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Updated: June 4, 2025
She seemed to recover from her emotion, and said quietly: "At least you will let me see the emerald?" Safti went to a small bureau that stood at the back of the room, opened one of its drawers with a key which he drew from beneath his dingy robe, lifted a small silver box carefully out, returned to the Princess, and put the box into her hand. "Open it," he said.
And then I give Safti five francs and my blessing, and he bids me "Bonne nuit!" and his ghostly figure is lost in the black shadows of the palm-trees. Oh, Safti works hard, very hard in winter. The other day I asked him: "Don't you get exhausted, Safti, with all this exertion to keep the Sahara home together? You are getting on in years now." "Ah yes, Sidi; I am already thirty-two, alas!"
As the ship glided out from the shore the old Countess hurried below. But the Princess remained on deck, leaning upon the bulwark, and gazing at the fading lights of the city where Safti dwelt. Two flames seemed burning in her heart, a fierce flame of joy, a fierce flame of contempt of contempt for herself. For was she not a common thief?
"I do not sell my medicines," Safti answered. "Those who use them must live near me, here in Tunis. When they are healed they give back to me the jewel that has saved them. But you you live far off." With the swiftness of a woman the Princess saw that persuasion would be useless. Safti's face looked hard as brown wood.
She found it difficult to speak, to explain her errand. At length she said: "You are a doctor? You can cure the sick?" Safti salaamed. "With jewels? Is that possible?" "Jewels are the only medicine," Safti replied, speaking with sudden volubility. "With the ruby I cure madness, with the white jade the disease of the hijada, and with the bloodstone haemorrhage.
Now that she saw it she felt the superstition that had sprung from her terror dying within her. Safti, with his crooked eyes, must have read her thought in her face, for he said: "The Princess is wrong. That medicine could cure her. The one who wears it for three months in each year can never be blind."
"I ran my eyes swiftly over the mob. Marnier was not in it. I pushed my way towards the doorway on the left which gave on to the court of the dancers. "Safti caught hold of my arm. "'It is not safe to go in there on such a night, Sidi. There are no lamps. It is black as a tomb. And no one can tell who may be there. Nomads, perhaps, men of evil from the south.
But as he spoke a tall youth in a single white garment glided into my view, his eyes bent down, his brown fingers fluttering on a long reed flute covered with red arabesques. His feet were bare, and he moved slowly. Safti hailed him with the accented violence peculiar to the Arabs. He stopped playing, looked, and smiled all over his young face.
The coffee nerved him to this stubborn exertion, and he spoke. "Sahah Sidi." "Merci." We sipped. "A day in summer, Sidi, when the great heats begin in June? Well, at five in the morning I get up "And light the fire," I murmured mechanically. The one eye stared in blank amazement. "Proceed, Safti. You get up at five. That is very early." "The sun rises at a quarter to five." "To call you. Well?"
When a Kabyle boy with a rosebud stuck under his turban had brought it languidly, I said to Safti: "And now, Safti, tell me how you pass your little holiday." Safti smiled gently in his beard. He was glad to have this moment of repose. "Each day is like its brother, Sidi," he responded, gazing out through the low doorway to the shimmering Sahara. "Then tell me how you pass a summer day."
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