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Your Oriental, as a rule, becomes hungry at the sight of a fair landscape; he manifests a sudden yearning for food. Not so these Souafa; they must have their native kif on such occasions. They are all, I am sorry to say, partakers of the pernicious drug. "You have forgotten your kif?" I asked. "Well, that was an oversight!"
Not a word is spoken. Hand him your pipe, if you are wise, and let him fill it for you. This kif, they say, affects people differently; but I think that, as a general effect, you will discover a genial warmth stealing through your limbs, while the things of this world begin to reveal themselves in a more spiritual perspective. I thought of the sunset this afternoon, as viewed from Sidi Mansur.
It must have been a fit of temporary obliviousness, brought about by the unaccustomed heat of the sun. Or possibly the kif.... It affects people differently. I must limit myself to three pipes, in future.
The day is yet young, methought; it is too hot to think of marching home at this hour. Now is the time, rather, for a pipe of kif if only to demonstrate the difference that exists between man and the ape. For your monkey can be taught to eat and drink like a Christian; he can even learn to smoke tobacco. But he cannot smoke kif: the stuff would choke him.
All night, he sang a sad song of his native country, a song which echoed through the whole mountain. Another, a Spaniard, was as if maddened: he tried to bite. It was necessary to kill him. Many have died of kif, a kif that is more violent than opium. When they no longer have Antinea, they smoke, smoke. Most have died that way ... the happiest. Little Kaine died differently.
He begged a match from Cadour, produced a ragged cigarette from inside his turban, and lit it skilfully in the wind: he probably lived chiefly on cigarettes, kif, and green tea, eating when there was bread; he was lean and sun-dried as a shred of tobacco, would sleep in snatches and often, his jellab-hood over his face to keep off the sun or the dew.
Now and then the musicians broke into a strange song, and the guests beat their hands and murmured in chorus; then again they would seem half intoxicated, in a harmless fashion, with kif and wine and music, and would appear to be absent in a world of their own.
He was a long-limbed fellow, bronzed and bearded, with the vacant, glassy eyes of a kif-smoker; for kif kept him going often instead of food, and helped him to swing along day after day, untiring, like a camel, sleeping little, praying occasionally at a saint's tomb, fording the streams, trotting over the plains, his eyes fixed on the horizon "eating the miles," as Arabs say.
Looking down from these sandy heights, I found that we had followed a tortuous river of green palms, that flowed through yellow sands into a distant lake of the same green the oasis. But the companion had become quite silent. He was bewitched, apparently, by the rural charms of this place. At last he said: "If only I had brought some kif to smoke!"
Below, down in the square, the picketed mules stamped and munched barley; the muleteers' voices, back under the arches in the colonnade, arose and fell, round a fire where green tea was brewing and much kif was in course of being smoked; occasionally an owl hooted.
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