We much admired the beautiful carpets and embroidered cushions on the marble floor, and the handsome silver and brass jugs, cups, and plates which adorned the Arab brackets, but we thought the four-poster bed, with white muslin curtains, which stood in the far corner, rather out of place. The young wife’s apartments consisted of two big rooms, about fourteen yards long by four wide, both leading out into a big square court with pink marble pillars, where palms and various other exotic plants flourished. In the centre was a fountain where goldfish glinted. Then we went to see the other wife, old, like her husband. Her room was big, her bed comfortable, her clothing good, but everything was of the simplest. Her only jewel was a tiny gold brooch fastening a drapery drawn round the head under the chin. She seemed too weary to talk. “Life is over for me,” she said. “My children are dead; my husband has not spoken to me for years. I, too, shall soon be gone.” And she clacked her tongue in her cheek in a dismally resigned fashion. I felt heavy-hearted as I went out. “How sad!” I said to Ben Aouda, one of the Bach-Agha’s three grown-up sons. “I thought she was your mother.” “My mother and my brothers’ mother has been dead a long time,” he replied. “That one”--and I distinguished a shade of contempt in his voice--“only gave my father daughters--feeble creatures who died young.” If an Arab woman wishes to retain any power she may ever have had over her husband, she must first be a mother, and, secondly, the mother of male children, strong and lusty. There are, of course, exceptions; I knew of one at Laghouat later. The two longed for a family. They made pilgrimages to all sorts of outlandish places. In accordance with Arab superstitions, the husband tore the still-throbbing heart out of countless jackals’ palpitating bodies and devoured it warm, while his wife wore all sorts of horrible fetishes round her neck and drank the blood of hyenas. It was all of no avail, but despite the advice and worrying of his family he refused to divorce her or to take another wife, as the law allowed him. But he was a very rare exception to the general rule. Besides the Bach-Agha’s, I used to visit at the rival house, where lived descendants of other rulers of Laghouat. Here I was often amused by the harmless little intrigues I came across. The master of the house possessed three very pretty and very young wives, ruled and guarded by his mother--one of the jolliest, gayest old ladies I have ever met. She was always draped in a spotless fine woollen _melhafa_, bordered with green. It was extraordinary, seeing the secluded life they led, how familiar these young wives were with Laghouat society. Peeping through their closely-latticed window, looking on to the road, they would say: “Ah! there goes Lieutenant This, or Captain That,” and then they would tell me stories concerning these officers that I had no idea of, and enjoy my surprise.