She knew how to wash and mend her _bou-bous_ and _pagnes_. She was always as spotless as a black cat, dressed in white, partly from an instinct of cleanliness, partly because she realised that Jean would not tolerate her otherwise. But apart from this care of her person, she was incapable of any work. Since the poor old Peyrals were no longer able to send their son the small sums that little by little they had saved for him, since “nothing had gone well with them,” as old Françoise had written, so that they had even been obliged to have recourse to the spahi’s slender purse, Fatou’s budget was becoming very difficult to balance. Fortunately, Fatou was a steady little person, whose mode of life was not extravagant. Throughout the Soudan, woman is in a position of great inferiority as compared to man. Several times in the course of her life she is bought and sold like a head of cattle, and at a price which is estimated at inverse ratio to her ugliness, defects, and increasing age. One day Jean asked his friend Nyaor, “What have you done with your wife Nokhoudounkhotillé, the one who was so good-looking?” And Nyaor replied, with a quiet smile, “Nokhoudounkhotillé talked too much, so I sold her. With the money I got for her I bought thirty sheep who never talk at all.” The hardest work done by the negroes, the task of pounding millet for the kouss-kouss, devolves upon the women. From morning till night, throughout Nubia, from Timbuctoo to the coast of Guinea, in all the thatched huts, under the burning sun, the negresses’ wooden pestles are noisily pounding in the mortars of khaya wood. Thousands of braceletted arms weary themselves at this task, and the chattering, quarrelsome workers mingle with this monotonous sound their chorus of shrill voices, which seem to come from the throats of monkeys. The result is a very characteristic hubbub, audible from afar in the thickets and desert tracts leading to these African villages. The result of this eternal pounding, which has been practised by the women for generations, is a coarse flour of millet, which is made into a flavourless kind of gruel called _kouss-kouss_. _Kouss-kouss_ is the basis of the nourishment of the black races. Fatou evaded this traditional labour of the women of her race. Every evening she paid a visit to Coura n’diaye, the woman griot, the ancient poetess of King El Hadj. In return for a small monthly payment Fatou had the right to sit among the little slaves of the old favourite around great calabashes, smoking with hot kouss-kouss, and to satisfy the appetite of her sixteen years. From her raised position on her _tara_, where she lay upon fine mats of complicated design, the old cast-off favourite presided with imperturbable dignity.