground, and in front of each was a not ill-made yellow grass tray, or dish, in which the wares for sale were exposed; in one tray were, perhaps, about two pounds of duchn; in the next the same quantity of cotton, still with the seeds; in the next half a pound of green tobacco, or dry bamias, then, perhaps, a large piece of beef, about ten or twelve pounds, covered with great flies, which every now and then would all buzz from their feast into the air with hideous noise, and return in a few seconds and settle down hungry as before. The offal from the beasts which had been slaughtered, was in one mountain in the centre of the market-place, and the congregation of black flies settled upon it made it look, from a little distance, like a heap of cinders. Over this, high in the sky, two or three vultures wheeled in circles on their motionless wings, eager for the business of the day to be finished, that they might get their share of the food before the hyenas came in the night to swallow it all away.

From the direction whence we had come there came a great and sudden noise of men in violent altercation. Some one had whispered

“Lady-bird, lady-bird, fly away home,

Your house is on fire, your wife is at home”

into the ear of the man selling duchn, whose wife we had seen, a short time before, outside the “tuckle” talking with the butcher. The two men now entered the market shouting and gesticulating, and seemingly about to begin a big battle. Foorawee love, with its imagined romance and real ugliness, I had already seen; here was an opportunity of witnessing Foorawee war. The opportunity was not to be lost, we turned the cavalcade towards the angry and eager combatants.

“Five piastres to the man who wins!” I called in my enthusiasm to see a real African fight. The eyes of each sparkled at the sum; the shouts rose in loudness and in number, hands were clenched and held forth defiantly, or swung round windmill fashion, but still came not in contact with anything likely to arrest their progress; heads were lowered ready to butt and to destroy, but still the maddened combatants remained unharmed. As one advanced the other receded, until their gyrations brought them into the centre of the market, and they chased each other, first one, then the other, round the offal covered with the flies.

Suddenly, chameleon-like, or like the transformation scene at a pantomime, the heap changed from black to its true colours of “magenta” and “solferino”; the flies left it, and swarmed, buzzing and angry, in one dense cloud round the heads of the yelling and leaping fiends.

“A dollar to the man who wins, and half a dollar to the loser!”

It was too much; the men stood dead still, and ceased to yell, but the flies still buzzed. The suffered injury, and the promised dollar, fired the soul of the man who sold the duchn; he watched his opportunity, lowered his head, and butted with all his weight full in the butcher’s breast. It was a battering ram: the butcher was bowled clean over backwards into the middle of the heap, and his adversary cast himself upon him. The two men thumped, bawled, and bit each other, and sprawled, kicked, and struggled about in the offal like two great fish floundering and disporting themselves in the warm shallow water. Even the vultures, wheeling slowly in the lofty air, became excited, flapped their wings and increased the orbit of their flight, alarmed at seeing their anticipated dinner kicked and scattered about in every direction. The teeth were the principal weapons used by the combatants. In a few minutes the butcher rose, bitten and bleeding. One horrible unearthly shriek, a high leap over the “magenta” and “solferino” mountain, and another over the heads of the still sitting and impassible market people, and he bounded away, followed by a cloud of flies, out of sight into the distant desert.

I gave the man his dollar, and, after spitting from his mouth the odds and ends of his adversary, he gave me in return a proud exultant smile. The wife, whom I had not yet observed, had arrived on the scene; they conferred together for a few seconds, after which she approached me, and asked for the half-dollar for the loser, she would give it him. I gave it to her, and she and her husband went home rich in money and in restored conjugal felicity.

Subsequent inquiry, observation, and reflection, have convinced me that social morality in Darfoor is at as low an ebb as it is possible to be; even the semblance of propriety is not regarded or expected. The last page of our Prayer Book whose title is, “A Table of Kindred and Affinity wherein whosoever are related are forbidden in Scripture and our laws to marry together,” would, if printed without the only two _nots_ it contains, represent a state of things, not which might arise, but which absolutely exists in Darfoor. Only among the higher classes is the ceremony of marriage ever performed; among the majority of the people it is dispensed with altogether, and this circumstance, alone, prevents it being said with truth that polygamy is general in the country.

A gentle walk round the market-place disclosed only a succession of such wares as I have described, and nothing which the most inveterate curiosity-monger could have purchased with a prospect of exciting the interest of his friends. I bought a bag of “duchn,” and brought it home with me to England, and planted some of it on the sunny-side of a back garden; it has not, however, yet ever appeared above ground, although it has had ample time to do so had it felt so disposed.

The town all round was lonely and hot, dirty, dusty and dull; “tuckles” and sheds, black with smoke, rotten with filth and age, and whose pristine not inelegant shape had been distorted and marred by the storms and rains of a long succession of years, were scattered about in their enclosures without attempt at arrangement or convenience. There was no stir, no life, no signs of happiness, only sloth, apathy, and sleep and flies. There was, however, one exception to all this; the shed of a Greek merchant, which he had built himself as a storehouse and residence. He had been here three years collecting ivory and ostrich feathers, in exchange for his Manchester “tobes,” French wines, brandy, and pale ale. He had been successful, and the shed was richly stored with fine tusks, six to eight feet long, and heavy as a man could lift, and with ostrich feathers, plentiful, long, and exquisitely white, and worth from a pound to five-and-twenty shillings a-piece. To get these he employed the natives of the country round at a piastre a day, and they travelled for him, far and wide, to the west and south, and brought him honestly all they took, and were satisfied if their earnings would enable them to drink, every day for a week, as much French brandy or bottled ale as they could swallow. We stopped the cavalcade opposite his door, delighted to find a resting-place for lunch. Our jaded steeds were our first care, and we gave them water, which they would not drink, and “duchn,” which they voraciously ate, and wanted more, which they got. The Greek came out, followed by other Greeks, all armed with pistols and long knives, looking like cut-throats, but amiable and good-natured, talkative and polite, and anxious to do business. Mohommed, the soldier, brought the lunch bag; but alas the wabbling! the bottles were broken, and the plates and the glasses, and the biscuits and bread were soft and red with the wasted wine. The cold mutton with a vinous taste, the tin of asparagus, the box of sardines, and the pot of jam were placed on the table, and the good Greek lent us plates, gave us “duchn” cake, and by invitation sat down to join Mohommed Effendi and myself. Something to drink was needful. I had not tasted bottled beer since leaving Cairo, more than four months ago. Tennant’s ale, in stone bottles for export, was inside; I bought some, cool, refreshing, very much up, clear as a topaz, and altogether surpassingly delicious, 4s. 2d. a bottle.

After lunch our host showed us over his store. Elephants’ tusks, however, I was not in want of; and ostrich feathers, should I at any time require those ornaments, are much cheaper in London already curled and ready for use; but the mention of a rhinoceros horn, stowed away somewhere, excited my cupidity and curiosity. The coveted horn was at length found, but not entire. The slaughter of its original owner in some remote southern jungle had been a joint-stock affair, and the partners had divided the proceeds equally between them. The half offered to me was about thirty inches long, one inch and a half broad at the base, and tapering to a point fine as a needle. The whole original must have been a tremendous weapon, calculated to make a hole right through the body of an elephant. I was not, however, disposed to purchase, at a fancy price, half a curiosity, and left it behind. When, later on, I reached the palace and went to my room, I found it on my bed, with a little note begging my acceptance of it as “backsheesh.” I much regret to say that it was lost on our journey home.

This, my first ramble through the town of El Fasher, and the sight of its poverty and misery, sin, sorrowfulness, and ugly dirt, did not impress me much in its favour, and I determined, if ever I rambled again, to go further and, perhaps, to fare worse.

[Decoration]