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But that you are brave men, and that I have ever met you in fair fight, let me speak one word with you first." Through the menaces and the rage around her, fierce as the yelling of starving wolves around a frozen corpse, her clear, brave tones reached the ear of the chief in the lingua sabir that she used.
She had apparently paused in her dancing to exchange one of those passes of arms which were her specialty, in the Sabir that she, a child of the regiments of Africa, had known as her mother tongue. "You call him a misanthrope?" she cried disdainfully. "And you have been drinking at his expense, you rascal?" The grumbled assent of the accused was inaudible.
He had lived with them for two years, in their tents, the devil knows where. He presented me to their chief, Sheik Otham, and to four others, splendid fellows in their blue cotton draperies and their amulets of red leather. Fortunately, they all spoke a kind of sabir which helped things along.
When seated, I commenced uttering a few phrases of condolence, but he replied to me in Turkish. This mode of conversing had its difficulties, so he, seeing that I could not understand him, started off into a Sabir or Italianised French, pronounced in an accent which I will not attempt to describe. "Povera Eccellenza Barbassou-Pacha! finito morto?"
With which fiery and bitter enunciation of her views on the gifts of the Princesse Corona d'Amague, Cigarette struck light to her brule-guele, and thrusting it between her lips, with her hands in the folds of her scarlet waist-sash, went off with the light, swift step natural to her, exaggerated into the carriage she had learned of the Zouaves; laughing her good-morrows noisily to this and that trooper as she passed their couches, and not dropping her voice even as she passed the place where the dead lay, but singing, as loud as she could, the most impudent drinking-song out of the taverns of the Spahis that ever celebrated wine, women, and war in the lawlessness of the lingua Sabir.
"Be careful," I said to him in a whisper; "it is my aunt. Keep your counsel, and don't let her suspect anything." Then I went through the formal introduction, delivering it in the famous sabir which I told you of. Mohammed in the same idiom was fashioning a compliment as profound as it was difficult to understand, when my aunt all at once answered him in the purest Turkish.
The chief who led them pressed them back, withholding them from the end that was so near to their hands when they should stretch that single ring of horsemen all lifeless in the dust. "You are great warriors," he cried, in the Sabir tongue; "surrender; we will spare!"
"To be sure," said the baron, withdrawing his hand to unlock the door, which opened noiselessly, disclosing the lofty private office with its one lamp burning in front of the capacious, empty armchair. "Ya didon, Mouci," said the poor Nabob, trying to jest, and resorting to the sabir patois to remind his old chum of all the pleasant reminiscences they had overhauled the day before.
Immediately we are made at home, but conversation languishes. He knows nothing but the pure Kabyle tongue, and cannot speak the mixed language of the coasts, called Sabir, which is the pigeon-French of Algiers and Philippeville. "Enta sabir el arbi?" "Knowest thou Arabic?" asks our host. "Makach" "No," we reply. "Enta sabir el Ingles?" "Canst thou speak English?"
Each of these has its appropriate offering, a long embroidered flag for the first, a cock for the second, and a piece of cloth for the third. Other celebrated shrines are those of Bahauddin Madar Shah at Nakkanpur in the Cawnpore district, and of Ala-uddin Sabir at Piran Kaliar in Saharanpur."
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