dragged him off into a far comer of the room where,
to judge by the tones of his voice, he told him very
plainly indeed what he thought about him.
Ai'ssa listened eagerly to as much of the conversation
as he could catch, and presently I saw a
look of great satisfaction come over his face.
* Hamid is going to pay him for the supper,’ he
whispered; ' that man is a good marabout, the other
is a pig,’ he added contemptuously. * Fancy refusing
to give food and lodging to strangers at this time of
the night, and he a marabout, too ! ’
Hamid’s wigging ended in his opening the door
into what were presumably the back premises and
pushing the marabout through it. He then closed
it behind him, and after listening for a moment to
satisfy himself as to the nature of the orders which
we could hear him shouting to his slaves, came back
and resumed, with a look of great annoyance on his
handsome face, his seat on the carpet beside me.
He was evidently much put out at the churlish
behaviour of our host, and was inclined to apologise
for his rudeness.
His lecture to him must have been very much to
the point, for when, a few minutes later, our host
returned, after having given the necessary orders for
our supper, he was affability itself, and had completely
changed in his manner towards us. He
flopped down on the carpet beside me, and plunged
at once into a very forced conversation.
I found his attentions rather embarrassing, for he
lived in an ‘ odour of sanctity ’ which would have
been unpleasant from the other end of the room,
He was distinctly boring in hiB conversation, and
I soon found that, like many of the smaller Algerian
saints, his holiness consisted in the fact that he
was, if not half-witted, at all events silly. He kept
making the most feeble jokes and going into roars
of laughter, which shook him like a jelly, at his own
witticisms, and glared at us in a most insolent way
if we did not see the point and join in the merriment.
After a time he began to play jokes of a mildly
practical nature upon Hamid, pulling away the
cushion just as he was about to lean back upon it,
snatching up one of his shoes and throwing it to the
far corner of the room, and other tricks of a similar
nature.
Presently, to our great relief, some of the slaves
entered the room, relighted the fire, and commenced
to cook the supper; and soon we had a huge bowl
of couscous steaming before us.
Hamid, for form’s sake, ate two or three mouthfuls,
then handed the spoon on to Aissa and El
Haj, remarking in a very sarcastic voice, and with a
look at our host as he did so, that if I had only
been at his house in Tebessa I should have had a
much better meal.
The fat marabout disdained a spoon altogether,
and, after the preliminary remark that he had already
had one supper that night, plunged his filthy paw
into the heap and began to shovel the food into his
mouth at a most alarming pace. His previous meal
did not seem to have had much effect upon his