Tartarin Of Tarascon Part 12

"Faith! you wear the look of a good sort of fellow, so I would, rather than not, let you have it. Get you back quickly to Tarascon, Monsieur Tartarin, for you are wasting your time here. There do remain a few panthers in the colony, but, out upon the big cats! they are too small game for you. As for lion-hunting, that's all over. There are none left in Algeria, my friend Cha.s.saing having lately knocked over the last."

Upon which the little gentleman saluted, closed the door, and trotted away chuckling, with his doc.u.ment-wallet and umbrella.

"Guard," asked Tartarin, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up his face contemptuously, "who under the sun is that poor little mannikin?"

"What! don't you know him? Why, that there's Monsieur Bombonnel!"

III. A Monastery of Lions.

AT Milianah, Tartarin of Tarascon alighted, leaving the stage-coach to continue its way towards the South.

Two days' rough jolting, two nights spent with eyes open to spy out of window if there were not discoverable the dread figure of a lion in the fields beyond the road--so much sleeplessness well deserved some hours repose. Besides, if we must tell everything, since his misadventure with Bombonnel, the outspoken Tartarin felt ill at ease, notwithstanding his weapons, his terrifying visage, and his red cap, before the Orleansville photographer and the two ladies fond of the military.

So he proceeded through the broad streets of Milianah, full of fine trees and fountains; but whilst looking up a suitable hotel, the poor fellow could not help musing over Bombonnel's words. Suppose they were true! Suppose there were no more lions in Algeria? What would be the good then of so much running about and fatigue?

Suddenly, at the turn of a street, our hero found himself face to face with--with what? Guess! "A donkey, of course!" A donkey? A splendid lion this time, waiting before a coffee-house door, royally sitting up on his hind-quarters, with his tawny mane gleaming in the sun.

"What possessed them to tell me that there were no more of them?"

exclaimed the Tarasconian, as he made a backward jump.

On hearing this outcry the lion lowered his head, and taking up in his mouth a wooden bowl that was before him on the footway, humbly held it out towards Tartarin, who was immovable with stupefaction. A pa.s.sing Arab tossed a copper into the bowl, and the lion wagged his tail.

Thereupon Tartarin understood it all. He saw what emotion had prevented him previously perceiving: that the crowd was gathered around a poor tame blind lion, and that two stalwart Negroes, armed with staves, were marching him through the town as a Savoyard does a marmot.

The blood of Tarascon boiled over at once.

"Wretches that you are!" he roared in a voice of thunder, "thus to debase such n.o.ble beasts!"

Springing to the lion, he wrenched the loathsome bowl from between his royal jaws. The two Africans, believing they had a thief to contend with, rushed upon the foreigner with uplifted cudgels. There was a dreadful conflict: the blackamoors smiting, the women screaming, and the youngsters laughing. An old Jew cobbler bleated out of the hollow of his stall, "Dake him to the shustish of the beace!" The lion himself; in his dark state, tried to roar as his hapless champion, after a desperate struggle, rolled on the ground among the spilt pence and the sweepings.

At this juncture a man cleft the throng, made the Negroes stand back with a word, and the women and urchins with a wave of the hand, lifted up Tartarin, brushed him down, shook him into shape, and sat him breathless upon a corner-post.

"What, prince, is it you?" said the good Tartarin, rubbing his ribs.

"Yes, indeed, it is I, my valiant friend. As soon as your letter was received, I entrusted Baya to her brother, hired a post-chaise, flew fifty leagues as fast as a horse could go, and here I am, just in time to s.n.a.t.c.h you from the brutality of these ruffians. What have you done, in the name of just Heaven, to bring this ugly trouble upon you?"

"What done, prince? It was too much for me to see this unfortunate lion with a begging-bowl in his mouth, humiliated, conquered, buffeted about, set up as a laughing-stock to all this Moslem rabble"--

"But you are wrong, my n.o.ble friend. On the contrary, this lion is an object of respect and adoration. This is a sacred beast who belongs to a great monastery of lions, founded three hundred years ago by Mahomet Ben Aouda, a kind of fierce and forbidding La Trappe, full of roarings and wild-beastly odours, where strange monks rear and feed lions by hundreds, and send them out all over Northern Africa, accompanied by begging brothers. The alms they receive serve for the maintenance of the monastery and its mosques; and the two Negroes showed so much displeasure just now because it was their conviction that the lion under their charge would forthwith devour them if a single penny of their collection were lost or stolen through any fault of theirs."

On hearing this incredible and yet veracious story Tartarin of Tarascon was delighted, and sniffed the air noisily. "What pleases me in this,"

he remarked, as the summing up of his opinion, "is that, whether Monsieur Bombonnel likes it or not, there are still lions in Algeria."--

"I should think there were!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the prince enthusiastically.

"We will start to-morrow beating up the Sh.e.l.liff Plain, and you will see lions enough!"

"What, prince! have you an intention to go a-hunting, too?"

"Of course! Do you think I am going to leave you to march by yourself into the heart of Africa, in the midst of ferocious tribes of whose languages and usages you are ignorant! No, no, ill.u.s.trious Tartarin, I shall quit you no more. Go where you will, I shall make one of the party."

"O Prince! prince!"

The beaming Tartarin hugged the devoted Gregory to his breast at the proud thought of his going to have a foreign prince to accompany him in his hunting, after the example of Jules Gerard, Bombonnel, and other famous lion-slayers.

IV. The Caravan on the March.

LEAVING Milianah at the earliest hour next morning, the intrepid Tartarin and the no less intrepid Prince Gregory descended towards the Sh.e.l.liff Plain through a delightful gorge shaded with jessamine, carouba, tuyas, and wild olive-trees, between hedges of little native gardens and thousands of merry, lively rills which scampered down from rock to rock with a singing splash--a bit of landscape meet for the Lebanon.

As much loaded with arms as the great Tartarin, Prince Gregory had, over and above that, donned a queer but magnificent military cap, all covered with gold lace and a tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of oak-leaves in silver cord, which gave His Highness the aspect of a Mexican general or a railway station-master on the banks of the Danube.

This plague of a cap much puzzled the beholder; and as he timidly craved some explanation, the prince gravely answered:

"It is a kind of headgear indispensable for travel in Algeria."

Whilst brightening up the peak with a sweep of his sleeve, he instructed his simple companion in the important part which the military cap plays in the French connection with the Arabs, and the terror this article of army insignia alone has the privilege of inspiring, so that the Civil Service has been obliged to put all its employees in caps, from the extra-copyist to the receiver-general. To govern Algeria (the prince is still speaking) there is no need of a strong head, or even of any head at all. A military cap does it alone, if showy and belaced, and shining at the top of a non-human pole, like Gessler's.

Thus chatting and philosophising, the caravan proceeded. The barefooted porters leaped from rock to rock with ape-like screams. The guncases clanked, and the guns themselves flashed. The natives who were pa.s.sing, salaamed to the ground before the magic cap. Up above, on the ramparts of Milianah, the head of the Arab Department, who was out for an airing with his wife, hearing these unusual noises, and seeing the weapons gleam between the branches, fancied there was a revolt, and ordered the drawbridge to be raised, the general alarm to be sounded, and the whole town put under a state of siege. A capital commencement for the caravan!

Unfortunately, before the day ended, things went wrong. Of the black luggage-bearers, one was doubled up with atrocious colics from having eaten the diachylon out of the medicine-chest: another fell on the roadside dead drunk with camphorated brandy; the third, carrier of the travelling-alb.u.m, deceived by the gilding on the clasps into the persuasion that he was flying with the treasures of Mecca, ran off into the Zaccar on his best legs.

This required consideration. The caravan halted, and held a council in the broken shadow of an old fig-tree.

"It's my advice that we turn up Negro porters from this evening forward," said the prince, trying without success to melt a cake of compressed meat in an improved patent triple-bottomed sauce-pan. "There is, haply, an Arab trader quite near here. The best thing to do is to stop there, and buy some donkeys."

"No, no; no donkeys," quickly interrupted Tartarin, becoming quite red at memory of Noiraud. "How can you expect," he added, hypocrite that he was, "that such little beasts could carry all our apparatus?"

The prince smiled.

"You are making a mistake, my ill.u.s.trious friend. However weakly and meagre the Algerian bourriquot may appear to you, he has solid loins. He must have them so to support all that he does. Just ask the Arabs. Hark to how they explain the French colonial organisation. 'On the top,' they say, 'is Mossoo, the Governor, with a heavy club to rap the staff; the staff, for revenge, canes the soldier; the soldier clubs the settler, and he hammers the Arab; the Arab smites the Negro, the Negro beats the Jew, and he takes it out of the donkey. The poor bourriquot having n.o.body to belabour, arches up his back and bears it all.' You see clearly now that he can bear your boxes."

"All the same," remonstrated Tartarin, "it strikes me that jacka.s.ses will not chime in nicely with the effect of our caravan. I want something more Oriental. For instance, if we could only get a camel"--

"As many as you like," said His Highness; and off they started for the Arab mart.

It was held a few miles away, on the banks of the Sh.e.l.liff. There were five or six thousand Arabs in tatters here, grovelling in the sunshine and noisily trafficking, amid jars of black olives, pots of honey, bags of spices; and great heaps of cigars; huge fires were roasting whole sheep, basted with b.u.t.ter; in open air slaughter-houses stark naked Negroes, with ruddy arms and their feet in gore, were cutting up kids hanging from crosspoles, with small knives.

In one corner, under a tent patched with a thousand colours, a Moorish clerk of the market in spectacles scrawled in a large book. Here was a cl.u.s.ter of men shouting with rage: it was a spinning-jenny game, set on a corn-measure, and Kabyles were ready to cut one another's throats over it. Yonder were laughs and contortions of delight: it was a Jew trader on a mule drowning in the Sh.e.l.liff. Then there were dogs, scorpions, ravens, and flies--rather flies than anything else.

But a plentiful lack of camels abounded. They finally unearthed one, though, of which the M'zabites were trying to get rid--the real ship of the desert, the cla.s.sical, standard camel, bald, woe-begone, with a long Bedouin head, and its hump, become limp in consequence of unduly long fasts, hanging melancholically on one side.

Tartarin considered it so handsome that he wanted the entire party to get upon it. Still his Oriental craze!

The beast knelt down for them to strap on the boxes.