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The Riffi turban, of strings of dark red wool, was wound round his head; a white shirt showed at his neck; he wore a black waistcoat, a white tunic down to his knees, and red knicks, below which came his long hairy shanks, ending in a pair of yellow slippers.
A Riffi sat on a stool in the sun, leaning against the vine, nursing his gun; his single long black lock fell down by his ear, glossy and tied in a knot at the end. Next door a gunsmith was at work in his little shop sand-papering a gun-stock: a sheep was penned inside against the Great Feast, and more sheep in the grocer's beyond.
After two or three mistakes, we hit upon the right one, and knocked at an old, battered, rat-eaten entrance falling to pieces. "Anna. Tabiba," called Miss Banks; and the door was opened by a countryman, a Riffi, rough-looking, only a coarse jellab over him, but with a kind expression on his face. The space inside was something like a chicken-pen.
Hadj Riffi himself had obeyed his Prophet Mohammed in so far as to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. A journey the prospect of which would horrify a tradesman at home is undertaken by an earnest-minded shop-keeping Moor as a matter of course. What are the twelve uncomfortable days by sea to Jeddah?
"Manage with bread and butter till God brings the jam." On the whole we fared not amiss, while our establishment, with its two Riffi servants, man and wife, worked well, until an occurrence took place which shook it to its very foundations, and left us to the end with a question which will never be solved.
His name was S`lam Ben Haddon Riffi of Bekiona, son of Haddon and of Fettouch Ben Haddon of Bekiona. S`lam's wife was Tahara. He had served for a year in the French army in Algeria, in the 2nd Regiment of Tirailleurs Algériens; and having picked up a little French, we learnt, with a few Arabic words, to understand each other. He and Tahara spoke Shillah to each other.
The coloured leather belts which they wear; the large embroidered leather pouches, with deep-cut leather fringes, which hold bullets and powder and money and hemp-tobacco; their shaved heads, with one long oiled and combed or plaited lock; their turbans, red or brown, of strings of wool, all complete a Riffi, and a very fine-looking fellow he can be.
Others that he was shot by some Riffi brothers because he was in the habit of talking to their sister. Others that the murder was connected with his having lived at one time with a Moorish woman, from whom he eventually separated. No one will ever know. Jinan Dolero would have been called in the Riviera "a villa": it was a typical Moorish garden-house.
The Villa Valentina breakfasted at 12.45, and cut the morning short. We were out again later with a guide Hadj Riffi he called himself bent on a visit to the Kasbah, or fortress of the city.
Tahara was a pretty, pale, dark girl, with curious cabalistic Riffi marks tattooed in blue on her forehead and chin.
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