With daybreak we find the town of Chellata preparing to play its
role as a mart or place of industry. The labor seems at first sight,
however, to be confined to the children and the women: the former lead
the flocks out at sunrise to pasture in the mountain, the women make
the town ring with their busy work, whether of grinding at the mill,
weaving stuff or making graceful vases in pottery. The men are at work
in the fields, from which they return at nightfall, sullen, hardy and
silent, in their tattered haiks. These are never changed among the
poor working-people, for the scars of a bornouse are as dignified as
those of the body, and are confided with the garment by a father to
his son. The women, as we have remarked before, are in a state of
far greater liberty than are the female Arabs, but it is more than
anything else the liberty to toil. Among these mountaineers the wife
is a chattel from whom it is permissible to extract all the usefulness
possible, and whom it is allowable to sell when a bargain can be
struck. The Kabyle woman's sole recreation is her errand to the
fountain. This is sometimes situated in the valley, far from the
nodding pillar or precipice on which the town is built. There the
traveler finds the good wives talking and laughing together, bending
their lively--sometimes blonde and blue-eyed--faces together over
their jars, and gossiping as in Naples or as in the streets around
Notre Dame in Paris.
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