ound of chatter, and now and then a
bare brown child in a scant shirt would escape, and be hurriedly pulled
back with soft explosions of laughter, while a black woman came out to
readjust the curtains.

There were three of these negresses, splendid bronze creatures, wearing
white djellabahs over bright-coloured caftans, striped scarves knotted
about their large hips, and gauze turbans on their crinkled hair. Their
wrists clinked with heavy silver bracelets, and big circular earrings
danced in their purple ear-lobes. A languor lay on all the other inmates
of the household, on the servants and hangers-on squatting in the shade
under the arcade, on our monumental host and his smiling son; but the
three negresses, vibrating with activity, rushed continually from the
curtained chamber to the kitchen, and from the kitchen to the master's
reception-room, bearing on their pinky-blue palms trays of Britannia
metal with tall glasses and fresh bunches of mint, shouting orders to
dozing menials, and calling to each other from opposite ends of the
court; and finally the stoutest of the three, disappearing from view,
reappeared suddenly on a pale green balcony overhead, where, profiled
against a square of blue sky, she leaned over in a Veronese attitude and
screamed down to the others like an excited parrot.

In spite of their febrile activity and tropical bird-shrieks, we waited
in vain for tea; and after a while our host suggested to his son that I
might like to visit the ladies of the household. As I had expected, the
young man led me across the _patio_, lifted the cotton hanging and
introduced me into an apartment exactly like the one we had just left.
Divans covered with striped mattress-ticking stood against the white
walls, and on them sat seven or eight passive-looking women over whom a
number of pale children scrambled.

The eldest of the group, and evidently the mistress of the house,
was an Algerian lady, probably of about fifty, with a sad and
delicately-modelled face; the others were daughters, daughters-in-law
and concubines. The latter word evokes to occidental ears images of
sensual seduction which the Moroccan harem seldom realizes. All the
ladies of this dignified official household wore the same look of
somewhat melancholy respectability. In their stuffy curtained apartment
they were like cellar-grown flowers, pale, heavy, fuller but frailer
than the garden sort. Their dresses, rich but sober, the veils and
diad