Project Gutenberg's Smain; and Safti's Summer Day, by Robert Hichens

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Title: Smain; and Safti's Summer Day
1905

Author: Robert Hichens

Release Date: November 8, 2007 [EBook #23411]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SMAIN; AND SAFTI'S SUMMER DAY ***

Produced by David Widger

SMAIN; and SAFTI'S SUMMER DAY.

By Robert Hichens

Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers

Copyright, 1905

"_When the African is in love he plays upon the pipe._"

Sahara Saying.

SMAIN

Far away in the desert I heard the sound of a flute, pure sound in the
pure air, delicate, sometimes almost comic with the comicality of a
child who bends women to kisses and to nonsense-words. We had passed
through the sandstorm, Safti and I, over the wastes of saltpetre, and
come into a land of palm gardens where there was almost breathless calm.
The feet of the camels paddled over the soft brown earth of the narrow
alleys between the brown earth walls, and we looked down to right and
left into the shady enclosed spaces, seamed with water rills, dotted
with little pools of pale yellow water, and saw always giant palms,
with wrinkled trunks and tufted, deep green foliage, brooding in their
squadrons over the dimness they had made. The activity of man might be
discerned here in the regularity of the artificial rills, the ordered
placing of the trees, each of which, too, stood on its oval hump. But no
man was seen; no flat-roofed huts appeared; no robe, pale blue or white,
fluttered among the shadows; no dog blinked in the golden patches of
the sun--only the sound of the flute came to us from some hidden place
ceaselessly, wild and romantic, full of an odd coquetry, and of an
absurdity that was both uncivilised and touching.

I stopped to listen, and looked round, searching the vistas between the
palms.

"Where does it come from?" I asked of Safti.

His one eye blinked languidly.

"From some gardener among the trees. All who dwell in Sidi-Matou are
gardeners."

The persistent flute gave forth a shower of notes that were like drops
of water flung softly in our faces.

"He is in love," ad