As in the other harems I had visited, perfect equality
seemed to prevail between the ladies, and while they
chatted with Mme. de S. whose few words of Arabic
had loosed their tongues, I tried to guess which was
the favourite, or at least the first in rank.
My choice wavered between the pretty pale creature
with a ferronniere across her temples and a
tea-rose caftan veiled in blue gauze, and the nut-brown
beauty in red velvet hung with pearls whose languid
attitudes and long-lidded eyes were so like the Keepsake
portraits of Byron’s Haidee. Or was it perhaps
the third, less pretty but more vivid and animated,
who sat behind the tea-tray, and mimicked so expressively
a soldier shouldering his rifle, and another falling
dead, in her effort to ask us “when the dreadful
war would be over”? Perhaps ... unless,
indeed, it were the handsome octoroon, slightly older
than the others, but even more richly dressed, so
free and noble in her movements, and treated by the
others with such friendly deference.
I was struck by the fact that among them all there
was not a child; it was the first harem without babies
that I had seen in that prolific land. Presently
one of the ladies asked Mme. de S. about her children,
in reply, she enquired for the Caid’s little
boy, the son of his wife who had died. The ladies’
faces lit up wistfully, a slave was given an order,
and presently a large-eyed ghost of a child was brought
into the room.
Instantly all the bracelet-laden arms were held out
to the dead woman’s son; and as I watched the
weak little body hung with amulets and the heavy head
covered with thin curls pressed against a brocaded
bosom, I was reminded of one of the coral-hung child-Christs
of Crivelli, standing livid and waxen on the knee
of a splendidly dressed Madonna.
The poor baby on whom such hopes and ambitions hung
stared at us with a solemn unamused gaze. Would
all his pretty mothers, his eyes seemed to ask, succeed
in bringing him to maturity in spite of the parched
summers of the south and the stifling existence of
the harem? It was evident that no precaution
had been neglected to protect him from maleficent
influences and the danger that walks by night, for
his frail neck and wrists were hung with innumerable
charms: Koranic verses, Soudanese incantations,
and images of forgotten idols in amber and coral and
horn and ambergris. Perhaps they will ward off
the powers of evil, and let him grow up to shoulder
the burden of the great Caids of the south.
VI
GENERAL LYAUTEY’S WORK IN MOROCCO
I
It is not too much to say that General Lyautey has
twice saved Morocco from destruction: once in
1912, when the inertia and double-dealing of Abd-el-Hafid
abandoned the country to the rebellious tribes who
had attacked him in Fez, and the second time in August,
1914, when Germany declared war on France.
