ARGAN FOREST

[Illustration: EVENING AT HANCHEN]

CHAPTER XI

IN THE ARGAN FOREST

Life, even at its greatest and best, may be compared to a froward
child, who must be humoured and played with till he falls asleep, and
then the care is over.

--_Goldsmith._

Early morning found the Tuesday market in full swing, and the town of
Hanchen already astir in honour of the occasion. To realise the importance
of the weekly gathering, it is well to remember that a market in the
country here is the only substitute for the bazaar of the towns. Every
douar within a ten-mile radius of Hanchen sends men and women to the
Tuesday market to buy and sell. So it befell that the hillside slope,
which was bare on the previous afternoon, hummed now like a hive, and was
well nigh as crowded. Rough tents of goats' or camels'-hair cloth
sheltered everything likely to appeal to the native mind and
resources,--tea, sugar, woollen and cotton goods, pottery, sieves,
padlocks, and nails being to all appearance the goods most sought after by
the country Moor. Quite a brisk demand for candles prevailed; they were
highly-coloured things, thick at the base and tapering to the wick. There
was a good sale too for native butter, that needed careful straining
before it could be eaten with comfort, and there were eggs in plenty,
fetching from twopence to threepence the dozen, a high price for Morocco,
and brought about by the export trade that has developed so rapidly in the
last few years. For the most part the traders seemed to be Berbers or of
evident Berber extraction, being darker and smaller than the Arabs, and in
some cases wearing the dark woollen outer garment, with its distinctive
orange-coloured mark on the back. Women and little children took no small
part in the market, but were perhaps most concerned with the sale of the
chickens that they brought from their homes, tied by the legs in bundles
without regard to the suffering entailed. The women did rather more than a
fair share of porters' work too. Very few camels were to be seen, but I
noticed one group of half a dozen being carefully fed on a cloth, because,
like all their supercilious breed, they were too dainty to eat from the
ground. They gurgled quite angrily over the question of precedence. A
little way from the tents in which hardware was exposed for sale, bread
was being baked in covered pans over a charcoal fire fanned by bellows,
while at the bott