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Updated: May 12, 2025
"Speak, light of the morning and blessing of thy mother's soul," he said, and crowded into his mouth a roll of meat and cucumber. "Against thy feddan shall be set my date-tree; it hath been so ever."
One or two little cafés we passed round the feddan, and banished any connection between them and lunch for ever and a day. A little room in the shade hung with yellow matting, no chairs, but a wide divan at the far end, where a few Moors sat cross-legged or reclined, smoking long pipes of soothing kif, and eating the pernicious haschisch this constitutes a café.
But no one told Soada this, and she did not think; she was content to rest in the fleeting dream. "Give them twenty-four hours," said the black-visaged fat sergeant of cavalry come to arrest Mahommed Selim for desertion. The father of Mahommed Selim again offered the Mamour a feddan of land if the young man might go free, and to the sergeant he offered a she-camel and a buffalo. To no purpose.
Neither was she to be seen in the Feddan or at the Kasbah, or among the Arabs who sat in the red glow of the fires that burnt before their tents. At last Israel bethought him of the mearrah, and there he found her. It was dark, and the lonesome place was silent. The reflection of the lights of the town rose into the sky above it, and the distant hum of voices came over the black town walls.
"That is all the part that God plays in this land of iniquity and bloodshed. Away, away!" The people separated, and the Mahdi turned towards the Kasbah. As he approached it, the lanes leading to the Feddan were being cleared for the mad antics of the Aissawa.
Yet he had to pay a house-tax of five piastres, a war-tax of five piastres, a camel-tax of five piastres, a palm-tax of five piastres, a salt-tax of nine piastres, a poll-tax of thirty piastres, a land-tax of ninety piastres. The canal for which he was taxed gave his feddan of land no water, for the Pasha, the friend of the Government, took all the water for his own land."
Twilight was gathering in the Feddan under the Mosque, and the last light of day, which had parleyed longest with the snowy heights of the Reef Mountains, was glowing only on the sky above them. "Sweetheart," said Israel, "what is the sun?" "The sun is a fire in the sky," Naomi answered; "my Father lights it every morning."
The Jews' Quarter lies on one side of the feddan, shut in by a gate at night and locked a squalid, noisy, over-populated spot, where the worst-kept donkeys and most filth are to be met with.
That very night the conscription descended upon Mahommed Selim, and by sunrise he was standing in front of the house of the Mamour with twelve others, to begin the march to Dongola. Though the young man's father went secretly to the Mamour, and offered him backsheesh, even to the tune of a feddan of land, the Mamour refused to accept it.
After taking counsel, however, the luggage was dispatched down to Martine; a muleteer badly marked with small-pox climbed on the top of our worldly goods, and the mule jogged off: we would follow when the steamer was sighted. Walking into the feddan in search of information about her, every Moor or Jew only replied with shrugged shoulders and extended palms. Who could tell?
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