Halima And The Scorpions

Halima And The Scorpions, by
Robert Hichens

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Title: Halima And The Scorpions 1905
Author: Robert Hichens
Release Date: November 8, 2007 [EBook #23414]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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Produced by David Widger

HALIMA AND THE SCORPIONS
By Robert Hichens
Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers

Copyright, 1905
In travelling about the world one collects a number of those trifles of
all sorts, usually named "curiosities," many of them worthless if it were
not for the memories they recall. The other day I was clearing out a
bureau before going abroad, and in one of the drawers I came across a
hedgehog's foot, set in silver, and hung upon a tarnished silver chain. I
picked it up in the Sahara, and here is its history.
*****
Mohammed El Aïd Ben Ali Tidjani, marabout of Tamacine, is a great
man in the Sahara Desert. His reputation for piety reaches as far as
Tunis and Algiers, to the north of Africa, and to the uttermost parts of
the Southern Desert, even to the land of the Touaregs. He dwells in a
sacred village of dried mud and brick, surrounded by a high wall,
pierced with loopholes, and ornamented with gates made of palm wood,
and covered with sheets of iron. In his mansion, above the entrance of
which is written "L'Entrée de Sidi Laïd," are clocks innumerable,
musical boxes, tables, chairs, sofas, and even framed photographs.
Negro servants bow before him, wives, brothers, children, and
obsequious hangers-on of various nationalities, black, bronze, and café
au lait in colour, offer him perpetual incense. Rich worshippers of the
Prophet and the Prophet's priests send him presents from afar; camels
laden with barley, donkeys staggering beneath sacks of grain, ostrich
plumes, silver ornaments, perfumes, red-eyed doves, gazelles whose
tiny hoofs are decorated with gold-leaf or painted in bright colours. The
tributes laid before the tomb of Cheikh Sidi El Hadj Ali ben Sidi El
Hadj Aïssa are, doubtless, his perquisites as guardian of the saint. He
dresses in silks of the tints of the autumn leaf, and carries in his mighty
hand a staff hung with apple-green ribbons. And his smile is as the
smile of the rising sun in an oleograph.
This personage one day blessed the hedgehog's foot I at present possess,
and endowed it solemnly with miraculous curative properties. It would
cure, he declared, all the physical ills that can beset a woman. Then he
gave it into the hands of a great Agha, who was about to take a wife,
accepted a tribute of dates, a grandfather's clock from Paris, and a

grinding organ of Barbary as a small acknowledgment of his generosity,
and probably thought very little more about the matter.
Now, in the course of time, it happened that the hedgehog's foot came
into the possession of a dancing-girl of Touggourt, called Halima. How
Halima got hold of it I cannot say, nor does anyone in Touggourt
exactly know, so far as I am aware. But, alas! even Aghas are
sometimes human, and play pitch and toss with magical things. As
Grand Dukes who go to disport themselves in Paris sometimes hie
them incognito to the "Café de la Sorcière," so do Aghas flit
occasionally to Touggourt, and appear upon the high benches of the
great dancing-house of the Ouled Nails in the outskirts of the city. And
Halima was young and beautiful. Her eyes were large, and she wore a
golden crown ornamented with very tall feathers. And she danced the
dance of the hands and the dance of the fainting fit with great
perfection. And the wives of Aghas have to put up with a good deal.
However it was, one evening Halima danced with the hedgehog's foot
that had been blessed dangling from her jewelled girdle. And there was
a great scandal in the city.
For in the four quarters of Touggourt, the quarter of the Jews, of the
foreigners, of the freed negroes, and of the citizens proper, it was
known that the hedgehog's foot had been blessed and endowed with
magical powers by the mighty marabout of Tamacine.
Halima herself affirmed it, standing at the front door of her terraced
dwelling in the court, while the other dancers gathered round, looking
like a troop of macaws in their feathers and their finery. With a brazen
pride she boasted that she possessed something worth more than uncut