Chapter XVII

“’Tis pleasing to be schooled in a strange tongue

By female lips and eyes, that is, I mean,

When both the teacher and the taught are young.

At least, this was the case where I have been;

They smile so when they’re right, and when they’re wrong

They smile still more, and then there intervene

Pressure of hands, and perhaps e’en a chaste kiss;

I learned the little that I know by this.”

BYRON.

* * * * *

AT EL FASHER.

An early visitor. — A bargain. — A bad boy. — A dilemma and a half. — Deserted. — Welcome help. — My first lesson. — An incompetent tutor.

WITH the exception of the bed of the Wady el Kho, the country all round El Fasher, for a distance of ten or fifteen miles, is utter desert, and no villages are within that distance.

My wanderings in the town had afforded me neither pleasure nor profit, and the suburban wilderness of sand and small stones offered even less inducement for a stroll. In order to profitably occupy my spare time, I determined, after due and long consultation with Mohommed Effendi, to engage a Foorawee tutor and to acquire so much of the language as might be useful immediately or in after life. My requirements were not many; I wished only to learn a few words of the vocabulary, the alphabet (if any existed), and to ascertain whether any written characters were in use. The lieutenant, or, as he called himself, my _aide-de-camp_, kindly volunteered to go out and endeavour to find a respectable and suitable person capable of imparting the above information.

The Foorawee language is not much used in this eastern and northern part of Darfoor; the constant intercourse with the numerous Arab tribes has nearly killed the original language. Further west, however, it is, I have been given to understand, universally spoken. Of all the men and boys whom we afterwards employed in our field-work, only a small proportion could speak Foorawee fluently, and only one, from another part of the country, was ignorant of Arabic.

Mohommed Effendi was a long time absent, and did not return that day.

It was my custom, in the desert as well as here, when shelter from the bright moonlight was to be had, to move my bed out of the tent or house and to sleep in the open night. On the morning following Mohommed Effendi’s departure, when I opened my eyes, as usual, just as the sun was about to show himself above the horizon, I saw at my bedside, facing me, about a yard off, a squatted hideous figure staring intently into my eyes.

“Frankenstein” was the first word that came, not to my lips, but into my mind. It was many years since I had read Mrs. Shelley’s awful book, and I had not been dreaming, but the idea came at once, the picture was irresistible. Of which sex the figure was I could not guess; the hands were folded over the breast with the ragged garments to keep away the cold, the shoulders were wide, and the arms long, hard, and muscular, and evidently of almost superhuman strength. The figure standing must have been at least six feet two or three inches. The head was small, very small, scarcely larger than that of an infant; the nose was prominent and sharp, but of chin there was almost none; the upper lip was at least two inches long, and the mouth was wide with hardly visible lips. The eyes were small, beady and black, cunning and remorseless. Over the face the skin was tight, and glistened as though seared with a hot iron, or like the scales of a serpent. Altogether the face was utterly unlike anything I had ever seen before, and there was nothing about it by which I could judge of its age; it might have been that of an evil-minded half-deformed imp of a child, or it might have been that of an aged person, half lunatic, half idiot.

After rubbing my eyes well I endeavoured to fix them upon those of the creature, but found it impossible, the expression was too penetrating, unearthly, and horrible. I asked:

“What’s the matter?”

“My husband is coming.”

The figure was therefore a woman. The voice was small and shrill, like that of an angry, petulant, malignant child.

“What’s he coming for?”

“Here he is.”

The woman stood up, rising without moving her arms or feet, like a sort of automaton. My estimate as to her height was not much wrong. The husband, quite an ordinary mortal, came into the enclosure. He walked straight up to me in bed and stretched out his hand to be shaken. The woman then followed his example, and the clasp of the dry, cold, snake- like figures I can plainly feel now, and shudder as I write. The two squatted down side by side, and, as before, I asked:

“What’s the matter?”

The man replied: “I can teach you the Foorawee language.”

I asked: “How much a lesson?”

The pair looked at each other, without a word, for a few seconds, and then rose and walked some distance beyond hearing. On their return they sat down as before, and the man, always spokesman, said:

“You say how much.”

I replied: “A piastre.”

As before, after looking at each other, they retired, and on returning:

“Ten piastres.”

The margin was large between one piastre and ten, but in this struggle with barbarism and its female demon ally I was determined not to be beaten. I was becoming quite interested.

“Who is to teach me?” I asked.

“Sometimes I, sometimes my wife.”

I thought of Byron’s lines:

“’Tis pleasing to be schooled in a strange tongue

By female lips and eyes, that is, I mean

When both the teacher and the taught are young;

At least this was the case where I have been.

They smile so when they’re right, and when they’re wrong

They smile still more, and then there intervene

Pressure of hands and, perhaps, even a chaste kiss;

I learned the little that I know by this”;

and smiled as they came to my recollection.

The additional inducement had its effect upon me, and I offered two piastres per lesson, to last as long as I might like. The loving pair again departed in silence, and returned to name another sum, I think eight piastres. Suffice it to tell that, after many departures for the purposes of conference, an agreement was at length come to for three piastres a lesson.

I told them, if they liked, to go into the kitchen and ask for Jacoob, he would give them some coffee; and that I would shortly appear to arrange the time and place for the first lesson. They both rose and shook hands again; the woman’s hand was warmer. So well do I remember her two horrid shakes, that I could now almost tell the exact number of degrees of increase of temperature of the second over the first; the horrid warm was worse than the horrid cold.

After dressing myself, I found them in the kitchen sipping scalding hot coffee and gnawing some cold bones which Jacoob had given them for breakfast. It was arranged that I should come over to their tuckle, some distance beyond the town, and which everybody knew, at two o’clock the next afternoon to take my first lesson. At the appointed time, again borrowing Mohommed Effendi’s bed, I called for my donkey-boy, who knew where I wished to go, and, with an alarmed expression of face, told me the woman was a witch, renowned in all the country, and that it would be much better to stop where I was, and not to go and see her at all. Everything was at length ready, and I started on my journey.

But in Darfoor, as in all other countries, _L’homme propose et Dieu dispose_. I was not destined to reach the end of my journey that day. The donkey-boy was evidently not pleased with the destination, and the donkey, from sympathy or, as I verily believe, from being unkindly and surreptitiously prodded behind, became restive in his gait, unstable in his demeanour, and quite unhappy in his mind; I had much difficulty in keeping my seat, and the saddle, already nearly reaching to the ground on either side, became displaced, and trailed on one side in the dirt and sand. It was necessary to alight and, with the aid of the donkey- boy, to properly adjust it. Suddenly, as my right leg was lifted high in the air ready to be thrown over the donkey’s back to remount, the boy tossed off the saddle, Mohommed Effendi’s bed, into the dirt, and, jumping professionally into what should have been my seat, before I had time to realise the situation or to get my right leg into its normal and perpendicular position, shouted “Yah, yah!” like a London halfpenny boy, and galloped away with the speed of the wind.

I was now in a predicament. The bed belonged to Mohommed Effendi, and it was necessarily a point of duty with me that it should be returned to him in due time and in such proper condition that his night’s rest should not be interfered with. To shout after the boy, or to attempt to run after the donkey, would be not only futile, but utterly wanting in the sombre dignity which it is so necessary to preserve in Eastern lands. After mature consideration I came to the conclusion that there were three courses open to me: I could walk into the distant town and wander beseechingly from tuckle to tuckle, with only three piastres in my pocket, the price of the lesson, and endeavour to find some one able and willing to carry the bed back to its lawful owner; I could, like a collier with a sack of coals, lift it on to my back, and so take it away home; or I could, as a third course, wait where I was and sit quietly down on the bed in the expectation of fortune sending me some one to bring me out of my difficulty. To the first course the objection was that I should be compelled to leave the bed in an unprotected state, and that the prowling dogs and hyenas, attracted by so strange an appearance in the desert, might pay it a visit and, perhaps, even venture to lie down upon it and go to sleep. The objection to the second course was that it was impossible. The bed was long and wide, and six inches thick, and, from many years of long and happy sleep, by day and night, had become heavy and conglomerated, and to carry it far was not in my power. Of three courses, a dilemma and a half, I decided to adopt the third, and, spreading the bed on the ground, sat down cross-legged upon it, lighted a pipe, and watched, in peace and forgetfulness of my trouble, the afternoon sun sink in slow splendour towards the purple serrated tops of the distant Gebel Marra.

One pipe, many pipes—two hours, and I was still in oblivion and contented helplessness. The sun was already taking off his golden and gaudy superfluous apparel, and, more fortunate than I, preparing for comfortable nightly repose, which for myself I could see no prospect of obtaining.

Out of the west two tall figures, like coming events casting their shadows before, approached towards where I sat. I rose and hastened towards them, to secure if possible their much needed assistance. The one was my friend of the morning, and the other evidently her sister, her counterpart; as tall, as muscular, as demoniacal, the two seemingly twins. The sole difference, striking and horrible, was a white cataract, opalescent in the light of the rising moon, in the eye of sister number two. Each carried a jar on her head, and the husband, with another jar, was a short distance behind. They had all three been on foot to the slopes of the Gebel Marra to purchase a supply of duchn, and had not comprehended my arrangement for two o’clock, hours, in Darfoor, not being known, time being computed by days. I was not, however, disposed to quarrel with them for their breach of engagement; I was too overjoyed to see them. The circumstance of the flight of the donkey-boy, and the consequent plight to which I had been reduced, inspired the sisters with just indignation, and the three little black beads of eyes sparkled dangerously. They thought the boy ought to be killed, and I have no doubt that for a good-sized cotton pocket-handkerchief the two would have joyfully departed on an errand of murder, and would have strangled the unhappy boy that very night. There was yet an hour before dinner, and I thought the time could not be better employed than in taking my first lesson. I sat down on the bed, and the man squatted on the ground in front of me with the three jars ranged behind him; the two women nestled lovingly and close to me, one on each side—I was evidently already a pet of theirs.

I have alluded to the individual who was to impart to me the rudiments of the Foorawee language as a “tutor,” but did not wish to imply that giving instruction in languages was his profession. He was simply, like all the other inhabitants of El Fasher, a tiller of the soil and a vendor of its produce. His engagement with me was his first undertaking to teach, and, most probably, his last. I was aware of this, and, of course, did not expect much. The few questions, which I had now time to put, had reference only to the existence of letters, of an alphabet, and of written characters. Of such things he knew nothing whatever, and to my every query his reply was a sound with the lips as of a soft administered kiss, which, in Foorawee, as in the Arabic as spoken in these latitudes, means “no.” This sound, vigorously echoed every time by the two women nestled close against me, although resuscitative of memories long dormant and not destitute of pleasure, began to make this, my first introductory three-piastres-worth of lesson, somewhat tedious and strictly monotonous.

Louder, shriller and more frequent came the kiss-like “noes”; closely and more closely to my either side pressed the hideous twins, hot and damp; night, with a million poet stars filling its eloquent immensity, fell lustrous over the face of the dead and boundless desert, and Nature whispered, softly but unmistakably, “Jacoob is laying the cloth.”

It was necessary to start homewards. I gave the man his three piastres, and, after wishing me good-bye, he departed with the sister. The wife rolled up the bed, and taking it under her arm, accompanied me in silence to the palace. The boy who had served me so scurvy a trick was there in fear and trembling, sent back by his parents.

On the following day I repaired to the tutor’s tuckle. It was distant, and the interior was dirty and hot; there was but one “angereb,” and we sat as before, the damp twins one on each side of me, and the man on the ground in front. Every five or ten minutes they emptied between them a gourd of “merissa,” holding nearly a quart. The attentions of the ladies grew in two senses warm, and I made no progress. They grew jealous of each other, and squabbled over every word. The man grew jealous of me, and my position was becoming uncomfortable. I cancelled the contract, refused to drink a gourd of “merissa,” jumped on to my donkey, and rode home as ignorant of the Foorawee language as if it had never been my good fortune to go to El Fasher.

[Decoration]