Short Stories, - [books to read fiction .txt] 📗
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The Rioba quite understood the situation. He changed his position, looked Dennison squarely in the eye, and with great coolness drew the young girl’s arm through his own—He had settled upon this course of action while walking with the procession. He baulked not. Pointing straight at Mother Sal’s puffy, oily countenance, he ejaculated, “A mother!” with ineffable scorn—and then added concisely: “Dennison, I p’rpose to be responsible henceforth for this here young woman. You are a liar—a thief—and—”
With a face whereon flashed out in a second all his pent-up wrath Dennison brought his pistol from behind his back and fired, but passion made his aim less true than that of the unscathed Rioba; who, entirely on his guard to meet what he had designedly provoked, fired almost simultaneously, and laid Dennison dead at his feet.
(French of Lermina: E. C. Waggener: For Short Stories.)
More nervous than drunk, he closed and locked the door, and by the light of a taper went to bed. Profound silence! Then, on his ear-drums tinkled a sound, crystalline, swelling to a vibration, like the notes of a hautboy interspersed with trumpet calls. The pillow, too, rose and fell under his head, sucking the brain like an exhauster, to eject it like a pump.
He opened his eyes. The light hushed the symphony; constrained the pillow to immobility. The taper flickered and leaped. Then, in the aureole of light, something black appeared, big, sprawling, with great antennæ. Ugh! he hated beasts! A beast? No. His arm hung from the bed; it was the shadow of his hand he saw, thrown by the taper. He turned on his back, seeing and not seeing; a misty film stretching across the sclerotic like the nyctoloptic membrane of birds. Fiery atoms danced in the darkness; his palate like a stopper closed his throat and gummed it with saliva. Then, in that obscurity, he was conscious of a slow gliding. It was the door, which he had locked, opening with wing-like sweeps, uncovering a hole long, narrow, always broader, never longer, showing black and always blacker.
He stared, lips puffed, parched and parted. But from that hole, that abyss of nothingness, nothing issued. He waited; a locked door would never thus open without something coming! He waited; still nothing; more and more feebly the taper danced; soon it would fall, splutter, drown in oil. He quickly decided. That something that did not come should not come! Doubling like a serpent he slipped to the floor, threw himself forward, seized, slammed the door, braced it with one hand, turned the key with the other. It was done! Breathless, panting, he returned to bed; not to sleep. His hot skin pricked and stung him; that devilish symphony, with the roar of a torrent, had recommenced. And that door, which a second time he had closed, was a second time reopening, swinging itself back like a vertical sepulchre. The wing-like sweeps began anew; the black hole widened, blacker always blacker, then—the taper fell, flashed, died to ember....
He was dead when they found him. The door? Both locked and bolted; but neither lock nor bolt had caught the socket.
(Algerian Sketches: Emile Masqueray: Le Figaro: Translated for Short Stories by Eleanor Moore Hiestand.)
For two wearisome days I had been journeying back and forth in the country of the Aoulâd Naîel. I was still far from my tent when I threw myself prone upon the sands, worn out with fatigue. On the previous afternoon, my guide and I had made a little excursion to a neighboring douar, and I could still hear echoes of the singular greetings showered upon me by my entertainers:
“Our father! Thy tent is blessed! Thy spurs are strong!”
Suddenly, as I lay there, the clouds seemed to lower above my head; they grew strangely dense and shone like brass. The manes and tails of our horses bristled with apprehension. I felt a prolonged shiver pass over me. A powerful hand seemed to press its weight upon my temples. Now the frozen sky was streaked with white; now it settled into oppressive darkness again; and with no living thing in sight upon the dry and barren plain, we felt utterly alone and at the mercy of some awful power. Presently a veil seemed to be thrown over our heads, and night came upon us as suddenly as when a lamp is extinguished in an otherwise unlighted room.
My guide shouted. We leaped upon our horses who galloped away with winged feet, trembling with fear, away into the fathomless shadows. In vain I tried to check this mad pace. I felt like throwing myself face downward upon the ground, for I thought death awaited us in the saddle; but my guide spurred on, quite oblivious of me, murmuring:
“There is no God! but God!”
A moment more and the clouds were cleft in twain with an awful crash. The sky was spread with a sheet of darting flame, and the earth became so bright that I saw quite plainly the gray lizards crawling in a tuft of chih. Our horses wheeled about, but we used our spurs, and, giving them the rein, we fled on, not knowing whither we went. We were quite beside ourselves; we no longer knew what danger it was that lashed us on. My guide urged on my horse with a hempen whip; I shouted to his. Again and again lurid flashes of lightning diffused about as dazzling circles which we traversed with a bound only to enter again into the terrible darkness. How long had we been flying? How many times had we barely escaped those awful thunderbolts? I knew only that we sped like bullets till we struck suddenly against a black cone which loomed up in our course.
Human cries rent the air, mingled with the howls of dogs.
We were trampling down somebody’s tent.
“Have a care, friend!” cried a voice from the darkness. “Thou art welcome. I would that thy countenance were known—that thou hadst come while it was yet day, but praised be God who sent thee to thy servants to herald the rain.”
We leaped from our saddles and sprang under cover just in time to escape a cascade from the clouds that would have drenched our very bones.
My host told me in the morning that he was about setting out in company with all the men of the douar to meet a distinguished hadj who had just made his third pilgrimage to the Kaaba and Medina, one of the Brotherhood of Lidi-Abd-el-Kader-el-Djilani, who was now regarded as almost a saint.
Upon their return, there was to be a festival. In the afternoon, a banquet of cuckoos, several roast sheep and honey-cakes would be served; this would be followed by target-practice and dancing—that is, there would be dancing-girls to entertain us. The tent occupied by these girls was in the remotest part of the semi-circle which the douar described. I could see it at a distance; the borders were drawn up and something red showed from beneath.
I was talking to a youth who asked me in good faith whether I believed in God and whether it were true that the Europeans married their sisters. He was evidently studying me as a kind of savage beyond the reach of Mohammed. Several young women passed by us, bending beneath the weight of black leathern bottles. The water glued their thin robes to their skin. They wore no undergarments, and the wind which tossed their torn clothing, revealed their whole figures in clear profile. Some were bearing on their heads bundles of briars which they steadied with their hands. Their arms were long and well shaped; their throats had no voluptuous fullness; their figures were almost straight up and down. They looked to me like primitive caryatids of Asia.
My host had a daughter who was barely sixteen; his niece was about twenty. These girls were eyeing me from afar and could not resist their curiosity to see and speak to the Roumi, who was evidently bored by the youth talking to him. Under the pretext of bringing me some water, they came up, one behind the other. They looked very pretty with their abundant hair intertwined with coral and their smooth cheeks mingling the hues of amber and rose. The Roumi took the bowl and drank with his eyes on his pretty servitors. As the eldest seemed surprised at this impertinence, he apologized for daring to drink in her presence, and, the ice being broken, they chatted freely. They sank their dark eyes into the depths of mine, and smiled till their beautiful teeth dazzled me.
“Why do you not cut off your moustache up to your lip? Why don’t you shave half of your head? you look like a monkey with all that hair falling over your face! Of what kind of cloth are your clothes made? Let us see, please, how it is sewed together. Did your wife make it? Tell us now—won’t you?—if your wives look like us?”
The elder who plied all these questions was half reclining in the sand, resting her body on her right hand and leaning forward so as to gain my ear. I answered her with the first lines of a song:
Thy cheeks are red without fard!”
She completed the stanza:
Thou who hast hurled me upon the mountain!”
Then she turned her face toward the furthest tent, through whose lifted borders something red shone, and said, abruptly:
“Dost thou know Khamissa?”
“What Khamissa?”
“The dancer.”
“No!”
“Then give us something right away, because, as soon as thou hast seen her, thy heart will burn itself out, and then wilt thou have nothing to do with us!”
I had in my pocket a little mirror which I gave her. The younger girl took my silk handkerchief and begged also for a red girdle I wore. So they plundered me outright—the little savages—and I was obliged to smile.
Fortunately for me, some shots were heard; sharp you-yous echoed along the line of the tents. The hadj was approaching from the depth of a ravine. There were at least thirty cavaliers attending him, all mounted on spirited horses which galloped over the brow of the hill, their tails flying. More than one of these horsemen wore only a shirt, a shabby sort of a burnous over his shoulders, a rag twisted around his head, and was mounted on a wooden saddle with no covering, and only two ends of rope for a bridle! I cannot describe the effect as they came riding over the hill, their bronzed legs pressing the flanks of their steeds. What a superb poverty it was! What wonderful bandits these men were!
The holy pilgrim permitted himself to be borne on a mule’s back. His eyes were half closed, his cheeks looked pale beneath a large turban of white muslin. He trembled a little as he set foot upon the ground, and still more when he seated himself in the midst of a group of young people, who looked at him with profound awe. I suggested giving him some quinine, but I was informed that it was the fear of God which caused him to tremble; the hadj thanked me with a glance which said I was only a pagan, or else I was a terrible blunderer! The women of the douar had hidden themselves. They dared not appear before this holy man, perhaps for fear his sanctity should suffer. Angels have fallen for love of women.
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