Where the Sheep Came Down to Drink
Noon, and the flock goes down to the river.
A hundred white backs on the stones.
She stood above them and counted,
and later tied what she had seen.
At noon in summer the Beni Ourain flocks go down to the river, and from the slope above you see a hundred white backs moving slowly across grey stones with the odd dark one among them. A weaver stands up there every day of her childhood. When she sits at the loom she does not have to think about the colours; she has them already, the white and the near-white and the one brown, and the long open field with a few marks on it is simply what a flock looks like from above.
This one is nearly four metres long and twenty kilos, a serious tent rug knotted for a big family and a long winter. The two centimetre pile is dense and has worn evenly, and the cream has the depth that only forty years of a house can give it. It wants a long room: a dining table for ten, or a hallway where the light comes from one end, so that the white does what the river did at noon.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.