Disorder reigned supreme; but Disorder, although a disheveled goddess,
is very often a picturesque one, and more of an artist than her
better-trained sisters; and the disorder was brightened with a thousand
vivid colors and careless touches that blent in confusion to enchant a
painter's eyes. The room was crammed with every sort of spoil that the
adventurous pillaging temper of the troopers could forage from Arab
tents, or mountain caves, or river depths, or desert beasts and birds.
All things, from tiger skins to birds' nests, from Bedouin weapons to
ostrich eggs, from a lion's mighty coat to a tobacco-stopper chipped out
of a morsel of deal, were piled together, pell-mell, or hung against
the whitewashed walls, or suspended by cords from bed to bed. Everything
that ingenuity and hardihood, prompted by the sharp spur of hunger,
could wrest from the foe, from the country, from earth or water, from
wild beasts or rock, were here in the midst of the soldiers' regimental
pallets and regimental arms, making the barracks at once atelier,
storehouse, workshop, and bazaar; while the men, cross-legged on their
little hard couches, worked away with the zest of those who work for the
few coins that alone will get them the food, the draught of wine, the
hour's mirth and indulgence at the estaminet, to which they look across
the long, stern probation of discipline and maneuver.
Skill, grace, talent, invention whose mother was necessity, and
invention that was the unforced offshoot of natural genius, were all
at work; and the hands that could send the naked steel down at a blow
through turban and through brain could shape, with a woman's ingenuity,
with a craftsman's skill, every quaint device and dainty bijou from
stone and wood, and many-colored feathers, and mountain berries, and
all odds and ends that chance might bring to hand, and that the women of
Bedouin tribes or the tourists of North Africa might hereafter buy with
a wondrous tale appended to them--racy and marvelous as the Sapir slang
and the military imagination could weave--to enhance the toys' value,
and get a few coins more on them for their manufacture.
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