has been taken prisoner during a desert raid and is
being held to ransom at Kairowan. It is addressed
to bis lady love at Tougourt. He begins by explaining
the situation, and then proceeds to say bow
much he wishes that be were sitting with bis adored
under the shade of bis palms with a stream of water
running in front of them.
The remainder of the song, owing to the intricacy
of the language, is extremely difficult to translate.
It is an Arab love-song, and Arab love-songs are
usually so full of local colour that they cannot be
rendered into idiomatic English.
The bride-elect and a bevy of dusky damsels,
whom, for want of a better name, must be called
her bridesmaids, were seated out of sight upon the
flat roof of the bouse, and whenever any point in the
song particularly took their fancy they struck up
that shrill quavering * Ay-ay-ay ’ by which the Arab
women are wont to express their applause.
At the conclusion of the song, the performers,
who bad each, in bis own particular way, been doing
bis best to produce as much noise as possible, laid
down their instruments, quite exhausted, panted,
fanned themselves and mopped their faces, while the
bride’s mother ran round the group rewarding them
for their efforts with coffee and lumps of sugar.
After an interval for rest and refreshment other
songs followed, in which the bridegroom compared
his beloved to the daughter of a Sultan, told her
that her eyes were like those of the gazelle, that her
hands and ears were like rose-leaves, and showered
pther fulsome compliments of a like nature upon her.
Now I have no wish to be unnecessarily ungallant,
but I had seen that dusky damsel dancing in the
square, and the praise which was being lavished
upon her personal appearance struck me as being
the most extravagant that I had ever heard—an
uglier, a greasier, and a more repulsive little negress
I have never seen.
We stayed a considerable time watching the
proceedings. But at length, as the performance
varied very little, we became somewhat bored by it,
and made our way back again to bed.
But the serenade was by no means over. It
continued far into the night and wound up, to the
detriment of our night’s repose, somewhere during
the small hours of the morning with a feu-de-joie
from the guns and pistols of the serenaders.
On our way back to the caravanserai we came
across no less than three other serenading parties.
How many more of them there were performing
that night in M’raier I have no idea. My impression
of the inhabitants of the place, gathered from the
one day which I spent in their midst, is that they
spend the whole of their time in marrying and giving
in marriage, and leave the care of their palms and
gardens to the kindly hand of Providence.