Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/81

Rh its resting place, the grave was filled, and the widow and the parents of the deceased began distributing bread and figs to the beggars, following out the Arab belief that each seed in the figs given at the grave to a beggar will lessen the period of the deceased's punishment in the next world by a year. Mohabad, or tombstones, were then placed at the head and the foot of the grave. As they began their incantations, the burning of incense and fresh lamentations, I turned and left the cemetery, through whose somber cypresses an evening wind from Terni murmured a soft accompaniment to their final funeral rites.

When night had dropped her mantle full upon the earth and the moon had set sail across the sky, augmenting the mystery of everything around us, Zofiette and I, accompanied by an acquaintance, a French official who had long been a resident in Algeria, strolled out of the town along a road that ran between orchards and vineyards in the direction of El-Eubbad. Finally, when we came upon a fountain by the roadside, we sat down on the stones that flanked it and listened to the low murmur of the unbroken stream and to the drowsy notes of birds and insects.

Suddenly a human voice broke this silence, so full of lesser sounds. How strange it is that the stillness of the night remains a silence, though it be replete with sounds, all of which it absorbs and takes within itself without an echo, yet that it is itself frightened and driven temporarily away by one loud note of a human voice.

We looked behind us and discovered a large garden on the other side of a hedge of Berber figs, within which a swing, that hung from a branch of one of the trees,