‘THE ROMANCE OF A SPAHI.'

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VII, Issue 10, 7 March 1891, Page 7

‘THE ROMANCE OF A SPAHI.'

France’s occupations in Africa are little understood by those who simply read that troops are stationed in certain places, and advances are made into the interior occasionally by the soldiers to suppress tribal disputes or to contend against the cruel and barbarous natives who rebel against foreign control. The life of a soldier is of little moment to those who watch the advances of Europeans in that Dark Continent, and the trials endured and the barrack life which is led are almost hidden secrets. Pierre Loti has given the public some idea of those minor details of occupation in a country where solitudes spread everywhere with a sad monotony, without a vestige of life—only the moving sand hills, the boundless horizons and the blazing light of the sun.

This is on the coast of Africa after passing the southern extremity of Morocco, and at the Saint Louis of the Senegal, the capital of Senegambia, where there is no fruit, nothing but the arachis and the bitter pistachio. In the sad autumns there are great hot plains, gloomy and desolate, and withered herbs and stunted palms, and vultures, bats and lizards. But there are wonderful fish in the river Senegal. ‘ The women carry on their heads baskets full of them and the young black girls return to their lodgings crowned with crawling fishes pierced through the gills. ’ The life at St. Louis is dreary snd monotonous and the idle cavalryman or spahi seeks pleasure where he can find it, and it is not strange that a cabaret should be visited, where wild bacchanalian orgies are held and where the morning finds the floor covered with broken glasses and bottles, and here and there a soldier in a sea of beei and alcohol. Occasionally a march is made where great marshes, covered with the dreary vegetation of mangroves, are passed, and stunted trees and pools of stagnant water covered with thick white vapour and the air heavy with the sickening odour, and everywhere skeletons and decaying bodies of camels and at night the jackal and hyena’s sharp cries. In the month of May come the fii st rains and the tornado, when the skies are terrible and the rain is torrential, and a grand confusion among the unsheltered human beings and horses and other domestic-animals v ith the elements make a pandemonium of noises. But nature is rejuvenated. The celebrations then conre of the fleeting and feverish spring time and the native marriages. It is the return of butterflies and of life. The griots. native minstrels, strike their tam-tams and the wild and voluptuous dances are held and the drinking of the kouss-kouss, made from coarse meal of millet, which is beaten with pestles in mortars, follows. These scenes are always noisy, and to the European disgusting at first, but the constant witnessing of them wears off the edge of civilized criticism, and something like music is found in the droning of the Nubians and the wild beating of the tam-tams.

It is in such a country where have been exiled so many young soldiers, whose return to their native country, while an oft-repeated dream, has never been realised. Theii bones were left to bleach upon the arid sands.