Outside the northern walls of Sfax was a large space where fodder was stacked, and charcoal and grain sold, and where the laden camels came stepping gravely along the white highway from the country, and here were small groups of men squatting round cooking pots, or Bedouins collecting round two negresses who were stirring beans over a charcoal fire, shredding in red pepper, the firelight playing on their broad features and flashing teeth.
The drone of native pipes from a ragged booth close under the walls, led us in that direction and we found two Soudanese doing a kind of dance, surrounded by a crowd of Arabs. They were in a medley of garments, one wearing an old khaki coat over his accordion-pleated shirt. It had once been white, but was stained and worn to an indeterminate shade. Dirty turbans were on their heads. One stood playing on a curious horned bagpipe, whilst the other revolved slowly round beating a drum, his hideous ebony face thrown back, his mouth opening and shutting, showing the pink interior and a thin tongue that quivered like an animal’s. Those who gave him money placed it in this horrid slot and he pouched it instantly in his cheek, all the time twisting and turning in a sort of dance. The last time I had seen anything of the sort was when I watched the ‘shimmy shake’ danced by Europeans on board a liner. There it had been an absurd travesty, civilisation playing at barbarism. Here was the original stuff, primitive and raw, under the intense blue of an Eastern sky, the sunlight pouring down on the scene and making great blocks of shadow under the awning and at the feet of stacked bales of pale yellow chaff.
The crowd were chiefly in neutral tints, broken with the bright crimson of a fez here and there, the warm madder of a cloak dyed in henna, or the brilliant lemon yellow of native slippers.
Along the road a group of Bedouins passed like a classic frieze against the white background of a marabou. Four camels in single file led by a man wrapped in a cloak, each laden camel topped by a huddled blue figure that bent and swayed to the motion. Two or three Bedouin women accompanied them on foot, in loose girdled robes, bearing burdens on their heads. Barefoot and erect they strode past, their olive throats covered with necklaces of coins, their handsome tattooed faces set to the open country. They are impatient even of the scant civilisation of the Souks. They are a people of free spaces and the wide sky; as soon might the kestrel companion with the dove, as these wild natures fraternise with city folk. And as they swung past, the frowning crenellated walls of the city looked down, as they have done for ages past, upon them and the bustle and crowd of the Souks, gazing beyond them to the gentian sea, whose calm they have watched ruffled by the prows of generations of conquerors who have come, have ruled, and in their turn become the dust blown hither and thither by the desert wind.