Maieddine did not want the coffee, but it would have been an insult to
refuse, and he made laboured conversation with the Kebir, his eyes and
thoughts fixed on the Caid's gate and the yellow motor-car. He hardly
saw the tents, beneath whose low-spread black wings eyes looked out at
him, as the bright eyes of chickens look out from under the mother-hen's
feathers. They were all much alike, though the Kebir's, as befitted his
position, was the best, made of wide strips of black woollen material
stitched together, spread tightly over stout poles, and pegged down into
the hard sand. There was a partition dividing the tent in two, a
partition made of one or two old haicks, woven by hand, and if Maieddine
had been interested, he could have seen his host's bedding arranged for
the day; a few coarse rugs and _frechias_ piled up carelessly, out of
the way. There was a bale of camels' hair, ready for weaving, and on top
of it a little boy was curled up asleep. From the tent-poles hung an
animal's skin, drying, and a cradle of netted cords in which swung and
slept a swaddled baby no bigger than a doll. It was a girl, therefore
its eyes were blackened with kohl, and its eyebrows neatly sketched on
with paint, as they had been since the unfortunate day of its birth,
when the father grumbled because it was not a "child," but only a
worthless female.
The mother of the four weeks' old doll, a fine young woman tinkling with
Arab silver, left her carpet-weaving to grind the coffee, while her
withered mother-in-law brightened with brushwood the smouldering fire of
camel-dung.
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