In the same category one may find the songs which are peculiar to the women, "couplets with which they accompany themselves in their dances; the songs, the complaints which one hears them repeat during whole hours in a rather slow and monotonous rhythm while they are at their household labors, turning the hand-mill, spinning and weaving cloths, and composed by the women, both words and music."[6] One of the songs, among others, and the most celebrated in the region of the Oued-Sahal, belonging to a class called Deker, is consecrated to the memory of an assassin, Daman-On-Mesal, executed by a French justice. As in most of these couplets, it is the guilty one who excites the interest: "The Christian oppresses. He has snatched away This deserving young man; He took him away to Bougre, The Christian women marvelled at him. Pardieu! O Mussulmans, you Have repudiated Kabyle honor." [7] [6] Hanoteau, Preface, p. iii. [7] Hanoteau, p. 94. With the Berbers of lower Morocco the women's songs are called by the Arab name Eghna. If the woman, as in all Mussulman society, plays an inferior rôle--inferior to that allowed to her in our modern civilizations--she is not less the object of songs which celebrate the power given her by beauty: "O bird with azure plumes, Go, be my messenger-- I ask thee that thy flight be swift; Take from me now thy recompense. Rise with the dawn--ah, very soon-- For me neglect a hundred plans; Direct thy flight toward the fount, To Tanina and Cherifa. "Speak to the eyelash-darkened maid, To the beautiful one of the pure, white throat; With teeth like milky pearls. Red as vermillion are her cheeks; Her graceful charms have stol'n my reason; Ceaselessly I see her in my dreams."[8] "A woman with a pretty nose Is worth a house of solid stone; I'd give for her a hundred reaux,[9] E'en if she quitted me as soon. "Arching eyebrows on a maid, With love the genii would entice, I'd buy her for a thousand reaux, Even if exile were the price. "A woman neither fat nor lean Is like a pleasant forest green, When she unfolds her budding charms, She gleams and glows with springtime sheen."[10] [8] Hanoteau, p. 350-357 [9] Reais [10] Hanoteau, pp. 302, 303 The same sentiment inspires the Touareg songs, among which tribe women enjoy much greater liberty and possess a knowledge of letters greater than that of the men, and know more of that which we should call literature, if that word were not too ambitious: