“Oh, far distant moon: 
  Could I but see thee, Ali! 
  Ali, son of Sliman,
  The beard[4] of Milan
  Has gone to draw water. 
  Her cruse, it is broken;
  But he mends it with thread,
  And draws water with her: 
  He cried to Ayesha: 
  ’Give me my sabre,
  That I kill the merle
  Perched on the dunghill
  Where she dreams;
  She has eaten all my olives.’"[5]

[3] A sort of sandal.

[4] Affectionate term for a child.

[5] Hanoteau, v. 441-443.

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 role—­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