A BREATH OF DESERT AIR.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3380, 27 June 1927, Page 8

A BREATH OF DESERT AIR.

(By Rosita Forbes.)

A blazing sun and an insistent sirocco, which the Arabs calT~“Wind of Madness,” accompanied our venture into the Riff.

From the fertile plains, where thousands of camels, with foals which look like absurd woolly toys, and tens oi thousands of sheep are pastured on rich emerald downs, we motored into the barren hills, where a lew wellplaced snipers could hold up a battalion.

Melsnassa village, which remained loyal in the recent war, though Abd-ei-Krim’s riflemen were within sight, was a collection of rough stone jam-pots impaled on a hill, and each roof was ornamented with a large, untidy nest, beside which stood a couple of storks, each poised on a single scarlet leg, like an artificial flower on a stalk.

Immediately we were in the recent war zone, and the mountains, incredibly barren, like great dunes speckled with stubble, were scarred with trenches and the remnants of barbed wire, A platoon of Senegalese, their scarlet caps an amusing contrast to their ebony faces, marked with the deep cuts of the Shilluk, sign of their tribal manhood, passed ns, exchanging cheerful greetings with Riffians in dark burnouses woven out of goats’ hair, lor there are few sheep in the Riff. Lonely posts, like pill-boxes, wrapped in wire entanglements, crowned incredible peaks, and told tales ol an epic defence, when a. handful of troops held at hay hordes of tribesmen—indistinguishable from the rocks in their earth-brown garments, turbans discarded, so that only one twisted topknot curled above shaven heads —until water and ammunition were exhausted. Now the road runs straight into the heart of the Riff, seventy kilometres north from Taza, and every day it follows the telephone wires nearer and nearer to the Spanish frontier. The weekly market was in progress where rare olive trees made delightful shade amid a foam of almond and peach blossom.

From every gully, where the Berbers live in caves, huddled familiarly with their goats and chickens, and from every apparently deserted peak came stalwart, dark-skinned tribesmen and women with a dingy cotton haik bundled up over a couple of ragged chemists, the only relief to their neutral coloring being their enormous carrings of white metal and red beads, or the tarnished silver pins, the size of daggers, with which they fasten at once their superfluous garments and the chains, necklaces and amulet cases which adorn them.

The goods came to market in the most haphazard fashion. One Jean dark-skinned camel stalked along, superciliously indifferent to any obstacle, with a basket-like erection on his back, from which peered a woman, whose cheeks and finger-nails were I equally orange with henna, her lap full of hens, babies and a black kid. A bullock was laden with young live-stock tied up among strings of onions, a pair of dangling sandals and a load of firewood.

The market took place within a square of temporary canvas shelters, and, as no one appeared to he rich enough to buy a whole goat, the price of which was approximately a pound, the wretched animals were slaughtered, skinned and dissected in front of prospective customers, and after their more attractive portions were carried off, slung across some brown burnousod back, the remainder was stuck on a sort of gibbet, beside which a story-teller announced with raucous insistence : “Listen, and learn wisdom, for in my story " are more events than eyes in the tail of a peacock!” The Riffs are agreeably lazy. If they cannot fight, they prefer to do nothing at all but gossip and drink mintflavoured tea. Their land is barren and they do not take the trouble to cultivate more than is necessary for a bare existence—after all, before France extended the frontier of civilisation, .if one were hungry, one could always raid one’s defenceless neighbours. The erstwhile warriors crouched beside the booths, bargaining for strongly scented soap, which they always licked to test its value, and watching cheery tirallenrs buying gay silk kerchiefs for tlie ladies of thier large and elastic hearts.

On the edge of the throng sat the kaid, a staunch ally of France since 191.4, who had been forced to fly to Algeria during some of the hostilities. He looked like one's childish conception of Abraham. With a carpet as a throne and an olive as canopy, he delivered justice to various vociferous litigants, and his judgments were never disputed, even when ho ordered a mountain thief to come unescorted to Taza the following Monday for several weeks’ imprisonment. I felt 1 had opened die; book of Genesis and that each descriptive sentence had quickened into action.