NORTH AFRICA
                            AND THE DESERT

                           SCENES AND MOODS


                                  BY
                          GEORGE E. WOODBERRY


                               NEW YORK
                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
                                 1914




                          COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY
                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

                         Published April, 1914

[Illustration: logo]




                                  To
                               SETH LOW
                   LONG MY FRIEND AND ONCE MY CHIEF
                        A STATESMAN INTERESTED
                 IN ALL THAT PERTAINS TO HUMAN WELFARE
                              I DEDICATE
                       CONFIDENT OF HIS SYMPATHY
                      THIS BOOK OF THE ARAB WORLD




                               CONTENTS

 CHAPTER
    I   TUNISIAN DAYS
   II   TLEMCEN
  III   FIGUIG
   IV   TOUGOURT
    V   SCENES AND VISIONS
   VI   ON THE MAT
  VII   DJERBA
 VIII   TRIPOLI




                             TUNISIAN DAYS

                               * * * * *

                                   I

                             TUNISIAN DAYS


                                   I

I was fortunate in my first landfall at Tunis. It was a fine sea
picture framed in that chill November dawn. On my left, over the
rippling watery gold to the few pink clouds eastward, lay the great
blue mountain headland, stretching far behind. In front, a little to
the right, was Goletta, the port, hard by; and ranging off northward
the line of the ocean beach ran stern and solemn, with the lighthouse
above. That rise, there, was the hill of Carthage. Westward over
the hollow space of waters swept the crescent horizon inland, low
and misty, centred a little to the south by the obscure white of
far Tunis. Carthage is the first thought of the traveller; his
instant memory is of Phoenician ships, and his imagination is of
Scipio and Regulus—these are the sights they saw.

The steamer plied up the long canal that makes the shallow, broad
lake navigable to the docks some miles beyond; flamingoes flew to the
right and left over the level lapping waters, fresh in the raw, damp,
almost rainy air; and gradually Tunis drew in sight, like a great
white flower on the bosom of the sloping uplands, strange, solitary,
unexpected, with minarets and the island look of a Moslem city.


                                  II

Barren enough was my first acquaintance with the land side, weary,
cheerless, desolate, like windy prairies in autumn, uninhabited,
uninhabitable; and I was chilled to the bone when I came back to the
hotel, then in the bud of its first season. It is more sober now, but
then it had a near cousinship to Monte Carlo; it was delightfully
irresponsible, vivacious, gay. One passed to the picturesque
bar and the café, thick with interesting groups; or with equal
ease to the “little horses” with their ever-dissolving banks
of faces, a covey of all nations, round the bell-timed play, and
to the vaudeville stage with gymnasts, French acting, fat Jewess
dancers, and a world lightly enjoying itself, as it looked from
railed low boxes on the spacious floor—men, women, children,
with tables, glasses, straws, and bright-colored things to drink,
waiters, musicians—always a pretty scene, with incidents, and rich
in human relations; or one went more gravely by a stairway to the
privacy of baccarat in its upper seclusion of the visiting card. It
was a pleasant and polite place wherever one might stroll about, and
in every corridor and at all hours the grand toilette of capitals,
men and women—even adventurers—of the world. The old beylic of
Tunis seemed far away; at least, one was still in Christendom.

I stepped out on the sidewalk after dinner, on a broad avenue
with trees. At the brilliant crossing carriages were passing
with drawn screens; and, as they drove slowly by, fingers held
back the curtains, and from time to time glimpses of women’s
figures were disclosed of quite a different type from any within
doors—ladies of wealthy native families taking the air, and
curious to see the French streets by night. So I learned that it
was the eve of Leilet-el-Kadir, the twenty-sixth of Ramadan, the
night of power commemorating the descent of the Koran on earth,
a grand Mohammedan feast; and I went forthwith into old Tunis on
my first voyage of discovery. Festivity reigned. On every hand
were lights of all varieties; the minarets aloft were outlined with
them; in the narrow streets they were as the multitude of the stars
for number, colored and clustered, hung and looped and festooned,
flaring and lanterned, a fine illumination in the obscurity; and
under them an animated throng of all ages, beautifully dressed for
the occasion—a city, a race, and a faith _en fête_.

I sat down at last in the café-crowded Place Halfouine, one of
the principal open spaces or squares of the old city, not large,
and surrounded by low, rather mean, buildings. It was a nightscene,
closed in by shadows, the foreground brightened by irregularly
placed open cafés with tables outside and benches within,
all completely filled with men, drinking, smoking, playing at
simple games, quite orderly, without boisterous noise or muscular
disorder, or joking—admirable public behavior. It charmed by its
novelty—costumes and persons, mass without individuality—the
scene of a new land. What folly to think that there are no more
worlds to discover! The scene was to me as if no one had ever looked
on it before. I observed the faces, the attitudes, the doings of
this strange people as if I had just landed from another world;
and I would gladly have stayed longer, but, with the early closing
habits of Moslems, the square began to thin, and I went with the
rest through the fast-emptying street with a glad feeling that
in a world, now grown altogether too small and neighborly, I had
happened upon one last true relic of the “far away.”

It was four days later, however, that the true holiday came, the
feast of rejoicing after Ramadan is over—Little Bairam. It is
celebrated at Tunis with special zeal. The morning streets were
overflowing with men and children in their best apparel; but the
latter, in particular, beautifully attired. Such gold jackets,
such tiny burnooses, such scarlet and crimson, turquoise and
emerald—and pinks! Such chubby fat faces in their barbaric borders
of clothes—or delicate, refined features, stamped with race, set
off by their greens and blues! Such vivacity, too; pure childish fun
and pleasure in a national holiday! There were strings of open carts
of the rudest construction—like tip-carts for gravel—completely
filled with these children heaped up like nosegays, their brilliancy
of color set off by the rudeness of the common cart. This seemed
one of their principal pleasures—taking a ride. But there were
others. In a packed cross-street I was addressed by two gallant
lads of perhaps fifteen, who were selling tickets at an entrance;
with faces and figures full of hospitable welcome to the stranger,
they invited me in, and I went. Inside was a small, barn-like
theatre with a curtain, a stage and an audience; and there I saw
“the shadows,” pictures thrown upon a screen, and the histrionic
art was thus practised with lifelike effect. I had read of “the
shadows,” but I never expected to see them. I came out after
a while, and the boys saluted me with very cheerful and animated
smiles as I passed them. I spied another show a little farther on;
and this, undaunted by my former experience, I also entered. It
was the puppets—also a traveller’s treasure-trove—the French
gendarme was the universal and unpitied victim, and the plots
were realistic incidents from things as they are. The audience was
almost wholly of children, from six years or less to twelve or more,
many of them with nurses or attendants; they took an active and even
excited interest, and did the necessary reckonings and sums which the
transactions on the stage called for, and shouted out the answers
as at a school exhibition, it might be, though the transactions
in question were not of a sort ever shown at an American school,
and would have evoked much remonstrance; but the children were very
happy through it all, thoroughly enjoyed it, in fact. I went behind
the curtain and saw the puppets engineered; and I left the little
theatregoers with fresh ideas of juvenile amusements.

So all the morning I passed among the gayly decked crowd, with
one and another small adventure, always handsomely treated, aided,
saluted. A people of kind and gentle manners, old and young; and
I am glad that I first saw them so fortunately in their days of
pleasantry and taking pride in their own. The experience threw
an atmosphere of cheerfulness over the land and the people, and
softened many a darker scene of their common days, of their penury
and hardship—their load of life. I could always think, even when
all was at its worst, that they still “had seasons that only bade
live and rejoice,” when many went bravely clad and fed full, and
the whole city was vivid with a spirit of general joy. The fixed
expression of the crowd was one of resigned patience under habitual
control; the gayety, the happiness, the holiday were relieved on a
grave background—a temperament, a character, an essential living,
unknown to me, something secret, profound. It was my first true
contact with Islam. One way, at least, by which a religion may
properly be measured is by its efficient power on those who profess
it; certainly the Moslem faith is very effective on its believers;
the sincerity of that faith is the first thing one learns about
it in practical observation. How often since then have I gathered
with them at this and other fêtes, and seen the carpeted streets
and tapestried walls, the solemn processions, the robes of state,
the fine horses, the men and the arms, all the barbaric display;
illuminations, fireworks, parades; but I have never been so struck,
as in these first Tunisian days, with the spirit of gentle happiness
that made my earliest impression of the race as I met it on the
shore of the sea.


                                  III

Ranging through the country by rail, I found one of the oldest
lands of earth wearing the signs, familiar to my eyes years ago,
of the American West. It seemed, at times, like an hallucination of
memory with odd differences, such as one might have in a dream. Now
and then one came to a larger and well-gardened station, some
watering-place of the richer citizens in summer; or to a thriving
seaport; but, in general, the stops were at way stations, as in
all thinly populated districts—a simple crossing of the long
gray roads, with a few buildings for the business of the line,
vast spaces round about, possibly slightly improved, with fields
or orchards or little groves, a crowd of loafers hanging on the
gates or fence of the enclosure to whom the arrival of the train
was the day’s event, a farm wagon of modern make, with horses,
awaiting some expected passenger and driving off to some home lost
in the expanse; in a word, the impression was of colonial things,
of the opening up of a country, of reclaiming the soil. What one
really saw everywhere was a frontier.

In the newspapers there was the same absorbing theme—colonization;
the local news, the daily happenings were characteristic of an
agricultural, industrial, commercial life of the nature of an
invasion of the waste. Here large depots for machinery were rising;
there men of broad enterprise, or syndicate companies had planted
olives, or corn, or vines, on a vast scale over miles of territory;
further on, a new line was making accessible the phosphate wealth
of Gafsa. Modern civilization, mechanism, communication, organized
exploitation, penetrating a new country, was what one felt, as if
that region were truly new like a savage land. Yet how many times
civilization, in one or another form, has rolled over it! In reality,
it is one of the most ancient beds of the human torrent, bare and
forsaken as it looks now. And now it is again a new frontier—the
place of the invasion of a new era by a new race with new designs.

This impression, nevertheless, is mainly a thing of the mind, of
recollection and observation; to the eye it is not so noticeable,
such is the extent of the natural spaces, the contour and atmosphere
of things held in these far horizons, the new temperament of that
landscape, and so characteristically native still is the aspect of
indigenous human life not yet displaced. The earth has the look of
the wild. Whatever may have formerly been its culture and occupancy,
all had lapsed back to the primitive; a land of plains—melancholy
tracts under a gray sky or vast empty spaces under a brilliant
sun—edged in far distance by lone mountains, caressed on broken
shores by a barren sea; full of solitude, sadness. Here and there
some great ruin stood, not unlike Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain,
or even cities of ruins; the land is strewn with them—temples,
courts, baths, cisterns, floors, columns, reliefs, arches of triumph,
theatres; but they seldom count to the eye. Antiquity, like the
frontier, is also a thing of the mind, in the main; the past and the
future are both matter of reflection, in the background of memory and
knowledge it may be, but not noticeable in the general landscape. It
is a place where human fate seems transitory, an insignificant
detail, as on the sea—or like animal life in nature, indifferent.


                                  IV

Once on such an excursion on the eastern seacoast, the Tunisian
Sahel, I left Sousse behind in the noon glare, a busy, thriving,
pleasant place, swarming with Arab life in its well-worn ancestral
ways and with French enterprise in its pioneering glow. The old
Saracen wall lay behind me towered and gated, a true mediæval girdle
of defence, and I gazed back on the white city impearling its high
hillside in the right Moslem way, and then settled myself to the
long ride southward as I passed through cemeteries, crisscrossed
with Barbary fig, and by gardens adjoining the sea, and struck out
into the plain, spotted with salty tracts and little cultivated. It
is thus that a ride on this soil is apt to begin—with a cemetery;
it is often the master note that gives the mood to a subsequent
landscape, a mood of sadness that is felt to be sterile also,
impregnated with fatalism. A Moslem burying-ground may be, at rare
places, a garden of repose; a forsaken garden it is usually, even
when most dignified and beautiful with its turbaned pillars in the
thick cypresses; but it is always a complete expression of death. The
cemetery lies outside at the most used entrance of a town; and,
as a rule, in the country it is of a melancholy indescribable—it
lies there in so naked a fashion, a hopeless and huddled stretch of
withered earth in swells and hummocks, hardly distinguishable from
common dirt and débris—the eternal potter’s field. It is a
fixed feature in the Tunisian landscape, which is made of simple
elements, whose continuous repetition gives its monotony to the
land. A ride only rearranges these elements under new lights and
in new horizons.

Here the great plain was the common background; my course to Sfax
lay over it, broken at first by a blossoming of gardens round a
town or village, and twice I came out on the sea; but always the
course was over a plain with elemental mark and quality—with an
omnipresence as of the sea on a voyage. The line between man’s
domain and nature is as sharply drawn on this plain as on a beach;
where man has not labored the scene stretches out with nature in
full possession, as on the ocean; his habitations and territory are
islands. Everything is seen relieved on great spaces, individualized,
isolated; fields of grain, green and moving under a strong land
wind; or olive groves—silvery gleams—on the hillsides, clumps
of trees, or long lines of them, whole hillsides, it may be;
or there are gardens, closed, secluded, thickly planted with
pear or peach or fig or other fruit, with vegetables, perhaps,
beneath and palms above. The figure scenes, too, are of the same
recurring simplicity—a man leading a spirited horse in the
street, a camel meagre and solemn and solitary silhouetting the
sky anywhere within a range of miles, boys in couples herding
sheep in the middle distances. The town or village emerging at
long intervals is a monochord—a point of dazzling white far off,
dissolving on approach into low houses, a confused mass of uneven
roofs skirting the ground except where the minaret and the palm
rise and unite it to heaven—to the fire-veined evening sky, deep
and tranquil, or the intense blue noon, or the pink morning bloom
of the spiritualized scene of the dawn. The streets are silent;
by the Moorish café lie or sit or crouch motionless figures,
sometimes utterly dull, like logs on the earth, or else holding pipes
or gazing at checkers, or vacant—always somnolent, statuesque,
sedentary. There are no windows, no neighborhood atmosphere—only
a stagnant exterior. The feeling of a retreat, of repose, of being
far away is always there. These towns have a curious mixture of the
eternal and the ruined in their first aspect; as of things left by
the tide, derelicts of life all. A ride in the Sahel is a slow,
kaleidoscopic combination of these things, a reiteration without
new meaning—the town, the cemetery, the grove, the garden, the
plain, the fields, camels and sheep, and herdboys—horizons,
somnolence, tranquillity. What a ride! and then to come out on
the sea at Monastir and Mahdia—such a homeless sea! There may
be boats with bending sails, the fisher’s life, suggesting those
strange outlying islands they touch at, exile islands from long ago,
where Marius found hiding, and where the Roman women of pleasure of
the grand world were sent to live and die, out of the world—still
the home of a race, blending every strain of ancient blood. Mahdia,
once an Arab capital and long a seat of power in different ages, is
a famous battle name in Mohammedan and crusading and corsair annals;
it stood many a great siege on its rocky peninsula, in Norman and
other soldiering hands, however lifeless it may seem now; but as
one looks on its diminutive harbor, a basin hewn in the rock, it
seems now to speak rather of the enmity of the sea and the terror
of tempest on this dangerous coast—shallow waters and inhospitable
shores. History, human courage, was but a wave that broke over it,
and is gone like the others, a momentary foam; but the sea is always
the sea. Everywhere one must grow familiar with the neighboring
coast-line before the sea will lay off that look of enmity it
wears to all at the first gaze; it is foreign always by nature. To
descend here at Mahdia, and to walk by its waves, to hear its roll,
to look off to its gulfs and hilltops afar, however brilliant may
be the scene, is to invite the deepest melancholy that the waste sea
holds—so meaningless that world lies in its monotony all about. I
remembered the Moorish prince who here, after his long victories,
stood reflecting on the men who were great before him, and how their
glory was gone. It is a more desolate port now. One gladly turns
to the land—and there meets the plain, equally vaguely hostile.

So I rode on by the unceasing stretch of the way, through town and
by garden and grove, into the ever-enveloping plain that opened
before. It was like putting to sea at every fresh start; and late
in the afternoon, on the last far crest of the rolling plain, I saw
the great ruin, El Djem, that rose with immense commanding power
and seemed to dominate a world of its own sterile territory. It is
a great ruin—a colosseum; arches still in heaven, and piled and
fallen rocks of the old colossal cirque; it still keeps its massive
and uplifted majesty, its Roman character of the eternal city cast
down in the waste, its monumental splendor—a hoar and solemn
token of the time when there were inhabitants in this desolation
to fill the vast theatre on days of festival, and the line of its
subject highway stretched unbroken to Tunis and southward, a proud,
unending urban way of villas, a road of gardens, where now only
stagnates the salty plain, sterile, lifeless. The hamlet beside
it is hardly perceptible, like a mole-hill, a mere trace of human
life. I sat out the sunset; and after, under a cold, starry sky,
Orion resplendent in the west and the evening star a glory, I set
off again by the long road through the sparkling April darkness and
a wind that grew winter-cold with night, southward still—the vast
heavens broken forth with innumerable starry lights—till after
some hours of speeding on a route that was without a living soul,
I came again on belated groups of walking Bedouins and fragrant
miles of gardens dark by the roadway and many a thick olive grove,
and drew up at Sfax.


                                   V

Sfax is the southern capital of Tunisia. It has always been an
important site, and under the new rule of the French thrives
and prospers commercially, in true frontier fashion, as the chief
market and base of the country being opened up in the inland behind
it whose seaport it is. It is also an old Mohammedan stronghold,
and its inherited life and customs go on, as at Sousse, in the
immemorial Arab ways. I remember it as the city of the olive and the
sponge. In the early morning light the open spaces about the market
were littered with young boys at their open-air breakfast, which
may be seen at most Mediterranean seaports on the Moslem side—the
vender beside his cooking apparatus, the boys with saucers of soup
or sops of bread, and on all sides the beginnings of labor; but
all this meagre human life was framed in an exquisite marine view
beyond. The wharf was thickly lined with the strange-looking boats
of the sponge-fishers, their Greek flags at half-mast in honor of
Good Friday, their sailors in Albanian costumes, their gear heaping
the open spaces with ropes and nets and endless tackle. It was all
charming, one of the vignettes of travel that will haunt the memory
for years—the odors, the little tasks, the look of the toil of the
sea, the sponges in dark heaps, the blue, limpid morning air crossed
with strange spars and ropes, and the host of fluttering flags.

Later in the day I got its companion scene from a hilltop some miles
south of the city, whence one commands a view of olive orchards
sloping down in one vast grove, in lines of regular intervals,
as far as the eye can reach, and lost to sight on all sides with
nothing to break the expanse—only millions of olive-trees regularly
planted, filling the entire broad, circling landscape. A little
tower surmounts the hilltop and from its round apex one surveys the
whole; the sense of this dot-like centre enhances the impression
that the scene makes of a living weft of mathematical lines, like
an endless spider’s web. It is a unique sight. The geometrical
effect is curious, like an immense garden-diagram; the similarity
of the round, bullet-like heads of the trees, all alike in shape,
is a novel trait of monotony; the silver-gray of the foliage, mixed
with the reddish tones of the soil, gives, in so broad a view, a
ground earth color quite new to the eye; and the sense of multitude
in which, nevertheless, individuality remains persistent and acutely
distinct on so vast a scale makes an indelible impression.


                                  VI

I seek in vain the secret of the charm that Tunis lays upon
me. Coming back to it, one feels something intimate in the city,
such as there is in places long lived in and cherished, impregnated
with memories, subtilized by forgotten life and feeling. It has sunk
deeper into the senses, the affections. Can the charm be merely
its soothing air, its weather, which, after all, is our physical
element? It has a marvellous sky; all hues that are celestial and
live in heaven are there. What clarity! Its changeable blues excite
and call the eye from hour to hour; and on rainy days its grays
are soft, enveloping mantles for the sight. Its peculiar trait is a
greenish tint in the blue, pervasive but not defined, an infusion
of clear emerald, translucent, such as one sees in winter sunsets
in New England; but here in early summer you will distinguish it
at high noon, after the rainless days of late spring. Tradition
associates heat with this coast, as with the Mediterranean generally;
but that is an illusion of the foreigner. Tunis is often chilly,
bitterly cold at times, though without the fall of snow; it lies
under the heights of the Atlas, and the winds bring down the
snow-chill on their wings. I remember one February when there were
no trains from Algiers for five days, the snow blocking the road;
it lay, at some places on the line, nine feet deep. But whatever
may be the weather, the atmospheric charm remains; it is soothing,
and has narcotic quality.

A fine landscape in fine weather is always captivating and
assimilates the traveller to the land. One is always at home in the
sun; and a noble view finds a friend in every eye. One or two such
experiences will make the fortune of a whole journey and after
a while be its whole memory. But in some regions, some cities,
the spell is perpetual; it is so at Tunis. The prospect is broad,
and wherever one turns the eye wanders off delightfully. The most
complete view is from the western hill, where is a beautiful great
park of rolling land with woods whence you will see the white city
southward; it lies like a great lily on its pads of green background,
with its motionless blue waters round about—a lake-country scene;
level waters like a flood, all floored and streaked with purple
and blue bands and reaches—a water prairie—to where Carthage
gleams white on its own green hill, amid an horizon of snowy villages
dazzling in the sun; and between, nearer, isolated roofs that flash
emerging from their obscure green gardens and tree-clumps, here and
there; farther still to the southeast, as the eye travels out over
the long lake into the gulf and the sea, rises a mass of mountain
blues that bound the entrance to the land and its harbors. It is
a view fit for a Greek amphitheatre.

Wherever you go, you are always coming out on these massive,
spacious, beautifully colored prospects, white strips of city
or village amid the spring, set in the master tone of blue that
envelopes and combines them—sky, and lake, and sea, themselves
infinitely changeable with the light and the distance and the
hour. Even in the most unexpected places Heaven will open these
far-off ways over a new land. I remember going into an obscure
and blind street, in the Arab quarter, among buildings in all
stages of apparent decay. I lifted the knocker at the lovely,
nail-studded door of an ancient-looking house, and passed at once
into an inner court with a fountain, beautifully decorated, cool,
shadowy, exquisite in repose and the sense of luxury; and I was
led on through a maze of stairways and passages till I came out on
a large room below the roof with a balcony; and stepping forward,
I saw unrolled as if by enchantment the whole sea-view. There must
be many such commanding points of vantage in the houses on the crest
of the thickly built hill—old Tunis, where the Arabs live. From
this station I overlooked the lower city with all its roofs and
streets. The multitude of green-tiled roofs on different levels
made the color-ground, whence rose the numerous low, white domes,
the slender minarets also touched with green or tipped with golden
balls, the greater domes of the mosques, the mass of the citadel;
broad French faubourgs and avenues were enclosing and defining lines,
with irregular masses of foliage, and deep, narrow streets sank in
the near scene, full of their native life. It was an architectural
wilderness of form and color, arresting, vivifying, oriental in mass,
feeling and detail, with the suggestion of a dream, of evanescence,
and round it was poured on all sides the still blue element—sky,
ocean, air. In Tunis, I noticed, everything seemed to end thus, in
something beyond, in a mood; life constantly distilled its dream,
and it was a dream of the senses.

The senses are constantly appealed to; they are kept awake, alert,
attentive, and they are fed; they have their joys. We do not
habitually use our senses for joy; and this is a part of the spell
of Tunis, that there, under a Southern sky, the senses come into
their own again. It is not merely the instinct of curiosity that is
kept active by an _ensemble_ so variously novel and insistent—for
example, these pavilioned minarets, square with a cube above, ending
in a green pyramid, or else octagonal in shape with the gallery and
its awning, tipped by the three gold balls and crescent—haunting
one like a strange sky; or the same instinct crudely excited by
the _ensemble_ of a population so foreign in physiognomy, garb,
and physical behavior as the Arab in its multifarious aspects,
its color and movement, all the unaccustomed surface of life. A
street in old Tunis is truly seen only when there is no one
in it; it is then that it is most impressive and yields up its
spirit. What privacy! those blank walls! those rare high windows
beautifully set! those discreet hanging balconies of latticed wood
and iron! those nail-studded doors in exquisite patterns, that
seem to have been rarely opened! An old house, set in some deep
forest, is not more retired. And, if one passes within—silence,
and soft footfalls, and refinement of all sense-impressions, the
constant presence of delicately moulded handiwork, tiles cooling
to the eye, wrought stucco, carved wood; and in those interiors,
with their beautiful ceilings and wainscoting, are columns that
seem of pagan purity, fountains as of woodland solitude, courts
of garden peace. It is wonderful, how this effect of harborage
and seclusion has been attained by an art so simple—flowers,
water, plaster, wood, traceries, colored tiles. The city must be
full of beautiful objects of this old art. It is not in this or
that house only, nor in the public museums where rare examples are
collected and massed, that one feels this artistic quality in the
old race. It is felt in the handicrafts everywhere, the decoration
of the surfaces, the enamelling, the gilding, the effort and liking
for what is wrought in lovely patterns and relieved work of every
description. There is a detail in the Tunisian sense of beauty,
an omnipresent and conscious decorative spirit, something native
and human. It is not only in the palace, but in the street, as
one treads the narrow ways, and looks into the bright shops, and
loiters in strange corners. It is an art of the senses—decoration
is most obviously that. Rooted in barbaric taste? possibly; but
most things human are rooted in barbarism. Unintellectual? perhaps,
in the European sense. Unemotional? certainly not on the European
scale of the emotions. Not developed from the beauty of the human
form? of course. But there is a spirit of the senses as there is a
spirit of the intellect; and it has its own art, a distillation of
its life, as I intimated in speaking of the landscape that leads one
into the mood of a dream—a dream of the senses. This art is akin
to that landscape—it is of the life of the senses; and the Arabs
were always frankly a sensual race. And, however it be, the city has
an artistic temperament, to me; it has no factory qualities in its
aspect, its wares, or its people; it is yet virgin of the future, a
dying perfume of the past. This flavor that I find in its art is not
Arabian, though it flowered from that desert root; it is Andalusian,
and comes from the skill and temperament of those old exiles who were
driven out from the southern shores of Spain in successive waves
of the Moorish emigration, each in turn sowing broadcast seeds of
the most exquisite Arab art all along the shores of North Africa,
and richly here at Tunis. It was an hereditary art, in families of
builders, wood-carvers, stone-cutters, stucco-moulders, painters,
gilders, dyers, embroiderers, leather-workers, damaskeen-workers,
illuminators—the Tunisian arts of daily life, that gave to life
that brilliant and exquisite surface in dress, utensils, interiors,
and also broad urban artistic effects of luxury in the look of its
commerce, the display of its multicolored crafts, and the vistas of
its minaret-haunted sky. Tunis, in fact, is not altogether native,
not of the pure desert blood; from the thirteenth century well into
the times of the Renaissance it had a flavor not unlike that of
a Greek colony in Sicily or on old Italian coasts; it was grafted
with the flower of Andalusian culture, transplanted in adversity
and flourishing on the African soil—blooming, perishing, and
leaving this exquisite memory of itself, this intuition of vanished
refinement and elegance, like a perfume.

To this Andalusian infusion is also traced the charm of the
manners of the Tunisians, that gentleness of breeding, softness,
and urbanity, blended with an immovable dignity, which is so
indescribable a racial trait. It is not the least foreign thing
about them, and adds to the _fond_ of mystery that they exude; for,
notwithstanding all that can be seen or told, or gleaned from the
past, mystery is of the essence of the traveller’s impression
at his first contact with the Arab race. It is a silent landscape,
a speechless folk, an incommunicable civilization; it is not only
the closed mosque, the secluded house, the taciturn figures strange
in garb and pose, immovably contemplative; but their life—all
that they are—seems a closed book in an unknown tongue, a scroll
unrolled but unintelligible. The feeling of racial mystery is
intense, and all external impressions lead the traveller finally
back to that—the insoluble soul of the race. It is not merely
Islam. These shores from the dawn of knowledge have been one of the
most fertile couches of the animal, man; here the young barbarian
has been born and bred, and passed away, through all the centuries,
and every civilization of the West has been seeded in conquest, and
has flowered in cities, typical capitals, and withered away, leaving
among the native race its ruins in their fields, in their blood,
on their faces—like the Christian cross still tattooed on Kabyle
foreheads. It is a race that assimilates but is not assimilated. It
has taken the color and form, more or less impregnated with the
spirit, of the genius of Carthage, Rome, Byzantium, Islam, France;
it has felt the impact of Greek, Norman, Spaniard; but it was ever
a race of inexhaustible resistant power, independent, tenacious,
rebellious. It was never submerged or exterminated. It is a fine
race. Tunis is one of its cosmopolitan cities, where it has drunk of
every foreign stream and influence, has been civilized, softened,
informed—a city of the various Mediterranean world, with great
colonies of other folk in it, Italians, Jews, Maltese—a New York,
as it were, on its own scale. In old Tunis, Arabized as it is,
the desert race is itself only an infusion; yet so persistent is
the ideal of race on its own soil, and so nomadic is the provincial
population, that one feels the presence of that old racial soul,
rightly or wrongly, into which the strength of the desert and the
mountains has passed, which never breathed the breath of Europe,
which remains in its own loneliness as in a fastness. It attracts
and perplexes the human mind that would fain make acquaintance with
it, but is oppressed by a feeling of impotence. And the exquisite
personal demeanor of the Tunisians is enigmatic in its impression;
it is like the charm of some Chinese painting or scroll that only
emphasizes the unintelligibility, the incommunicability of the too
variant spiritual past. With such delightful manners, such identical
refinements of taste, it would be so easy to be friends! But no;
it is more rational to think of it all as an artistic growth of
a foreign culture, a part of the lovely Andalusian inheritance of
the land.

To a mind with a historical background it is odd to find Tunis so
completely a modern city. The Andalusian tradition is unconcentrated,
and slight in its elements of reality, in things; its full experience
is rather an imaginative memory; and of the times before that there
is nothing left. In the suburban country there are more, though few,
relics of past ages, but there the memory works more freely. One
recalls, looking off to the sea-towering Mountain of the Two Horns,
that on one of those peaks rose the ancient temple of Baal. The
harbors of Carthage are fascinating to the eye of the imagination;
but the specific remains there are scanty and mediocre; they arouse
no reaction deeper than thought; and in the museum of Carthage one
dwells most on the curious fact that what little has come down to
us of that far-off life has found its way only by the grave itself;
here, as in so many places, the tomb has been the chief conservator
of life in its material aspects and what may be inferred from them
of the soul of dead populations. It is rather in the neighborhood of
the Cathedral that memory expands, for beside the near home of the
White Brothers, who have spread their mantles and left their bones
throughout the Sahara, a noble mission nobly done, here survives
the only recorded anecdote of the history of this ridge, that must
have been the place of innumerable tragedies—the marvellously
vivid Christian story of Saint Louis’s death. The narrative is as
fresh and poignant as if it were written yesterday; and on the spot
one likes to remember that the chivalrous and good French crusader
and king is a Moslem as well as a Christian saint. It is a symbol
of peace and conciliation. The past, however, is here a barren
field. Antiquity is felt, not in the survival of its monuments,
but in the sense of the utter waste, the annihilation of the past,
the extinction that has overtaken all that human life and its glory
and struggle—Punic, Roman, Visigothic—the emptiness of the place
of their battles, religions, pleasures, buildings, and tombs. It is
all débris; it is of the slightest—little archæological heaps
and pits in a vast horizon of silent sky and sea. The mind becomes
merely pessimistic, surveying the scene; the mood of fatalism invades
it—the mood of the frozen moon and the solar catastrophe—floods
of the eternal nothingness—a mood of the pure intellect; and one is
glad to come back to some nook like Ariana, a village midway between
Carthage and Tunis, where ruin becomes again romantic and human. The
very roses bloom there as in a deserted garden of long ago. It was
there that the Hafsides, the rulers of the golden age of Tunis in the
thirteenth century, had their country-seats—fair as the paradise
at Roccada, where one “was gay without cause and smiled without
a reason”—surrounded by gardens, with great lakes shadowed by
pine and cypress, and gleaming with kiosks lined with marble and
faience, with ceilings of sculptured wood gilded and painted, and
cooled by the fresh waters of many fountains. The love of the country
was always a trait here—an Arab trait—the rich like to get out
of the city to some place of quiet, privacy and repose, such as La
Marsa to-day by the sea near Carthage. The sense of the reposeful
country mingles with that of the beautiful city in the past as well
as now; and the Hafsides were great civilizers, builders, favorers
of trade, patrons of the arts and of science. Their works and their
gardens are gone alike. Time drives his ploughshare often and deep
in an African city; and it is not alone on the green and shining
levels of the suburban country, with its great spaces and imperial
memories, where every maritime and migratory race has written some
half-obliterated line of history, that the mountains look on the
sea, and there is a great silence; but ruin is a near neighbor in
the city as well. How many nooks and corners, full of the romance of
places left to decay! That, too, is an Arab trait: to leave the old
to decay and forgetfulness. It is natural that things should die,
and be let lie where they fall. Oblivion is never far off.

What lassitude at last! Is it only the nerve-soothing weather, which
cradles and lulls, week after week, the wearied Western mind? Is it
only a renaissance of the senses, coming into their own, restored and
vivified with strange forms and colors, accepting the impermanence of
things human, and content to adorn and refine the sensual moment, to
withdraw and enjoy? or is it a new world, a new mode of human life,
with its own perceptions and intuitions and valuations, a new form
of the protean existence of men on the earth, with another memory,
psychology, experience? Whatever it be it is a spell that grows.


                                  VII

I like to pass my afternoons in the shop of the perfumer in old
Tunis. I come by covered ways, where the sunlight sifts through
old rafters on stained walls and worn stones, and soon discern in
the softened darkness the low, small columns wound with alternate
stripes of red and green—bright clustered colors; down the winding
way of dimmed light in the narrow street opens on either side the
row of shallow shops, shadowy alcoves of bright merchandise; and
there in the heart of old Tunis, each in his niche, canopied by
his trade and seeming an emanation of the things he sells, sit the
perfumers. A throng passes by, now dense, now thin—passes forever,
in crowds, in groups, in solitude, rarely speaking; and over against
the silent movement sit the merchants—tranquil figures in perfumed
boxes—whose business seems one long repose. A languid scent loads
the dusky air.

Just opposite the venerable Mosque of the Olive, an isle of
sanctity still uncrossed by the heathen Frankish sea, right under
the shadow of its silence-guarded doors, stands and has stood
for centuries the shop where I love to lounge away hours that
have no attribute of time. My host—I may well call him so,
we are old acquaintances now—salutes me, his robe of fading
hues detaching the figure from the background as he rises; his
serene face lightens with a smile, his stately form softens with
a gesture, he speaks a word, and I sit down on the narrow bench at
the side, and light the cigarette he has proffered, while his only
son quickly commands coffee. How well I remember years ago when the
child’s soft Arab eyes first looked into mine! He is taller now,
beautifully garbed in an embroidered burnoose; and he sits by me,
and talks in low tones. What a relief it is, just to be here! What
an ablution! The very air is courtesy. There is no need to talk;
and we sit, we three, and smoke our cigarettes, and sip our coffee,
with now and then a word, and regard the street.

A motley street, like the bridge at Stamboul—a provincial form
of that unfathomable sea of human faces; and, here as there, an
unknown world in miniature, diverse, novel, brilliant—the African
world. The native predominates, with here and there a flash of
foreign blood, round-faced Sicilians, Spaniards whose faces seem
in arms, French in uniforms; but always the native—every strain
of the littoral and the highland, every tint of the desert sun:
black-bearded Moors of Morocco, vindictive visages; fat Jews of
Djerba laughing; negroes—boys of Fezzan or black giants of the
Soudan; Arabs of every skin, hints of Gothic and Vandal blood and
the old blond race long before all, resolute Kabyles, fair Chaouia,
Touaregs with white-wrapped faces, caravan men, Berber and Bedouin
of all the land; women, too, veiled or with children at the open
breast. That group of Tunisian dandies—how they stroll! olive
faces, inexpressive, with the jonquil stuck over the ear, swinging
little canes, clad in fine burnooses of pale blues or dying greens
or ashy rose! Those bare-legged Bedouins, lean shoulders looped
in earth-brown folds—how they walk! Every moment brings a new
challenge to the eye. What life histories! what unspeaking faces! how
closed a world! and my eyes rest on the shut gates of the ancient
Mosque of the Olive over against me; I feel the spell of the unknown
sealed in that faith, this life—the spell of a new life of the
spirit of man, the mystery of a new earth-life of his body.

One falls into revery and absent-mindedness here, as elsewhere one
falls asleep; but not for long. A lady, closely veiled, stands
in the shop with her shorter, low-browed attendant. I hear low
syllables softly murmured; I am aware of a drop of perfume rubbed
like dew on the back of her hand just below the small fingers,
not too slim; I watch the fall of the precious, twinkling liquid
in the faceted bottle; I mark the delicate handling of the small
balances. It is like a picture in a dream, so still, so vivid in the
semi-darkness of the booth. She is gone, and the fancy wanders after
her—whither? The boy’s _taleb_, his teacher of the mosque school,
passing, sits down for a moment—an alert figure, scrutinizing,
intelligent, energetic. There has been some school excitement,
some public commotion; master and boy both scan the last paper with
eagerness. I ask about the boy’s lessons; but with a kind look
at my young friend, and a half reply to me, he puts the question
aside, as if one should not say pleasant things in a boy’s hearing
too much. He is soon off on his affairs; and other friends of the
shop come and go, not too often, some hearty, some subtle, but all
cordial, merchants who would woo me away to other shops behind whose
seemingly narrow spaces lies the wealth of great houses—oh, not
to buy, but only to view silken stuffs, trifles of wrought silver,
things begemmed, inlaid sword and pictured leather, brass, mosaic,
horn, marvels of the strong and deft brown Arab hand in immemorial
industries; the wealth of a large world is nigh, when I please—it
is but a step here to Samarcand or Timbuctoo; but I say, lightly,
“Another day.”

I love better to sit here, flanked by the huge wax tapers, overhung
by the five-fingered groups of colored candles, amid the curiously
shaped glasses and mysterious boxes, the gold filagree, the facets,
the ivory eggs—and to breathe, only to breathe, diffused hidden
scents of the rose and the violet—jasmine, geranium—essences
of all flowers, all gardens, all odorous things, till life itself
might seem the perfumed essence of existence and the sensual world
only an outer dusk. Oh, the delightful narcotism! I was ever too
much the Occidental not to think even in my dream—I am conscious
of the feeling through all—“What am I, an alien, here?” But
it is sweet to be here, to have peace, and gentleness, and courtesy,
young trust and brave respect, and breeding; it is balm. The darkness
falls; the passer-by grows rare; it is closing time. There is a drop
for my hand now, for good-by. The boy companions me to the limit of
old Tunis. It is good night. It is a departure—as if some shore
were left behind. It is a nostalgia—a shadowy perception that
something more of life has escaped, of the irretrievable thing,
gone, like something flown from the hand. And as I come under the
Gate of France into the lights of the brilliant avenue, I find
again him I had eluded, whom I heard as the voice of one standing
without, saying: “What am I, an alien, here?”—I am again the
old European.


                                 VIII

Quick music comes down the evening street—the clatter of
cavalry—the beautiful rhythm of horses’ backs—flash of
French uniforms so harmonized with the African setting—spahis,
tirailleurs, guns—a gallant and lively scene in the massed
avenue! I love the French soldiers in Africa; but it is with a deeper
feeling than mere martial exhilaration that one sees them to-night,
for this is an annual fête-day, and their march commemorates the
entry of the French troops into Tunis. One involuntarily looks
at the faces of the natives in the crowds—impassible. But the
old European cannot but feel a thrill at the sight of France, the
leader of our civilization, again taking charge of the untamed and
reluctant land and its intractable people to which every mastering
empire of the North, from the dawn of our history, has brought in
vain the force of its arms and the light of its intelligence. The
hour has come again, and one feels the presence of the Napoleonic
idea, clad, as of old, in the French arms; for it is from Napoleon,
that star of enlightenment—Napoleon as he was in his Egyptian
campaigns—that the French empire in Africa derives; and if, as the
heir of the Crusades, France was through centuries the protector of
Christians in the East, and that rôle is now done, it is a greater
rôle that she inherits from Napoleon as the friend of Islam, with
the centuries before her. Force, demonstrated in the army, is the
basis of order in all civilized lands; that is why the presence
of the French uniform delights me; but it is not by brute force
that France moves in the essential conquest, nor is it military
lust that her empire in Africa represents and embodies. It is,
rather, a striking instance of fatality in human events that her
advancing career in North Africa presents to the historical mind;
a slight incident—a bey struck one of her ambassadors with a
fan—forced on her the occupation of Algiers, and in the course
of years she found herself saddled with a burden of colonial
empire as awkwardly and reluctantly as was the case with us and
the Philippines. There were anticolonialists in her experiences,
as there were antiimperialists with us; and the arguments were
about the same, essentially, in both cases—the rights of man, a
new frontier, an alien people, with various economic considerations
of revenue, tariff, exploitation. That obscure element of reality,
however, which we call fate, worked on continuously, linking
situation with event, difficulty with remedy, what was done with
what had to be done, till the occupation spread from Algiers into
the mountains, along the seaboard, over the Atlas, into the desert,
absorbing the neighboring land of Tunis, skirting the dangerous
frontier of Morocco—and now the vitalizing and beneficent power
of French civilization, as it might almost seem against the will
of its masters, dominates a vast tract of doubtful empire whose
issues are among the most interesting contingencies of the future
of humanity. It is a great work that has been accomplished, but is
greater in the tasks it opens than in those already achieved.

The policy of pacification and penetration is, indeed, one of the
present glories of France. There has been fierce fighting, hard toils
of war; the land has been the training-school of French generals;
and were it known and written, the story of French campaigning in
the mountains and the desert would prove to be one of those heroic
chapters of fine deeds obscurely done, rich in personal worth,
that of all military glory have most moral greatness. The _esprit_
of the soldiers was like that of devoted and lost bands—they were
there to die. But it belongs to military force to be initial and
preparatory, occasional, in its active expression; thereafter, in its
passivity, it is a guarantee; it is order. The great line of French
administrative policy, whether playing through the army or beyond it,
was, nevertheless, the child and heir of Napoleon’s idea; amity
with Islam. To respect rites, usages, prejudices, to make the leaders
of the people—chiefs, judges, religious heads—intermediaries of
power, to find with patience and consideration the line of least
resistance for civilization by means of the social and racial
organization instead of in opposition thereto, and to display
therewith not a spirit of cold, proud, and superior tolerance but a
frank and interested sympathy—that, at least, was the ideal of the
French way of empire. It had its disinterested elements—respect
for humanity was implicit in it. What strikes the close student of
the movement most is not the military advance but the extraordinary
degree to which the military advance itself was impregnated with
intelligence, scientific observation, scholarly interest, economic
suggestion, engineering ambition, as if these French officers were
less men of arms than pioneers of knowledge and public works. The
publications through fifty years by men in the service on every
conceivable topic relating to the land and its people in scientific,
economic, and historical matters are innumerable; they constitute
a thorough study of vast areas. Such a fact tells its own story—a
story of devotion in a cause of civilization.

Peaceful penetration does not mean merely that the railroad has
entered the Sahara, and the wire gone far beyond into its heart,
and the express messenger crossed the great waste; nor that the
school and, with it, the language are everywhere, subduing and
informing the mind; nor that agricultural science, engineering skill,
economic initiative, and even philanthropic endeavor, hospitals,
hygiene, are at work, or beginning, or in contemplation; but it
means the restoration of a great and almost forsaken tract of the
earth—from the Mediterranean and Lake Tchad to the Niger and the
Atlantic—with its populations, to the benefits of peaceful culture,
safe commerce, humane conditions, and to fraternity with the rest
of mankind. It is not the brilliant military scene that holds my
eye in the packed avenue, with its double rows of trees shadowy in
the air, lined with brilliant shops and stately urban buildings,
opera, cathedral, residence—the familiar modern metropolitan
scene in the electric glare; but I see the work of France all over
the darkened land from the thousand miles of seacoast, up over the
impenetrable Atlas ranges, down endless desert routes—carrying
civilizing power, like a radiating force, through a new world.


                                  IX

Tunis is the gateway by which I entered this world—the new world
of France, the old world of the desert. It was almost an accident
of travel that I had come here, refuging myself from the life I
had known, and seeking a place to forget and to repose, away from
men. I had no thought of even temporary residence or exploration;
but each day my interest deepened, my curiosity was enlivened, my
sympathies warmed, and slowly I was aware that the land held me in
its spell—a land of fantastic scenery, of a mysterious people, of
a barbaric history and _mise en scène_, a land of the primitive. I
coursed it from end to end.

The best description of North Africa as a visual fragment of the
globe is that which delineates it as a vast triangular island, whose
two northern horns lie, one off Spain at Gibraltar, the other, with
a broader strait, off Sicily—with a southward wall overlooking
the ocean-like Sahara, and running slantingly to the Atlantic,
whose seaboard makes the narrow base of the triangle. This immense
island is gridironed through its whole mass with mountains, ranging
southwest and northeast, and hence not easily penetrable except at
those remote ends; it is backed by table-lands of varying breadth
between the Northern and the Saharan Atlas, which form its outer
walls, and the conglomeration of successive ranges at varying
altitudes, with their high plateaus, is cut with deep gullies,
valleys, pockets, fastnesses of all sorts—a formidable country
for defence and of difficult communication. Under the southern edge
of the Saharan Atlas, like a long chain of infrequent islands,
runs the line of oases in the near desert from the northeasterly
tip of the lowlands of the isle of Djerba southwesterly the whole
distance to the Atlantic, and here and there pressing deep into
the waste of sand and rock; under the northern wall stretches the
arable lowland here and there on the Mediterranean coast where
lie the mountain-backed ports. At the highest points, in Morocco,
lies perpetual snow, and the land is snow-roofed in winter.

Among these wild mountains in antiquity lived an indigenous blond
race, whose blue-eyed, clear-complexioned descendants may still
be met with there, and mixed with them a darker population from
the sunburnt desert and lowlands, the Getulae and Numidians of
history, of whom Jugurtha was a fine and unforgotten type; on
these original and tenacious races, whose blood was inexpugnable,
poured the immigrant human floods through the centuries from north
and south, west and east, but the natives maintained their hold and
the stock survived. The Punic immigration, with its great capital
of Carthage, only touched the coast; the Romans established a great
province in Tunisia, founded cities and garrisoned the country as
far as the desert and into the Riff, and made punitive expeditions
among the nomads to the south; the Visigoths flocked from Spain,
overran the whole country, and passed away like sheets of foam;
the Byzantines rebuilt the fortresses, and their hands fell away;
the Arab hordes in successive waves carried Islam to the western
ocean, and, settling, Arabized great tracts of the Berber blood,
and made the land Moslem, but with a deeper impregnation than when it
had been Romanized and Christianized; while through all the years of
their slow and imperfect dominance new floods of fresh desert blood
poured up from the Sahara, much as the barbarians fell from the north
upon Rome. The massive island was thus always in the contention of
the human seas, rising and falling; yet the Berber blood, the Berber
spirit, continually recruited from the Sahara, seems never to have
really given way; taking the changing colors of its invaders, it
persisted—a rude, independent, democratic, fierce, much-enduring,
untamable race. It wears its Islam in its own fashion. It keeps the
other stocks, that dwell in it, apart; the Jews, the Turks, Italians,
Maltese, Spaniards, are but colonies, however long upon the soil,
and even though in some instances they adopt native costumes and
ways. And now it is the turn of France—that is to say, of dominant
Western civilization in its most humane and enlightened form.

How many interests were here combined! A land of natural wildness,
of romantic and solemn scenes, of splendid solitudes and varying
climates; a past dipped in all the colors of history; a race of
physical competency, savage vitality, where the primitive ages still
stamped an image of themselves in manners and actions and aspect;
the fortunes of one of the great present causes of humanity, to
be paralleled with Egypt and India, a work of civilization! It
could not but prove a fine adventure. And so I turned nomad,
and fared forth. Bedouin boys, rich with my last Tunisian copper,
gave me delighted good-bys as they ran after my carriage, screaming
bright-eyed; and I felt as if I had already friends in the lonely,
silent land as the long level spans of the high aqueduct marched
backward, and the train sped on.




                                TLEMCEN

                               * * * * *

                                  II

                                TLEMCEN


                                   I

Snow in April! I could hardly believe my eyes as I looked through
the blurred panes of the one small window on the large, moist
flakes falling thickly, the trees green with spring-time whose
young foliage was burdened and slim limbs delicately heaped with
snow an inch deep in the windless air, while the little park was
a white floor and the half-invisible roofs a drifted curtain like
a broken hillside—it was so like a snowy spring at home. I was
in the unpretending hotel, in an upper corner room, bare, narrow,
but clean, which reminded me curiously of such accommodation as one
used to find in western Kansas towns thirty years ago, fit for the
seasoned traveller, but without superfluities,—frontier-like, a
border lodging; and the impression was deepened and vivified when I
descended the rude and confused stairway and found the private-family
dining-room, with the only fire—olive-knots burning reluctantly on
a small hearth. A French officer, hanging over it, made room for me,
and in a moment two other officers appeared, heavily clothed with
leather and capes, prepared, as I gathered, for a long ride in the
country. It might have been a hunting scene in Colorado, in the early
morning, except for the military color, the foreign physiognomy and
the French coffee we were drinking; it had the traits of rude vigor,
hardihood and weather that belong to an outdoor life.

It seemed more natural to go out into the snow than not, and so I
found an Arab and went. Our path led us a short way through streets
of Sunday quiet, and soon broke by a city gate into irregular
country, picturesque from the beginning with ruined masses of old
ramparts. The road was bordered with trees and hedges, a lovely
road even in the snow, and soon it was apparent that we were passing
through the midst of an old and extensive cemetery with cypresses,
cactus, fig-trees, here and there an immense carob-tree, and
olives and locusts, diversifying the uneven lines of the slopes;
and everywhere, as far as one looked, neglected graves, shrines
in ruins, koubbas—small, square, dome-covered memorials of the
saints—dilapidated and with broken arches, the débris of centuries
of devotion and mortality. It was quite in keeping; for I was myself
on pilgrimage, where for seven centuries the faithful Moslem of the
land had preceded me, to the holy tomb of Sidi bou-Médyen, the
patron saint of the little city. As he ended his earthly travels
on one of these neighboring slopes—and he had wandered through
the Arab world—he exclaimed: “How good it were to sleep in
this blessed soil the eternal slumber!” and so they buried him
there. It was a place of immemorial consecration; in early times
of the faith a body of pious Moslems had been cloistered near by,
and already in that age in these fields the “men of God” had
their resting-places about which the Moslems liked to be buried,
as old Christians used to wish to lie in holy ground about the
church. It was even then a place of pilgrimage, and a village grew
up about it, and ruins of minarets and mosques still lie there;
and later, about Sidi bou-Médyen’s shrine, another village was
built among the encumbering graves, for he was a famous saint and
many pilgrims came there, and now the inhabitants say pleasantly:
“We have the dead in our houses.” The landscape is thus a
place of tombs; but it is enchanting, and one sees at a little
distance terraced mountain edges, thick gardens of olive, the
pomegranates, the ancient fig-trees, masses of foliage and vines,
abounding fertility and freshness, green and flowering with spring;
and sown all along the tree-sheltered road the low and humble ruins
of mortality.

I entered the village—the road ran a mile or more through such a
scene—and climbed the steep way to the wooden door through which
one comes into the precincts of the saint’s tomb with its attendant
mosque and school. I did not anticipate a mausoleum; I was familiar
with such shrines and knew what I should see; but the square koubbas,
with their white domes, which one sees everywhere in the fields,
on the hilltops, all over this lonely country, give a grave and
solemn accent to the landscape, and I felt the reverence of the
place, remote and solitary, where so many thousand men had warmed
their life-worn hearts in the glow of the faith. In the antechamber,
adjoining the shrine, Moorish arches fell on four small onyx columns
of beautiful purity, resting on the tiled floor, and just at my
feet was an ancient holy well whose onyx edge was deeply cut by the
wearing of the chain that had given water to twenty generations of
those who thirsted for God. As I turned, the room of the shrine was
open before me—heavy with shadows, almost dark, while the light
struggled through vivid, dull spots of colored glass, blue, green,
red, on the obscurity where I saw the raised coffin, swathed with
silken stuffs and gold-wrought work and thick with hanging standards;
another coffin, with the body of the companion and disciple of the
saint, stood beside, more humbly covered, and there were candles,
chandeliers, suspended ostrich eggs, lanterns, and banal European
objects, the common furnishings of shrines. I lingered a while with
the sombre and thoughtful respect natural before a sight so very
human, so impregnated with humanity. I noted the votive offerings
on the door, bits of silk and tangled threads, which attested the
humility of the estate of multitudes of these poor people—remnants
of fetichism; and the strips of painted wood upon the walls of the
antechamber, with ordinary Mohammedan designs, rude scrawls of art.

I issued into the court, in the raw snowy air, and crossed the narrow
space to the mosque. It was a magnificent portal that rose before me
through the falling flakes, raised on its broad steps as on a base,
and lifting the apex of its wide horseshoe arch more than twenty
feet in air; a high entablature expanded above. The whole surface
of the gateway was covered with arabesque work in mosaic faience
to the architrave, bearing its dedicatory inscription in beautiful
architectural script, and with enamelled tiles above—all in sober
colors of white, brown, yellow, and green—and finely wrought
in Moorish designs; it was a noble entrance. I passed within its
shadows, and found myself in a stately porch, richly ornamented,
the lateral walls overlaid, from a lower space left bare and severe,
by delicately arcaded work in stucco as far as to the springing of
the stalactite ceiling of the cupola, whose central points gave
back the reflected snow-lights from below; massive bronze doors,
sombre, rich in shadowy tones, filled the fourth side—their
plates, riveted to the wood, chiselled and overspread with large,
many-pointed stars engaged in an infinite lineal network of that
old art, in whose subtility and intricacy and illusory freedom
of control the Moorish decorative genius delighted to work. The
momentary sight, as my eyes rounded out the full impression of the
porch I stood in, was, as it were, a seizure; the novelty—for I
had never before seen this art in its own home—the refinement,
the harmony relieved on the sense of mass and space, the seclusion,
the winter lights without, the cool and sombre peace, combined to
make a moment in which memory concentrates itself. It was an Alhambra
chamber in which I stood; and the first realizing sight of a new art,
like that of a new land, is a vivifying moment, full of infinite
possibility, almost of a new life for the artistic instincts.
I shall never forget the moment nor the place where the spell of the
Andalusian craftsmen first thus seized me in the slowly falling snow.

The way led me on into the arcaded court, and then the hall of
prayer, under the arches of its crossing naves, to the ornamented
recess sunk in the further wall, the mihrab, which is the Moslem
altar and guides the hearts of the people, as they pray, toward
Mecca. Its arch rested on two small onyx columns, with high,
foliated capitals, exquisite in their romantic kind; and above
and about ran the arabesque decoration in plaster and all over the
walls of the mosque and the surface of the Moorish arches, whose
intervening roofs were ceiled with sunken panels of cognate but
diverse design—a beautiful garniture of wandering lineal relief,
like the veining of a leaf, netted in geometrical forms, emboldened
with lines of cursive script, flowing with conventionalized floral
branch and palms, varied, repeated, interlaced. The architectural
masses and spaces defined themselves with firmness and breadth in
contrast with this richly elaborated surface; there seemed a natural
unity between the design and the decoration, as of the forest with
its foliage; through all one felt the effect that belongs unfailingly
to the mosque—a grand simplicity. I wandered about, for a mosque
charms me more than a church; and then I turned to the médersah,
or college, adjoining its precinct, with its central court lined with
scholars’ cells and its hall for lectures and prayer beyond. It was
pleasing to find a college under the protection of the saint. Sidi
bou-Médyen was himself a scholar, bred at the schools of Seville and
Fez; he retired to the anchorite’s life on these hills while yet
a youth, and being perfected in the friendship of God, admitted to
ecstasy and invested with the power of miracle, preached at Baghdat,
professed theology, rhetoric, and law at Seville and Cordova, and
opened a college of his own on the African shore at Bougie, then
a hearth of liberal studies, where his tall figure, his resonant,
melodious voice and flowery and fiery eloquence gained him a
great name; it was thence he was summoned by the reigning prince
of Tlemcen on that last journey on which, nearing the city’s
“blessed soil,” where his divine youth was passed, he died. It
was quite fit that a college, as well as a mosque, should be raised
and perpetuate his name near his tomb. I left its portal and passed
down by the stairway to the court, and gazed up at the minaret,
decorated above and wreathed with a frieze of mosaic faience, that
lifted its three copper balls at its culmination, dominating the
little group of sacred buildings on this hill, so characteristic
of the Moslem faith and past; and its slender and guarding beauty
was the last sight I saw as I went down through the narrow way and
issued into the village road. A tall, grave Arab youth, standing
in the snow, offered me a great bunch of violets, which I took;
and in the clearing weather I began my walk back through that broad
orchard cemetery, with its endless human débris under the light
fall of snow—arch and mound and wall among the trees, while brief
glints of sunshine lightened over it. Cemeteries are usually ugly;
but this is one of the very few that I remember with fondness,
perhaps because here there was no effort to delay the natural decay
of human memory. Death is as natural as life, and here it seemed so;
there was no antithesis of the fallen ruin and the blossom springing
in the snow, but a tranquil harmony. It is so that I remember it.


                                  II

Later in the afternoon, the weather continuing to clear, I drove
with a French gentleman—we were mutually unknown—to the cascades
lying not far to the southeast. Tlemcen is posed at a somewhat high
elevation on the last spurs of the ranges that encircle and dominate
it from behind, and faces a great plain, bounded with distant blue
mountains on the sides, and having the Mediterranean at its far
limit, whose gleam can be seen only on fair, clear days. It is a
spacious prospect; and the near view in which we drove by a rising
serpentine road was finely mountainous—dolomitic crags on the
right, and on the left a deep ravine denting the plain whose gently
sloping plateau had many a time been a chosen battle-ground. Birds
flew about the heights and verdure clothed the scene. The geological
formation lends itself to numerous living springs; the upper
limestone rests on sandstone, which in turn lies on marl and clay,
and the mountain rainfall is thus caught in natural reservoirs,
which issue in innumerable outlets in the porous surface. These
successive ranges of the extreme North African shore are, in fact,
a continuation of the hills of Grenada, with which they form a great
half circle, centred at Gibraltar, and with its hollow turned toward
the Mediterranean; it is the country of the Moroccan Riff, and the
character of the landscape on the African side is precisely the same
as in Spain—it is Andalusian scenery. As we drew near our goal,
the rocks took on more distinctly the picturesqueness of outline,
due to long erosion; they had a look like natural ruins high in air,
and opposite, just beyond the cascades, a superb cliff mountain
filled the lower sky.

We passed through a little garden to the foot of the fall. It was a
grotto scene. The water issued in masses from low cavernous walls
and recesses over whose broken floors and spurs it poured. It was
not a simple waterfall, however, that we had come to see, but a
succession of cascades that fell from shelf to shelf far up the
precipice. The whole scene was robed in new-fallen snow, and the
way wet and slippery; but the ascent was easily practicable by a
path that led up the incline, with many a gyration, often dipping
into the bed of a flowing stream and mounting by the rocks in the
midst, often too steep and slippery to climb without the friendly
aid of bushes, grasping hands and canes. But one scrambled up,
and the running water underfoot, snow and icy slides, only gave a
wild tang and gentle touch of adventure to the rather breathless
labor; and every little while one stopped and looked below into
the deepening ravine, or approached the falling waters in some
new aspect, till we came out at the summit of the upper cascade,
where it poured beautifully down in the midst of a cirque of
pointed rocks that rose from an indescribably fantastic mass
of juts and hanging eyries, as it were, all clothed and thick
with vegetation, vivid and bathed, inexpressibly fresh, trees
and shrubs and flowers and vines, an exuberance of plant life;
and the glittering cascade fell spraying far into its rocky heart
and sent back mellow music from the depth. “It is a landscape of
Edgar Poe,” said my companion. I was startled for a moment, but
a glance assured me that the aptitude of his remark was unknown
to the speaker—it was only a spontaneous tribute to genius,
which perhaps the casual presence of an American had helped to
germinate. But, indeed, the impression of the scene could hardly
have been better given than in those words. It was “a landscape of
Edgar Poe”—just such a one as he would have chosen as the scene
of one of his romances, as my companion went on to say; it was _sui
generis_, fantastic, a marriage of the garden and the wilderness,
not without a touch of _diablerie_, the suggestion that would make
of such a retreat the haunt of Arabian fancy, primitive tragedy,
and enchanted legend. It had the formal character of romance and
the atmosphere of natural magic; a place where _unearthliness_ might
find its home. That was the Poesque trait that the random suggestion,
perhaps, overdefined. This scene, however, was not all, as, indeed,
our ears warned us; and crossing a narrow crown of land toward the
muffled roar, we saw another falling river; the slender column of
wavering waters came from a great height, sprayed and united, and
rushed with a flood of force and speed to join the waterfall below;
it had the beauty of something seen against the sky, in contrast with
what was seen below against the earth; it was a unique combination,
and the only time I have ever seen the junction of two rivers by
the waterfall of one flowing into the waterfall of the other.

We went by an upper path to the high viaduct of a railroad that
crosses the deep glen at that point, and thence commanded the
broad expanse of the seaward plain with its near amphitheatre of
mountain ranges, and Tlemcen lying below on its headland among its
orchards. The reason why it grew up, and stood for centuries, was
plain; it is the key of the country. It seemed, and is, a garden
city; and as we walked or scrambled down the looped pathway over
the terraced face of the hill on that side, and drove on round the
circuitous road and back on our track to the city, I was most struck
by the endless orchards lying beneath us on the bottom-lands at the
foot of the ravine, and others through which we passed; and during
all my stay I saw them—orchards of orange, lemon, almond, peach,
and pear, and apple trees, and olives, and especially cherries, in
profusion everywhere, and among them the constant sound of running
waters from the springs.


                                  III

The fruit-bearing feature of the country must have been an original
trait. Pomaria, or as one might say in our own phrase, Orchard-town,
was the name of the first settlement in the colonizing days of
Rome. I walked to the place, just under the northern wall of the
city, one morning for a stroll. I was soon at the foot of the tall
minaret of the ruined mosque of Sidi Lahsen that rises on the site
of old Agadir, which was the Berber name that next absorbed the
Roman Pomaria; and I saw the Latin-inscribed stones built into
the foundation, ruin under ruin, as it were; for the walls of the
minaret, which towered a hundred and fifty feet, were dilapidated,
their enamel weather-worn, showing faded green and yellow tones
in the rectangular spaces on the sides and the bordering band at
the top, which bore the ceramic decoration; the campanile above,
tipped with a stork’s nest and a stork, added a touch of lonely
desertion, and grass and flowers were growing between the stones of
the adjacent roofless floor. Ruined mosques are often as beautiful
as English abbeys.

I wandered on through a country district over which was scattered
a native village, but in the main an open region. It was remarkable
for the number of old trees it contained; and, indeed, hardly less
striking a feature of the landscape of Tlemcen, in general, than
its garlanding orchards is this grouping of old trees, though it is
rarer. The whole African coast affords specimens of trees of great
mass and age. I remember one such on the eastern borders of Algeria
that I found among the fields, deep in the country; or rather I was
guided to it by the Arab children I had gathered in my train, and
especially by one Bedouin shepherd lad who had left his wandering
herd to follow me, and they insisted that I should see the sacred
tree. It was a monarch of the vale—one of a group of three;
massive in foliage, long of limb, great of girth, horizontal in
aspect, a leaning, almost fallen, tower of the forest. It looked as
if centuries were indifferent to it—it was so old. It was a holy
tree, a _marabout_, as they called it; and bits of cloth, strips
of rags, fluttered from its boughs, where they had been placed as
votive offerings by the poor people of the district. I was told that
I should put some copper coins on the bough or in the hollow, for an
offering and to have good fortune, for no one would take them, and
I did so, glad to pay my devoirs and wondering inwardly how long it
was since my own far ancestors had joined in tree-worship. It was the
first time I had ever seen a sacred tree, one actually worshipped,
and it touched my imagination. At Tlemcen I saw no tree so fine as
that; but there were several that bore a patriarchal resemblance; and
in the morning stroll I speak of I found a grove of them, not close
together, but spread out over the open landscape and nigh enough
for neighborhood. They were terebinths, old ruins of the vegetable
world, with that same horizontal reach and earth-bowed air—they
might almost seem on their knees in some elemental adoration; age
filled them; in that cemetery—for it was a cemetery—they were
monumental. It was a quiet landscape; cattle were grazing here and
there; three or four ruined koubbas with broken arches and fallen
walls rose at intervals, once stately monuments, for this was the
burial-place of the royalty of Tlemcen in their empire years. Not
far away, on a knoll, in a place apart, was the shrine of the first
patron saint of the city, then Agadir—for Sidi bou-Médyen was
a later comer, and saints, like dynasties, have their times and
seasons, and this cemetery of the City-Gate was old before his
hillside began to know the furrow of death. The first patron, Sidi
Wahhâb, a companion of the Prophet and a comrade of the conqueror,
lies under the terebinths. Pointed by a magnificent tree, I passed
along its shadow down a shelving, stony way to a little garden of
roses; there, in the hollow, sunken in the surrounding soil by its
antiquity, I found the grave of Sidi Yaqoub, walled, but open to
the sky—a lovely place, with the rose and the terebinth and the
sky. This cemetery of the City-Gate was a kind of spiritual outpost
for protection; the saints, indeed, camped about all the gates to
guard the city in their death; nor was it altogether in vain; it is
related of at least one prudent conqueror that he carefully inquired
as to number and virtue of the saints who lay at the various gates,
as if they had been modern batteries, and selected for attack that
postern where least was to be feared from the ghostly artillery.
The position at the spot I have described was uncommonly strong.

I followed on my return the broken line of the old ramparts of
Agadir, a knife-edge path, or divide, as it were, a climbing,
tortuous, rough way, great masses of red soil heavily overgrown with
vivid vegetation, trees, bushes, vines, emerging on a bewildering
combination of gardens and tanneries—a dilapidated, ruinous way
it was altogether. I remember a Tower of the Winds that might have
been on the Roman campagna; and to the north there was always
the broad prospect of the great plain. It was but a short walk
from here to one of the modern gates of Tlemcen, that stands on a
higher level than Agadir; and just under it I came on the mosque of
Sidi’l-Halwi, or, as one would say, Englishing his name, Saint
Bonbon. In his mortal days he made sweetmeats for the children,
and the touch of a child’s story hangs about his legend. When
the wicked vizier beheaded him and his body was cast outside the
gate, it was said that in answer to the guardian’s nightly call
for all belated travellers to enter, the poor ghost would cry from
the outer darkness: “Go to sleep, guardian; there is none without
except the wretched Saint Bonbon.” The repeated miracle found the
ears of the Sultan and was verified by himself in person, and the
wicked vizier was at once sealed up alive in the neighboring wall,
which was conveniently being repaired at the time, and the body of
the saint was honorably laid in the shrine where it still reposes in
the shelter of another of those secular trees—a carob, this time;
and duly the mosque rose hard by with its fair minaret, on whose
faces still the brown and yellow tones of the half-obliterated
faience duskily shine in the sun. I entered under the portal,
partly sheathed in the same weather-battered colors, with touches
of blue and green, relics of an older beauty, and I rested there
an hour about, under the fretted wooden ceilings, untwining the
sinuous arabesque patterns of the arcaded walls, cooling my eyes
with the translucent onyx columns of the nave—low columns with
Moorish capitals, whose gentle forms attested the burning here ages
ago of the lamp of art.


                                  IV

A little to the west of Tlemcen, and almost adjoining it, stands
another ruined city, Mansourah. I rambled out toward it on a road
alive with market-day bustle and travel, where the country people
were arriving in groups with produce and beasts of burden, and the
interest of the weekly holiday in town—a rough, hard people, not
at all like the Tunisians, but doubtless of a more vital stock. The
French cavalry were exercising in the Great Basin that had once been
like a lake in that quarter of the city, a part of the water-works of
the old days. Almost as soon as I was beyond the gate I saw Mansourah
lying on the slope near by, well marked by its great ramparts, with
towers. It was the site of an immense fortified camp, where once a
Moroccan army had sat down to besiege Tlemcen, and had abode many
years in that great siege, and had built a city to house itself. At
one point began a paved road, and I passed down its well-worn,
smooth flags into the enclosure, which was wooded with olives,
and looked like a large orchard, showing spaces of strewn stone,
some rough, ruined masses, and on the far side a lofty single
tower. The fallen stones indicated the place of the palace, and the
tower was the minaret of the destroyed mosque. In those fighting
days a siege might consume a reign, and an army was a population;
the march might seem a migration; the army brought its women and
children along with it and the people who were necessary to its
subsistence, traders and the like, and established ordinary life
on the spot; a city grew up, and in this case, perhaps, throve
especially on the intercepted caravan trade that could no longer
find its natural and customary outlet through the besieged town;
and if the war were waged successfully the new city would swallow
up the old one that would fall to decay. So Tagrart, long before
Tlemcen, had been the camp over against Agadir, and, conquering,
had become the new seat of the city. The lot of Mansourah, however,
was different; it did not finally succeed, but Tlemcen in the end
drove the plough over the new city, exterminating it, and leaving
only these ruins to be the memorial of the event.

I found little of interest in the detail except that splendid tower,
which was a spectacle of ruin; it commanded the scene by its single
and solitary figure, and was imposing to the eye and to the mind. It
was a minaret, but of a different order from any I ever saw. It
stood in the middle of the façade of the mosque, which was entered
by the central door of the minaret, massively crowned by concentric
arches over the portal; and this base was continued above, in the
upper stories, by a bolder and more solid construction than usual,
with ornamental details fitted to its severe lines, with a balcony
halfway up, and at the top a group of small Gothic arches. It was
thus more like a cathedral tower in aspect, position, and use; and
in its majestic ruin it seemed such. The treatment of the surface,
however, was altogether Moorish. The material was a beautiful rosy
stone; and, overlaid on this, one still saw the half-obliterated
green and blue lights of the incrusted work like a dull peacock
lining. The discreet relief of this ceramic ornament on the rose
stone, used as a ground and having its own warm and massive effect
in the harmony of tints, must have made a superb example of that
mosaic art of color which treated great surfaces like a jewel
box. But what a marvel it is to find the camp of a horde of Berber
tribes, in the confusion of a fierce and bloody siege, a _foyer_
of the great arts—of architecture, delicate sculpture, and mosaic
color! All those onyx columns that have so delighted me were brought
from these ruins and reset in their new places in Tlemcen. What
an interesting group of impressions a few days had brought me,
here! not one city, but a nest of cities, like a nest of boxes—or
like Troy, superposed one on another: Pomaria, Agadir, Tagrart,
Mansourah, Tlemcen. A necropolis of saints; a mountain-pleasance of
fountains, orchards, grottos, the haunt of pigeons and fruits, rich
in the privacy and delights of country life; a land of campaigns,
and Berber dynasties, and sieges! I began to feel the inadequacies
of my schoolboy geography and college histories, the need of a new
orientation of my ideas to serve as a ground-plan for my knowledge
of the people and its past, the race-character; and, on my return,
I sought out the book-shop—an excellent one—and purchased all
the little city could tell me about itself.


                                   V

The conversion of a people to a new religion, notwithstanding the
glory of apostolic legends, must have always been largely a nominal
change. The victorious faith takes up into itself the customs and
cardinal ideas, the habits of feeling and doing, the mental and
moral leaf-mould, as it were, of the old, and it is often the old
that survives in the growth under a new name and in a new social
organization. It was thus that Catholicism re-embodied paganism,
whether classical or heathen, without a violent disturbance of
the primeval roots of old religion with its annual flowering of
fêtes, its local worships, its sheltering thoughts of protection
in the human task-work, its adumbrations of the world of spirits,
its ritual toward the good and evil powers; and the religion of
Mohammed, sweeping over Africa on the swords of Arab raiders and
hordes, subdued the country to the only God, but the Berber soul
remained much as it had been, a barbarian soul, still deeply engaged
in fetichism, magic, diabolism, primitive emotions, and ancestral
tribal practices—superstition; nor was this the first time that
the Berber soul had encountered the religion of the foreigner,
for pagan temples and Christian churches already stood upon the
soil. The faith of Mohammed was more fiercely proselytizing; it was,
moreover, of desert and tribal kin; and it imposed its formulas and
exterior observance more widely and thoroughly than its predecessors.

The Berber race, nevertheless, was hard-bitted, obstinate,
independent; it was scattered over deserts and in mountain
fastnesses; its conversion was slow and remained imperfect in spite
of much missionary work on the part of the pious proselytizers from
the schools of Seville and Fez, who in later generations followed
the fiery conquerors to “Koranize” the rude mountaineers, such
as those of Kabylie, and settled beside them as daily guides and
teachers. Long after the first conquest Christianized Berbers and
other dissident groups were to be found here and there, and were
tolerated. The elements of primitive savagery held their own in
the life of the people at large, just as pagan practice and thought
survived in southern Italy, and in the last century were easily to be
observed there; the Riff, in particular, was a stronghold of magic;
and everywhere beneath the thin Moslem veneer was the old substratum
of superstition embedded in an unchanging savage heredity of mood,
belief, and social custom. Fetichism persisted in the mental habit
of the people, and still shows in their addiction to holy places,
magical rites and modes of healing, charms and amulets, and the
whole rosary of primitive superstition.

The Berbers were also by nature a Protestant race; their independent
spirit quickly availed itself of every sectarian difference, reform
or pretension, to make a core of revolt, inside the pale of the
religion, against their foreign orthodox masters. It was their way
of asserting their nationalism against the Arab domination; it was,
essentially, a political manœuvre. The first great Moslem heresy,
Kharedjism, instituted by the followers of Ali, the son-in-law of
Mohammed, found the Berber tribes an army flocking to its banners;
and, afterward, wherever schism broke out or a pretender arose,
there were the Berbers gathered together. In that world they
were the opposition. Islam itself, by the example of Mohammed,
had shown the way; every tribe had its inspired prophet, sooner
or later; and one, at least, among them, the Berghouaia, once most
powerful in this region, had its own Koran, specially received in
the Berber tongue from the only God, whose prophet in this instance
was Saleh. The expectation of the Mahdi, too—the last imam, who,
having mysteriously disappeared, shall come again to bring justice
on the earth—a tradition that mounted to Mohammed himself, was
an incentive to his appearance; and inasmuch as the prediction
circulated under the popular form—“the sun shall arise in the
west”—the Berbers regarded themselves as the chosen people
among whom the Mahdi should arise. Under these conditions there
was no lack of Mahdis. One of them, the greatest, Obéïd Allah,
the Fatémide, built that lonely seaport of Mahdia on the Tunisian
coast, whence he extended his sovereignty over the Moslem dominions
from the Egyptian border to the Atlantic, including Sicily, and
warred on Genoa, Corsica, and Sardinia; but his son had to contend
with a prophet pretender, “the man with the ass,” who with
a great following from the tribes maintained himself for a while,
until between his own new-found taste for fine horses and the desire
of the tribesmen to return to their own country, his authority and
the army melted away together, like snow in the desert. It was a
characteristic incident in Berber history.

The natural and various course of such events had ample illustration
in the Morocco country about Tlemcen. Edris, the last alleged
descendant of Ali, found refuge in this quarter on the Atlantic edge
of the Mohammedan world; the Berbers, after their custom of rallying
about a promising dissenter, soon had him at their head; his son
founded Fez, and the dynasty was prosperous and glorious. Then
a cloud appeared in the far south, a cloud of horsemen with the
veil—I suppose the blue veil that I associate with the Touaregs,
themselves doubtless the best living type of that old horde
of desert raiders. They mounted up from the borders of Senegal,
gathering masses of foot-followers as they went, preaching a reform
of faith and manners, breaking all musical instruments, and cleansing
the land; they were fighting Puritans of their age and religion,
establishing an austere life and a pure form of the faith. So
the princely Edrisides gave place to the princely Almoravides,
and their dynasty, too, was prosperous and glorious, and extended
its realm into Spain. Then rose the Mahdi. In this instance he
was Ibn Toumert, a Berber, lame and ugly, small, copper-colored,
sunken-eyed, who had schooled himself at Cordova, and then, like
Sidi bou-Médyen, warmed his enthusiastic and mystic temperament in
the oriental fires of Baghdat and Mecca, and had returned along the
cities of the African seaboard a reformer, breaking winecasks and
violins, and publicly reproaching devout dignitaries for corruption
of manners, even the reigning prince of the Almoravides. He was soon
the Mahdi, with a new Koran, institutor of the sect of the Unity
of God, which after his death came to the throne of the country in
the dynasty of the princely Almohades. The students of Tlemcen had
once sent one of their number to the prophet with an invitation to
come and teach them; he, however, found himself ill at ease in the
college, and soon went away into hermitage among the mountains;
but the youth remained with him as his disciple and companion,
and it was this youth, Abd el-Moumin, who founded the new dynasty,
like its predecessors prosperous and glorious; and it was he who
drove the Normans out of their last stronghold at Mahdia, having
extended his power so far, and with his conquering arms brought
the Andalusian arts to Tunis. In the four centuries of this brief
historic survey—from the eighth to the twelfth—a sectary,
a reformation, and a Mahdi were the initial points on which the
great changes of the government of the country turned.

It might seem that in this civilization politics was only another
form of religion; but, deeply engaged as political changes were
in religious phenomena, this is perhaps a superficial view. It may
also be maintained that the Berbers took no metaphysical interest in
dogma, and found in divergent sects and the incessant agitation of
unbridled religious enthusiasm only modes of partisanship and levers
of political ambition; their religion was, at least, compatible
with a vigorous secular life. On the theatre of history religious
events gave to politics their dramatic form, at moments of crisis;
but the religious life of the community is not to be found in them,
but rather in facts of more usual nature and daily occurrence. The
cardinal fact, and one that swallowed up all the others, from this
point of view, was the extraordinary development of saint worship;
its mortal efflorescence and fossilized deposit, so to speak, was
this strata of tombs, koubbas, which cover the region. The Marabout,
to give the saint his peculiar designation, was a man bound to
religion, and was called the “friend of God”; he was revered in
his life, and in his death he became the protector of the locality of
his tomb, the intermediary of prayer to Allah, whose personality he
obscured and tended to displace in practice. It was natural that the
cult of saints should flourish in such a superstitious population;
and the country itself, by its inaccessible character—desert and
wilderness—lent itself to hermit lives, to types of the religious
brooder and mystic, the solitary, with his dreams, illusions, and
trances. Religious consecration was also a protection in a country
of rapine and disorder, and a source of profit among a credulous
people. There was, indeed, in the circumstances everything to favor
such an order of men. It appears, also, that in the time of the great
exodus of the Moors from Spain, a considerable body of fugitives,
learned men, found refuge in the Zaouïa of Saguiet-el-Hamra,
a famous monastery in Morocco; and the labor of these “men of
God,” pious and ardent, who seemed to be almost of another order
of beings between mankind and the divinity, is sometimes assigned
as the original source of the magnitude of the development of saint
worship in these regions. It was they who “Koranized” the tribes,
a body of missionary monks, educated, devoted, with the traits of
apostolic zeal and ascetic temperament. There were Marabouts long
before their day, but to them and their example may be due the
fact that the tombs, the holy koubbas, increase toward the west,
beyond Algiers and in Morocco, where they “star” the earth.

The lives of the Algerian saints, of which many may be read, do not
differ materially from that kind of biography in any religion. Every
village has its patron saint, its “master of the country,” as
he was called, and, as at Tlemcen, one may oust another with the
lapse of time. The koubba was a shrine, a local hearth of religious
life and practice, and the worship of the shrine was the near and
warm fact in daily experience; the veneration of the Marabout
appears to hold that place in the hearts of the people where
religion is most human. The Marabout himself was of many types,
ranging from plain idiocy, as was the case of Sidi bou-Djemaa on
the hill above Mansourah, to the mystic height, the “pole of
being,” as was the case of Sidi bou-Médyen on the hill above
Agadir. He was miracle-worker, thaumaturgist, medicine-man, and
might be consulted for all human events, from cattle disease to
thief hunting; he was a preacher, a doctor of the law, an agitator,
a recluse, a madman, anything out of the common; and the story of
the legends runs the whole gamut of friar, anchorite, and fanatic
in all religious history. Women, in particular, gathered about him
and his shrine. In a region and civilization where there was no
effective mastery of authority or reason, given over to individual
initiative in a half-barbarized mental condition, such a development
was entirely natural; and the landscape itself is the history and
mark of it—there is a koubba on every hilltop, in the beds of the
streams, on the slopes of the plains—sometimes clumps of them;
in every prospect emerges the shining white cube of the holy tomb.


                                  VI

The secular phase of Berber life in these ages is vividly
illustrated in the person and career of Yarmorâsen Ben Zeiyân,
the founder of the first kingdom of Tlemcen. He belonged to the
tribe of Abd el-Wâd, who, with their cousins, the Beni-Mérin,
under the pressure of the Arabs of the second invasion, came up
from the desert and took possession of the coast, the former about
Tlemcen and the latter in Morocco. For many years these tribes,
under the Almohades, had exercised feudal rights over the country;
they came north in the spring and summer, and collected tribute
from the agriculturalists and townsmen, and returned in winter to
their desert homes with the supplies they had thus obtained. Their
rise has been termed, not inaptly, a renaissance of the Berber race
power, as, indeed, the entire history of the Berbers was a series of
explosions of national force, succeeding each other in one or another
place at long intervals, but impotent to found a permanent political
state. Yarmorâsen was of the type of Tamburlane; a simple Berber,
he was unable to speak Arabic, but he had military and organizing
genius, became chief and conqueror, and founded the dynasty with
which the glory of Tlemcen began. At the moment the Almohades
were nearing their fall. The country is described as in anarchy:
everywhere the spirit of revolt broke out, the people refused to
pay taxes, brigands infested the great routes, the officials were
shut up in the towns, the country people were without protection;
the region was at the mercy of its nomad masters. It was then that
Yarmorâsen found his opportunity, seized independent power, and
established order such as was known to that civilization. He was
a great man of his race, brave, feared, honored, who understood
the interests of his people, political administration, and the art
and ends of rule. He reigned forty-four years, amid continuous war;
he was defeated early in his career by the ruler of Tunis, but the
victor could find no better man on whom to devolve the government
than the foe he had overthrown; and it is an interesting point to
observe that his ambassador of state, on this occasion, who made
the treaty, was his mother. He was respectful of the rights of
courtesy, at least, and won applause by his kind treatment of the
sister and women of the Almohad prince he overthrew, sending them
back to their own land under escort.

In the battle which marked the fall of the Almohades and the
independence of Tlemcen there were characteristic incidents. The van
of the march of the old princes was led by the Koran, one of the
earliest and most famous copies, which the Almohades had captured
from the Moors of Grenada and rebound and incrusted with jewels;
it was borne on a dromedary, and enclosed in a silk-covered coffer
surmounted by a beautiful palm; small flags fluttered from the
corners, while before it floated a great white banner on a long
staff. It was thus that the Almohades always went out to war. When
the two armies stood in battle order, the women on both sides ran
through the ranks with uncovered faces and by their cries, gestures,
and looks animated their warriors to fight. A similar scene is
described by a modern author in writing of a Kabyle village feud;
the battle-field, he says, was the dry bed of a torrent, between two
slopes; on the heights of the ravine on either side stood the women,
barefooted, bare-armed, uttering sharp cries which crossed over
the heads of the fighters. “They are all there, their mothers,
their wives, their sisters, their daughters, serried one against
another like the flowers of a crown; even the widows whose husbands
were killed in the last spring combat, even the _révoltées_ who had
left their husbands declaring they would no longer serve them,—all
adorned and painted for the battle. Rich or poor, young or old,
beautiful as idols or disfigured by age and suffering, they are
all together, their arms interlaced, their eyes wide and full of
fire, at the foot of each village, a confused mass of ornaments,
bright colors and miserable rags, lifted by one movement, erect
with hate and terror.” The men charge, fire point-blank, engage
hand to hand with their yatagans—“better a hundred times die
here than go back to the village, because their women will that
they should die.” It was such a scene when Yarmorâsen fought
with the Almohad prince, Es-Saïd.

Yarmorâsen was more than a fighter; he was an enlightened governor.
Tlemcen was then a double city—Agadir and Tagrart, not an arrow’s
flight between them. Tagrart had been the “camp” of the invading
Almoravides, who had taken Agadir, and as victor it was now the
city of the functionaries and government, while the people—the
old inhabitants—continued to live in Agadir. Yarmorâsen cared
for both, and built the minaret of Agadir, and also that of the
grand mosque of Tlemcen, but he declined to inscribe his name upon
them, saying: “It is enough that God knows.” He built other
public works and the city grew into a thriving capital, not only
of war, but of residence and trade, and also became famous for its
schools. Among other learned men whom his reputation as a protector
of the liberal arts attracted to his court was one, brilliant in
that century, Abou Bekr Mohammed Ibn Khattab, whose story especially
interested me. He was a poet, and commanded not only a fine hand,
but a beautiful epistolary style. Yarmorâsen made him the first
secretary of state, and he wrote despatches to the lords of Morocco
and Tunis so elegantly composed that, says the Arabian historian
Tenesi, they were still learned by heart in his day; and he adds that
with this poet the art of writing diplomatic despatches in rhymed
prose ceased. The Berber prince deserves grateful memory among poets
as the last patron of a lost grace of the art, not likely to find
its renaissance ever; and they must read with pleasure the starry
and flowery titles with which the chroniclers adorn his glory—the
magnanimous, the lion-heart, the bounteous cloud, the shining rose,
the kingliest of nobles, the noblest of kings, the well-beloved,
the sword of destiny, the lieutenant of God, crown of the great,
Emir of the Moslems, Yarmorâsen Ben Zeiyân.

He left a line of strong and brilliant rulers who were warriors
first of all, for the glorious age of Tlemcen was a period of intense
life, and the little city had often to battle for its existence. It
suffered reverses; not long after the death of Yarmorâsen a
contemporary Arabian traveller thus depicts it: “This city is
very beautiful to see, and contains magnificent things; but they are
houses without inhabitants, estates without owners, places that no
one visits. The clouds with their showers weep for the misfortunes
of the town, and the doves on the trees deplore its destiny with
their moaning cry.” Its recovery, however, must have been rapid,
for in the next reign Tachfin found time in the intervals of war to
build the Great Basin and a beautiful college, and he reared also
the minaret of the great mosque at Algiers. These were the years of
the life-and-death struggle with the Beni-Mérin, of which Mansourah
is the monument. The great siege had been sustained and the peril
beaten back; but now the enemy returned, and from a new Mansourah
on the same site they directed their attack so well that they took
Tagrart, old Tlemcen—Tachfin, the king, falling in battle. The
victor, Abou’l-Hasen, was a worthy conqueror and the founder of
the artistic Mansourah, that I have described, with its palace, its
mosque, and its columns; he made the new city his royal residence,
over against Tagrart as Tagrart had stood over against Agadir, and he
adorned the suburbs of the old city; he built the mosque and college
of Sidi bou-Médyen, and his son the mosque of our good Saint Bonbon;
he was an art-loving prince and a wide victor, magnificent in royal
presents which he exchanged with the Sultan of Egypt, and in all
ways glorious; but I remember him best as the conqueror who, after
he had swept the coast of Africa to the desert limit, returning,
stood on that solitary beach at Mahdia, that so impressed me, and
“reflected on the lot of those who had preceded him, men still
greater and more powerful on the earth.” But this domination of
the Beni-Mérin, who after all were cousins, lasted only a score
of years; and the line of Yarmorâsen came to its own again, in
the person of Abou-Hammou, of the younger branch. He had been born
and bred in Andalusia, and was an accomplished prince. He wrote a
book upon the art of government for the education of his son, which
may be read now in Spanish, and he was a great patron of learning;
he built a beautiful college, adorned with marble columns, trees
and fountains, for his friend, the sage Abou-ben-Ahmed, attended
the first lecture and endowed the institution with sufficient
property for its maintenance. He, too, labored in war; but the
remarkable trait of these princes of the rude Berber stock is that,
notwithstanding the state of instant and long-continued warfare in
which they held their lives and power, they were as great builders
as warriors, and unceasing in their patronage of learning and the
arts. This was the great age of the city in the reigns I have
touched on. A score of descendants carried on the rule through
another century to the scene of trade, war, and study that Leo
the African portrays in the city. He describes the various aspects
of this great market of the desert, its buildings, and especially
its four classes of citizens, merchants, artisans, soldiers, and
students. Of these last he says: “The scholars are very poor and
live in colleges in very great wretchedness; but when they come to
be doctors, they are given some reader’s or notary’s office,
or they become priests.” Alas, the scholar’s life! Doubtless it
was the same in Yarmorâsen’s time. It is a pathetic thing to me to
think of those thousands of poor free scholars, through generations,
seeking the light as best they could in this university city,
for such it was—what a record of self-denial and deprivation,
of belief in the highest, of living on the bread of hope! But it
was all to end—the old Tlemcen—with the coming of the Turk;
he came in the peculiarly atrocious form of the pirate, Aroudj,
master of Algiers, who gathered all the young princes of the old
blood royal, a numerous band, and drowned them in the Great Basin.


                                  VII

In the brilliant years of Tlemcen, during which it was a spray
of the flowering branch of Andalusian art, what is most striking
and remains on the mind with a touch of surprise is the sense of
the long and various contact of the Berber world with inherited
Mediterranean civilization. We are accustomed to think of the north
coast of Africa as a much-isolated country; but no place in the world
is ever so isolated as it may seem to be; and the connection of the
North African peoples with the centres of Christian history was never
broken from the first Christian ages. Some Christian communities were
encysted among the Berbers by the first Arab invasion; in the tenth
century there were still five bishoprics among them. Charlemagne
sent an embassy to Kairouan in respect to the relics of some saint
at Carthage, in the reign of Ibrahim, the Aglabite, who received
it with great splendor. The trade of the country was of vast
territorial extent, reaching the Soudan and Central Africa and the
furthest Mohammedan East; in the eleventh century negotiations were
entered into with the Papacy with a view to attracting Christian
merchants and markets. En-Nacer, a prince of the Hammadites, sent
presents to Gregory VII, including all his Christian slaves. The
contact with the Christians as enemies, in Sicily, Spain, and on
the sea, was incessant in the period of Moslem power. Christians,
too, made a part of the mercenary troops of the Moslem armies; the
Beni-Mérin are said to have had at one time twelve thousand such
troops, and Yarmorâsen had two thousand, who mutinied and were
slain; these were the last of the Christian cavalry in Moslem pay.

Contact with the old civilization was still more intimate and
continuous toward the East in commerce and the arts. The Berber
tribes of the coast had contained artisans from Roman times;
but the Arabs were from the beginning dependent on civilization
for all articles of luxury, and, especially in their religious
needs, for the architectural arts. The mosque was built on the
plan of Byzantine churches, and the Greeks and Persians became the
masters of construction and decoration in building; Roman temples
and palaces and Christian churches were the quarries from which
materials were taken. The great mosque at Kairouan is “a forest
of columns” of antique make, and in this it is an example of
a general practice. Original building came slowly into being,
and was rudely imitative. The Andalusian art, as it is called,
the special form in which the Moorish genius embodied itself,
was evolved in Spain, and its history is incompletely made out;
for although the Alhambra, together with other examples at Seville
and Cordova, is its most perfect product, yet the art was developed
also on the Moroccan side of the strait, and its creations at Fez,
Marrâkeck, and other points still await thorough examination and
study. The examples at Tlemcen belong to this African branch of
the art, which was patronized by the early king of Tlemcen, and
was most illustrated, perhaps, by the Beni-Mérin prince in his
reign at Mansourah; for his predecessors at Fez had been rulers
on both sides the strait, and were, therefore, in more immediate
contact with the sources of the art, which, however, had already
by reason of the emigrant Andalusians made Fez a noble Moorish
city. As compared with Fez, Tlemcen was provincial.

The Berber princes ruled over a border state continually at war,
and their city retained the rudeness of the nomad life; they
were kings of a master-warrior caste among the other elements of
the population, but with a pride in public works and a delight in
decorative luxury, a capacity for civilization and elegance, which
transformed them into accomplished princes of Andalusian culture,
like their neighbors. In realizing their ambitions they were,
however, dependent on the aid of their neighbors; they obtained both
workmen, architects, and in some cases material already wrought, from
Spain, and especially from the lord of Andalusia, Abou’l-Walîd,
who sent them the ablest artisans he could command. The legend that
the bronze plates of the door of the mosque of Sidi bou-Médyen
were miraculously floated there from abroad doubtless contains the
truth that they were brought from Spain. Some of the tiles are of
foreign manufacture. The art, whether in spirit, style, or skill,
is to be looked on as an importation, though it achieved its works
on the spot. It affords admirable examples, and they are of uncommon
purity, since each newcomer did not restore and refashion older work
in current modes of later skill or taste, but left it, as the Arabs
will, to its own decay; this art is seen, therefore, very often
just as it was in its first creation save for the ravage of time.

It was not an art of structure, though at times, as in the tower
at Mansourah, it has structural nobility, or, as elsewhere, lines
of grace; neither the architects nor the workmen were expert
builders, and they treated structural elements—the column,
the arch, the dome—decoratively; these were subordinated to a
decorative intention. The genius for decoration, however, found
its main channel in the treatment of surfaces, sometimes curved and
limited, but usually flat and spacious. It sprang rather from the
art of graving than of modelling, and flowered especially in the
line—arabesque. The line was employed in a series of geometric
patterns—squares, polygons, circles—symmetrically arranged,
and mingled with more or less distinctness; or in rectilineal
or curvilineal combinations that were also patterns, repeated
indefinitely; or in formalized script based on calligraphy. The
origins of this mode go far back into antiquity; but its predominant
use is the special trait of Moorish decoration. The second main
feature of the art was in its color—mosaic. It is true that the
lineal decoration of plaster and wood was painted, in red, blue,
and olive-green, but this color has disappeared; for our eyes,
so far as color is concerned, it is the mosaic that has survived;
and here, too, the mosaic sometimes borrows its interior designs
from the patterns of lineal decoration. The origin of this mosaic
is also lost in antiquity; the art in one or another of its forms
had long been widely diffused in the Mediterranean world. The Roman
soil of Africa had been covered with mosaic floors, which may still
be seen in beautiful and varied collections of them at Tunis and
Sousse; Byzantine work, such as is found at Ravenna and in Sicily,
was a living art through the Middle Ages; and the contemporary
Persian manufacture of tiles and similar work passed everywhere
in the commercial world, and may be closely connected technically
with the art in Andalusia. It was for exterior decoration that
the mosaic faience was principally employed. The motives of the
lineal decoration are few—disks, stars, and the like—and in the
floral design only the acanthus formalized is used; similarly,
the colors of the mosaic are few—manganese-brown, white,
copper-green, iron-yellow, rarely blue. The combination of these
few elements—colors and patterns—is unrestricted by any limit,
they are undefined by any form, they grow by accretion, and they
thus obtain and give the quality of the infinite, the illimitable,
which is the most obvious trait of the arabesque. It is an art that
plays with form only to escape from it, whether in color or in line.

The charm of this art does not lie merely in its perfect fitness to
its light and cheap materials, nor in its easy solving of its own
problems, but rather in its kinship to the Arab genius, its response
to the desert spirit. This is most deeply felt in the mosques, where
it is in contact with the gravest things in life. The mosque is the
plainest of sacred places, and delights a Puritan soul. There are
no images of humanized deities or deified men; there is neither god
nor saint nor mythic story; neither is there any mystery of dogma or
speculation to be told in symbolism of material things; there is only
unbodied and unformulated religious awe, the worship of the spirit in
the spirit. The art that defines has here no function. The Western
genius, master of life, is a defining genius; the oriental way is
different—it is an effusion, an expansion, an illimitable going
forth. This art, too, with its few motives, its paucity of fact,
its monotony of structure, yet issuing always on the illimitable,
the infinite, resumes the structure of the desert, which is similar
in its elements and effects, its composition and its sentiment. It is
also completely free from the burden of thought, the fatal gift of
Western genius with its hard definings, too avid of knowing, whose
art is rather a means to cage than to free the bird of life. It is
an art restorative of the senses in their own kingdom—whether in
line or color, a pure joy to the eye, a “disembodied joy,” too,
as art should be, full of abstraction, yet unconscious of anything
beyond the sensuous sphere. It is easy to sum its salient technical
points and to indicate its obvious affinities with the mosque, with
desert nature, with the Arab genius; but even though he see it, one
cannot easily appreciate it in its decay, nor well imagine it in
its fresh beauty, as a visible harmony for the soul, without some
initiation into the fundamental moods of the race for whom and of
whom it was. To me, nevertheless, the sight was a pure delight,
as is the memory; a nomad art it seemed, born of the desert and
expressive of it, an evanescence of beauty playing on fragile and
humble materials, as life in the desert is fragile and humble, and
clad in the evanescence of nature—life not too seriously valued,
sure of speedy ruin, not worthy of too great outward cost.


                                 VIII

I went out into the night on my last evening and wandered in the dark
streets till the falling gleam of a Moorish cafe drew me into its
shadowy spaces, where I drank a cup of coffee, listening to sudden
snatches of native music and observing the swarthy and stalwart Arabs
where they were banked up on a sort of high stage at my left. It
was a characteristic but dull and lifeless scene. At a later hour I
visited the moving pictures. The large, obscure shed was jammed full
of rough-looking men and boys, French soldiers in many colors, and
Arabs in hanging folds, with life-worn faces, often emaciated; but I
noted as a general characteristic that self-contained, self-reliant
immobility of countenance that is the type of border men; it was
the crowd of a frontier town. I went back to my hotel under the
keen midnight sky at last, thinking of the long and crowded life
of the historic past in this old caravanserai of the desert tribes,
of the scenes of which I had been reading—the Koran-led army, the
battle of the women, the palace feasts, night-long, where pages swung
rose censers among the guests and the revelry ended with the morning
prayer; of the great figures—the scholar-saint, Sidi bou-Médyen,
the ascetic revolutionary, Ibn Toumert, the Berber shepherd boy
who found a kingdom, the world conqueror by the sea at Mahdia,
the young princes drowned; of the desert courage that had flashed
here, a sword from the scabbard, of the desert piety that had here
flung away the jewel of life a thousand times, of the generations
of desert idealists who in the crowded schools had walked the way
of light as it was vouchsafed to them; and in the waking reality
of the French border town, whose night scene had depressed me,
it seemed an Arabian dream.




                                FIGUIG

                               * * * * *

                                  III

                                FIGUIG


                                   I

I woke, in the train, on the high plateaus. Dawn—soft green and
pallid gold, luminous, then dying under a heavy cloud while faint
pink brightened on the sides of the great horizon—opened the lofty
plain, boundless and naked, thinly touched with tufts of vegetation;
as far as one could see, only the elements—color, cold, swathing
wild herbage on rugged soil; and far off, alone, the haze of an
abrupt mountain range. It was the steppe beyond Khreider. The
vast, salt chott of El-Chergui, that streaks the middle of the
steppe with its waste and quicksands, lay behind; but its saline
arms still clung to and discolored the surface, and whitened the
view westward with dull crystalline deposits. This wide blanching
of the gray and red soil striped and threw into relief the rigid
scene—aridity, vacancy, solitude, from which emerged the still
grandeur of inanimate things. It was the characteristic scene of
the high plains—a vague monotony, colored with sterile features
flowing on level horizons. As the train ascended nature seemed
still to unclothe and uncover, to strip and peel the land; but not
continuously. From time to time the steppe lapsed back to a thicker
growth of tough-fibred alfa, whose home is on these plains, and bore
other dry, sparse, darkish desert plants upon reddish hummocks; on
this pasturage distant herds of camels browsed unattended, as on a
cattle-range, in the wild spaces fenced by rolling sands; then the
climbing train would soon pass again amid low dunes. Few stations, at
long intervals; isolated, meagre, they seemed lost in the spreading
areas, mere points of supply; the most important was but a village,
with sickly trees; but they took on an original character. They were
fortified; obviously built for defence, with sallies and retreats in
their walls; guarded casemates obliquely commanding all avenues of
approach and the walls themselves; doors that were meant to shut. It
was a railway in arms, a line of military posts, or blockhouses,
as it were, on an unsettled border. The sight gave a tang of war
to the silence of the uninhabited country, and reminded one of
unseen tribes and of the harsh frontier of Morocco over opposite,
south and west. Slowly the mountains sprang up; one had already
drifted behind, Djebel-Antar; and now the peaks of the Saharan
Atlas, rising sheer from the plain a thousand metres, lay on either
hand, bold crests and jutting ranges—Djebel-Aïssa on the left,
the Sfissifa on the right in the southwestern sky, Djebel-Mektar
straight ahead. We had passed the highest point of the line at an
elevation of thirteen hundred metres, and were now on the incline
and rapidly approaching the last barrier of the Sahara. We were soon
at the foot of Mektar. It was Aïn-Sefra, an important military base.

But I did not think of war; to me Aïn-Sefra is a name of literature
and has a touch of personal literary _devoir_; for there in the
barren Moslem cemetery, outside the decaying ksar, is buried the
poor girl who taught me more about Africa than all other writers; she
had the rare power of truth-telling, and lived the life she saw; her
books are but remnants and relics of her genius, but she distilled
her soul in them—one of the wandering souls of earth, Isabelle
Eberhardt. She was only twenty-seven, but years are nothing—she
had drunk the cup of life. Here she died in the oued, the torrent
river whose bottom I was now skirting, a wide, dry watercourse,
strewn with stones, and with roughly indented banks. It was dry
now, but on these denuded uplands and surfaces, after a rainfall,
which is usually torrential, it fills in a moment with a furious
sweep and onset of waters; and thus a few years ago it rose in the
October night and tore away the village below the high ground of
the French encampment; and there she was drowned. The echo of her
soul in mine, long ago at Tunis, was the lure that drew me here.

There, before my eyes, was the sight I had longed to see, just as
she had described it. I knew it as one recognizes a lighthouse
on a foreign coast, so single, so unique it was—the leap of
the red dunes up the defile, fierce as a sword thrust of the far
desert through the mountains. That was Africa—the untamed wild,
the bastion of nature in her barbarity, the savage citadel of
her splendid forces to which man is negligible and human things
unknown. The dunes are golden-red, tossed like a stormy, billowing
sea; they charge, they leap, they impend—petrified in air; an
ocean surf of red sand, touched with golden lights, frozen in the
act of the wild wind. They are magnificent in their lines of motion,
in their angers of color; but the spirit of them is their _élan_,
their drive, flung forward as if to ram and overwhelm the pass with
a wide sandy sea. The light on them is a menace; they threaten;
nor is it a vain threat; they move with the sure fatality of all
lifeless things, they will invade and conquer—a foe to be reckoned
with; and to fend the valley against them, man takes a garden,
trees, plantations, advancing a van of life against all that
lifelessness. It is a superb picture there, among the mountains,
a symbol of the struggle—the long battle of vegetable and mineral
forces, clothing and desolating the planet; and it holds the rich
glow of the African temperament, a spark of the soul of the land.

The train winds on in the bright morning air by a shining koubba,
dark palm tufts, and the high, silent tricolor, and goes down
the oued, turns the mountain, passes into the rocks, a strange
scene of stormy forms and sterile colors, and makes from valley
to valley by sharp curves, from oued to oued by deep cuts,
piercing and grooving its passage to lower levels through the
range of the ksour. Almost from the first it is unimaginable,
that landscape. It is all rock in ruins, denuded and shivered,
shelving down, disintegrating; fallen avalanches of rotten strata;
every kind of fracture; whole hills in a state of breaking up into
small pieces, pebbly masses, bitten, slivered. We traverse broken,
burnt fields of it, all shingle; expanses of it so, beneath walls
cracked and scarified; we curve by scattered bowlders of all sizes
and positions, down valleys of stones; new hills open, sharp-edged,
jagged—continuous rock. All outlooks are on the waste wilderness
crumbling in its own abandonment; all contours are knife-edges;
the perspectives are all of angles. In the near open tracts lie
relics and remains, mounds, mountains, and hills that have melted
away; steep lifts on all curves; and on the sky horizon, following
and crossing one another, saw-toothed ranges, obliquely indented
with sharp re-entries, or else acute cones and rounded mamelons:
the whole changing landscape a ruin of mountains being crumbled and
split and blown away. It is an elemental battle-field, where the
rock is the victim—a suicide of nature. In this region of extreme
temperatures with sudden changes—burning noons and frozen nights,
torrid summers and winter snows, downpours of rainfall—the fire
and frost, wind and cloudburst have done their secular work; they
have stripped and pulverized the softer, outer rock shell, washed it
down, blown it away, till the supporting granite and schist are bare
to the bone. It is a skeletonized, worn land, all apex and débris;
near objects have the form and aspect of ruins, the horizons are
serried, the surfaces calcined. It is an upper world of the floored
and pinnacled rock, an underworld shivered and strewn with its own
fragments, a “gray annihilation”—of the color of cinders. I
imagine that the landscapes of the moon look thus.

A mineral world, bedded, scintillant, flaked. It is dyed with color.
All life has gone from it, and with the departure of life has come
an intensification, an originality, an efflorescence of mineral
being. The earlier stages of the ride—the red mountains striped
beneath with black, beyond the middle ground of a prevailing reddish
tint sparsely scattered with a vegetation of obscure greens and
dull grays amid strong earth colors, once with the bluish-black
of palm-trees blotting the distance—I remember now almost as
fertility. Here there is not a leaf—nor even earth nor sand. It
seems rock devastated by fire, like volcanic summits. A sombre
magnificence, a fantastic grandeur! Blue-grays, browns, and ochres
of every shade gleam on the slopes of the hillsides; reds splash the
precipices and walls; innumerable, indescribable tones, too gloomy to
be called iridescence, shimmer over the mid-distance and die out in
twilights of color amid the manganese shadows, on the cold limestone
heights, in the sandstone gullies. Where I can see the surfaces of
the shivered stones, I notice their extraordinary smoothness. There
are purples and black-greens and violets among them, but for
the most part they are black, like soot; for amid this fantastic
coloration, what gives its sombreness to the scene—the trouble
of the unfamiliar—and grows most menacing, is the black. The
land is oxidized—blackened; its shivered floor is strewn with
black stones; black stripes streak its sides far and near; amid all
that mineral bloom it is to black that the eye returns, fascinated,
enthralled. It invades the spirits with its prolonged weirdness; it
awes and saddens. And all at once we emerge from a deep ravine—oh,
_la belle vie!_—a sea of dark verdure makes in from below, like
a fiord, among the naked mountains round it—silent, mysterious,
living, the green of the palm oasis; and swiftly, after that
stop, we dip into the black gorges beyond Moghrar, more sombre,
sinister—valleys of the color and aspect of some strange death, the
incineration of nature in her own secular periods, the passing of a
planet. Slowly vegetation begins—tufts amid the rock interstices,
desert growths, the _chaufleur saharienne_, the drin, the thyme,
plants of ashen-gray, stiff, sapless; trees now—betoums, feeble
palms; a beaten track with a trio of Bedouin Arabs. It is the oued
of the Zousfana; and we debouch on the far prospect—off to the
right the oases of Figuig, oblong dark spots on the foot-hills of
Morocco, and before us to the left the great horizons of the Sahara,
the _hamada_. Five hours from Aïn-Sefra. It is Beni-Ounif.

I descended from the train amid groups of soldiers. I lose my
prejudice against a uniform when it is French or Italian; and in
North Africa the blue of the tirailleur, the red of the spahi,
are a part of the _mise en scène_. These were soldiers of the
Foreign Legion. I had been familiar with their uniform, too, in
the north at Oran, and particularly at Sidi-bel-Abbes, one of their
rendezvous; and I saw it again with friendly eyes, for all that I
had here—harborage, security, freedom to come and go—did I not
owe it to them? The Sud-Oranais is their work, like so much else
in Algeria. I trudged through the sand, a young Arab tugging at my
baggage and guiding me, to the hotel, which occupied a corner of
an extensive flat building of Moresque style, rather imposing with
its towers though it was only of one story, on a street that seemed
preternaturally wide because all the buildings were likewise of one
story. The whole little town, a mere handful of low, fragile blocks,
looked strangely desolate and lonesome, forsaken, isolated, dull. The
host received me pleasantly—I was the only guest to arrive, and
there was no sign of another occupant—and took me to my room in the
single corridor; it was clean and sufficient—a bed, a basin, and
a chair; a small, heavily barred window, at the height of my head,
looked on a large, vacant court. So this was the _terre perdue_.
I was “far away.” “The brutality of life—” I was “clean
quit” of it, like a lark in the blue, like a gull on the gray
sea. “_Adieu, mes amis,_” I thought. Where had I read it—“The
man who is not a misanthrope has never loved his fellow men.”

There was a knock at my door: “Monsieur, some one to see you.”
It came with a shock, for the solitude had begun to seize me. I
went toward the office. A young soldier of the Legion approached
me, full of French grace, with a look of expectancy on his fine
face. “I heard there was an American here,” he said in English;
“I did not believe it,” he added; “I came to see.” “Yes,”
I said, “I am an American.” “There hasn’t been one here
in two years—not since I came,” he spoke slowly—keen,
soft tones. “South American?” he ventured. “No,” I said,
melting. “Truly from the United States—where?” His look hung on
my face. “I was born near Boston,” I replied, interested. “I
was born in Boston.” I shall never forget the gladness of his
voice, the light that swept his eyes. A quick, soldierly friending
seized us—the warmth that does not wait, the trust that does not
question. In ten minutes he was caring for me like a younger brother,
introducing me with my letters at the Bureau Arab, doing everything
till he went to his service. In the evening we met again, and so the
lonely journey of the day ended in an African sunset, as it were,
of gay and brilliant spirits, for I know of no greater joy than
the making of friends. He was of French parentage, and the only
American in the Legion; at least, he had never seen nor known of
another. And I went to bed thinking of the strange irony of life,
and how the first thing that the _terre perdue_ gave me was the
last thing I expected in the wide world—a friend.


                                  II

I went by myself to visit the old ksar, the native village which
had occupied this site before the coming of the French and the rise
of the new town about the railway. It lay some little distance to
the west of the track—a collection of palm-trees, with a village
at the farther end, backed by a white koubba. My Arab boy, who
had never lost sight of me, had me in charge, and led the way. We
crossed into the strip of barren country and saw the ksar with its
palmerai before us, like a rising shoal in the plain. Accustomed
as my eyes are to large horizons, this country had an aspect of
solitariness that was extraordinary. The sand-blown black rock, the
_hamada_, lies all about; the mountains of the Ksour that back the
scene to the northeast are reddish in color and severe in outline,
and the mountains of Morocco, cut here by three passes, block it to
the north and west with their heavy and wild masses, while other
detached heights are seen far off to the south. From this broken
ring of bare mountains, red and violet and gray, the rocky desert
floor, blown with reddish sand, makes out into the open distance
interminably to horizons like the sea. In the midst of this the
little ksar with its trailing palm-trees, Beni-Ounif with its slender
rail and station, its white redoubt and low buildings, with the
Bureau Arab and its palms a little removed, seem insignificant human
details, mere markings of animal life, in a prospect where nature,
grandiose in form and without limit in distance, exalted by aridity,
is visibly infinite, all-encompassing, supreme. The sun only, burning
and solitary, seems to own the land. The moment one steps upon the
windy plain it is as if he had put to sea; he is alone with nature,
and the harshness of the land gives poignancy to his solitude.

We walked over rough ground awhile, and then crossed the dry bed
of a oued, one of the channels that in time of flood lead the
waters down to the Zousfana, whose shrunken stream flows in its
wide rocky bottom some distance to the north of the ksar toward
the mountains; and we climbed up on the farther side by crumbling
footpaths that run on little uneven ridges of dry mud, twisting
about in a rambling way, with small streams to cross, which groove
the soil; and so we came into the gardens. The aspect, however, is
not that of a garden; the background of the scene is all dry mud,
whose moulded and undulating surface makes the soil, while the little
plots are divided by mud walls, high enough at times to give some
shade and meant to retain the irrigating waters. There are a few
patches of barley, very fresh and green; but for the most part the
plots are filled with trees—fig-trees, old and contorted, with
their heavy limbs, the peach and almond with fragile grace and new
tender green, the pomegranate and the apple, and rising above them
the palms whose decorative forms frame in and dignify the little
copses of the fruit-trees, and unite them; but the dry mud makes
an odd contrast with the branching green of varied tints and gives
a note of aridity to the whole under scene. The plots vary only in
their planting, and were entirely deserted. We came through them
to the ksar itself with its wall. It is built of dry mud, which is
the only material used here for walls and houses alike. The rain
soon gives them a new modelling at best, and this ksar is old and
ruined, half abandoned now that the French town is near. The outer
wall is much broken, with the meandering shapelessness of abandoned
earthworks—scallops and indentations, the smooth moulding and mud
sculpture of time on the golden soil; and off beyond it stretches
the endless cemetery, with the pointed stones at the head and foot
of the graves, a tract of miserable death, so simple, naked, and
poverty-struck, and yet in such perfect harmony with the sterile
and solitary scene, that it does not seem sad but only the natural
and inevitable end. It belongs to the desert; it is its comment
on the trivial worthlessness of human life, whose multitude of
bones are heaped and left here like the potter’s shard. The sun
beats down on the wide silence of that cemetery; the sand blows and
accumulates about the rough stones that seem to lie at random; there
is no distinction of persons there, no sepulchral apparelling of the
mortal fact, no illusion, no deception; it is the grave—“whither
thou goest.” And it is not sad—no more than the naked mountains
of the Ksour, the dark Morocco heights, the silent sunlight; it is
one with them—it is nature. On its edge toward the ksar rises the
koubba of the saint, Sidi Slimanc bou-Semakha, the ancient patron of
the country; it is the only spot of this old Moslem ground that no
infidel foot has trod; there his body reposes in its wooden coffin,
hung with faded silks within its carved rail in the white chamber,
secluded and sacred, and the faithful sleep in the desert outside. It
is a world that has passed away.

The ksar itself was like all others in this region. They are walled
villages adjoining the palmerai that feeds them; the houses are built
of sun-baked earth supported on small palm beams and lean serried
one upon another in continuous lines and embankments; narrow alley
ways and passages honeycomb them, often with a roofing of the same
palm beams, so that one walks in underground obscurity; externally,
owing to their old and weather-worn aspect, they have a general
ruinous look. The walls on the street are blind; here and there in
dark corners a seat for loungers is hollowed out in the side; there
is somewhere a square for judgment where is the assembly of the
elders, and by the mosque or koubba an open space. There is always
a life outside the walls, a place for market, for caravans to stop,
encampments of all sorts. All have a look of dilapidation. But this
old ksar had more than that; it was obviously in a state of ruin
and abandonment. Walls had fallen, exposing the wretched interiors,
cave-like, mere cellarage. There was no one there. I passed through
some of the covered ways—blank obscurity, with holes of naked
sunlight. I did not see half a dozen living figures; they were
unoccupied, listless, marooned. It was still—a stillness of
death. I found the sources, the underground streams that supply the
little oasis; there were three or four young negro girls standing
in the water in discolored bright rags; they pointed out to me the
blind fish in the water. “_C’est défendu_,” said my Arab
boy when I asked him to catch one. Life seemed _défendu_. The
air was moribund. It was a decadence of the very earth. I was glad
to have the hot sun on my back again by the tall palms and green
fruit-trees springing out of their dry-mud beds, and I sat down on
a crumbling wall, amid the amber deliquescence of the rich-toned
soil, and looked back on that landscape of decay, and sought to
reconstruct in fancy the desert life of its silent years.

It was an old human lair. Its people, the _ksouriens_, who lived here
their half-underground life, sheltered from the burning blasts of the
summer sun and the bitter winds of winter, were a settled townfolk,
with their oasis agriculture and simple desert market. The ruling
race were the descendants of some Marabout; for the Moslem saint
was a patriarch, and one finds whole villages that claim to be
originated from some one of them; these men were the proprietors
of the gardens, which were tilled by native negroes or Soudanese
slaves and their progeny, a servile breed; and there were Jews,
who were compelled to live apart, a pariah caste. Outside were the
Berber and Arabized nomad tribes, scattered and living in fractions,
who went from place to place for the pasturage of their flocks;
their chiefs and head men were desert raiders, who took toll
by tribute or pillage of the caravans traversing their country,
and made forays on their neighbors; the people of the ksar held a
feudal relation to these desert lords. The most secure units of
property in the land were the zaouias, or monasteries, bound to
hospitality and charity, and ruled by Marabout stocks; their gardens
and flocks had a protective character of sacredness, the goods of
God. Society was in a primitive form of uncohering fragments, very
independent, self-centred, uncontrolled; though it was of one faith,
hostility pervaded it; feuds were its annals; it had pirate blood. A
pastoral, marauding, sanguinary world, with elements of property and
aristocracy, but democratic within itself, with slaves and outcast
breeds; a world of simple wants but always half submerged in misery;
a world of the strong arm. In such a world the _ksouriens_ lived here
by the mountain passes. They saw those old nomad tribes go by that
mounted to Tlemcen and drank the bright cup of the Mediterranean for
a season; but the _ksouriens_ had forgotten them; their passage was
only a wrinkling of the desert sand. Caravans stopped by the brown
walls; raiders rode by to the desert; the seven ksars of Figuig
fought petty wars, one on another, on the hill opposite; mountain
women pitched their striped tents by the cemetery wall; the Jews
worked at little ornaments of silver and coral; there was a coming
and going to the fountain, secret and ferocious love, the woe of
poverty and hate—the Arab life of violence and ruse and silence,
in the palm gardens, the underground passages, the darkened streets;
a life of obscurity and somnolence; and the _ksouriens_ grew pale
like wax, with their black beards and corded turbans, and the old
Arab vitality melted in their bones. The hours that no man counts
rolled over the languid ksar, where white figures sat in the seats
in the earthen wall along the covered streets in the silence; the
unborn became the living and the stones multiplied in the cemetery;
and there was no change. I could almost hear the bugle note yonder
that brought a new world of men. And now the ksar was dead.

The moon, almost at the full, was growing bright in the eastern sky;
the mountains of the Ksour, that still took the setting sun, glowed
with naked rock, rose-colored; on the left the mountains of Figuig
lay in black shadow, with the violet defiles between, clear-cut on
the molten sky. As I stepped on the rise of Beni-Ounif it was already
night; the brilliant white moon flooded the hard landscape with
winter clarity; the unceasing wind blew cold. It was a solemn scene.


                                  III

“Monsieur, le spahi.” I went out in the early morning air and
found my escort for Figuig, a tall, dark Arab, almost black, his
head capped with a huge turban wound with brown camel’s rope in
two coils, and his form robed in a heavy white burnoose that showed
his red trousers beneath; he held two horses, one tall and strong,
for himself, the other, smaller and lighter, a mare, for me. My
friend soon joined us with his mount, and, glancing at my mare as I
also mounted, warned me not to rein her in straight with that bit,
as it was thus that the Arabs trained their horses to rear and
caper, and a strong pull might bring her up unexpectedly on her
hind legs, and that, he said, was all I need be careful about. We
trotted off easily enough down the street toward the railway, and
in a few moments turned the last building and were on the route
westward over the open plain. The old ksar lay far off to the left,
the Zousfana to the north, and between was the unobstructed stretch
of the rocky _hamada_, herbless and strewn with small and broken
stones, to where we saw a line of straggling palms beneath the
Morocco hillside. The air was brisk and cool—just the morning for
a gallop. The temptation was too great for my mare, who showed no
liking for her neighbors, and, after a few partly foiled attempts,
struck boldly off the trail to the left. I minded my instructions
and had no desire to see what she could do on her hind legs. I had
neither whip nor spur. I gave her her head. I was likely to have a
touch of the Arab _fantasia_, and I did. I settled myself hard in
the saddle as she flew on; she was soon at the top of her speed; it
was the gallop of my life. Her feet were as sure as they were fleet
on the pathless, rocky plain; she avoided obstacles by instinct; and
if she came to a dry, ditch-like channel now and then that cut the
level, with a slight retardation for the spring she jumped it, as if
that were the best of all. But it was a pace that would end. After
a mile or so she breathed heavily, and I, seeing some Arab tents
pitched not far away, turned her toward them, thinking she might
regard it as a friendly place, and so brought her up quite blown and
with heaving sides. Three or four Arabs, very friendly and curious,
ran up, and I dismounted. “_Méchante, méchante_,” they kept
saying; and I looked at the shallow glitter of the mare’s eyes,
as she turned them on me to see the rider she had got the better
of, and for my part I said “_Furbo_”—something that I learned
in Italy. My friend came riding up after a little to know where I
was going, and said he thought I was “having a little fun”; and
the spahi rode in, and, dismounting, also with a “_méchante_”
changed horses with me. I said good-by to the friendly Arabs, and we
rode off straight north to the route from which I had involuntarily
wandered; but it was a fine morning gallop.

We came without further incident to the line of scattered palms,
amid a very broken country, where the ascent makes up to Figuig,
enclosed in a double circle of walls. Figuig is the name of the whole
district. It includes a lower level where is the ksar of Zenaga and
its vast palmerai, and a higher level on which are scattered the
other six ksars amid their gardens. All are built of sun-dried mud,
as are also the two walls, the inner being furnished with round
towers at frequent regular intervals. We went on amid a confusion
of gardens—fruit-trees with vegetables under them, such as beans
and onions, and plots of bright barley in the more open places, but
mostly palms, with little else, all springing out of the dry mud;
we were past the ruinous-looking stretches of the brown, sunbasking
wall, and began to be lost in a narrow canyon, as it were, up which
the rude way went between the enclosed gardens. There was hardly
width for our horses as we rode in single file on the uneven,
climbing path that seemed something like the bed of a torrent, and
indeed every now and then water would break out from underground and
pour down like a cascade or swift brook, with a delicious sound of
running streams. On either side the garden walls rose a great height
far over our heads, and above them brimmed branches of fruit-tree
tops with the splendid free masses of palms hanging distinct and
entire in the bit of blue. We seemed to be walled out of a thick,
fertile, and beautiful grove; but they had only the same dry mud for
their bed that was under our feet in the narrow, tortuous way. The
sun had begun to be hot before we left the plain, and now, in spite
of the shelter of the walls, the heat began to make itself felt;
there was the dust of the country, too, which, slight as it was
that day, is omnipresent; so, being both very thirsty, my friend
and I dismounted at a place where the running water came fresh from
the yellow ground, and we drank a very cooling draught of its brown
stream. It is the scene that I remember best. It was like a defile
in a narrow place; the way broadened here by a bend in the steep
ascent; one saw the brimming gardens below, and the view was closed
above by the turn of the walls; and there, in the hollow, my friend
and I leaned over the cascading water and, turning, saw the spahi,
as he tightened the girths of my saddle which had loosened, under
those walls, brown in the shadow and an orange glow in the sun,
with the spring green starred with white blossoms like a tender
hedge above their yellow tops, and the leaning palms in the blue. It
had a strange charm; and the water made music, and it was solitude,
and everything there was of the earth, earthy—and beautiful.

We came out shortly at the top of the ascent in an open space before
a round archway in a wall, and dismounted in a scene of Moors passing
in and out, whom I photographed; and then we walked on through the
low-browed little street, which offered nothing remarkable except its
strangeness, and found ourselves at the other side on a high rocky
floor, quite mountainous in look, stretching off and off nowhere,
which is the neutral ground lying about all the ksars; it looked as
if the sun and wind had worn it out, and it had a rugged grandeur;
a distant horseman on it seemed uncommonly tall and as solitary as a
ship at sea. I got a slim palm wand from a group of Arab boys to use
as a switch; but my show of copper coin drew some beggars about me,
very insistent, and when we mounted and rode off stones followed
us. I have been stoned in various parts of the world and did not
mind. The spahi, however, after the incident, took up his station
behind. We soon reached another wall with a gate, on one side the
inevitable cemetery, with its pointed stones, and on the other the
Morocco army in the shape of a small squad of soldiers in soiled
gorgeousness, lying about on the ground near their guard-house. They
did not have a very military appearance, and paid no attention to
us as we rode into the ksar and struck the narrow street, which was
the main thoroughfare. It was quite animated, with many passers-by,
whose oriental figures were sharply relieved on the walls in the
sun or grew dark in the shadow. The houses were low, one against
another, and their wall space was broken only by rude doors; here
and there were higher buildings, often with little oblong windows
aloft, with the effect of a ruined tower, or broken-arched façade,
or square donjon; but these elements were rare, though at times they
gave an architectural _ensemble_ to little views against the sky with
their fine shadows. Poor habitations they are, dilapidated and meagre
they look, forlorn and melancholy to the mind, rubbishy, tumble-down,
and ruinous to the eye; yet the air of ancientry everywhere dignifies
the poor materials, and the sun seems to love them; human life, too,
clothes them with its mysterious aura. The crude object partakes of
the light it floats in, and every impression fluctuates momentarily
through a whole gamut of sense and sensibility; for there is a
touch of enchantment in all strangeness.

We dismounted in the middle of the street, half blocking the way with
our horses, by a café, whose proprietor, a humble and life-worn
old man, set himself to prepare us a cup of the peculiar Morocco
tea that is flavored with mint. There were a few passers-by, and
I busied myself with my camera. The café was a mere hole in the
wall, of preternatural obscurity, considering its small size and
shallow depth; the furnace and the teakettle seemed to leave hardly
room for the old Arab to move about. I found a camp-stool and sat
down opposite the low, dark opening, and, the tea being ready, was
drinking it with much relish; it was truly delicious with its strong
and fragrant aroma of mint, and was also uncommonly exhilarating. I
was thus engaged when two particularly ill-favored Moors, each with
a long gun over his shoulder, appeared, and planted themselves,
one on either side behind my shoulders, as close as they could get
without actually pressing against me, and gazed stolidly and fixedly
down at me. I paid no attention to them, but drank my tea, and from
time to time dusted my leather leggings with my little palm wand. It
was a picturesque group: my friend in his shining white uniform,
unarmed, leaning carelessly against the wall in the sun, the tall
spahi opposite in the shade regarding us, the two Moors hanging
over me motionless, and no one said a word. After a while they
seemed to have had enough of it, and went away with a sullen look.

We said good-by to our host and walked on, the spahi following on
horseback at a distance of several yards, well behind, and two boys
leading our horses. We were soon in the covered ways, where it was
often very dark; we met hardly any one—a negro boy or a woman;
the doors were shut, and it was seldom that one left ajar gave a
scant view of the interior; narrow alleys ran off in all directions,
down which one looked into darkness; but if we stopped to peer into
them, or showed curiosity, the metallic voice of the spahi would
come from behind, “_Marchez_,” and at the frequent turnings
of the way he called, in the same hard voice, “_À droite, à
gauche_”; and so we made our progress through those shadowy vaults,
silent, deserted, in the uncertain light. It was like a dead city,
motionless, hypnotized, as if nothing would ever change there, with a
sense of repose, of negligence of life, of calm, as if nothing would
ever matter; occasionally there were figures in the recesses sunk in
the wall, silent, motionless—dreamers; one white-bearded old man,
seated thus under an archway in a dark corner, seemed as if he had
been there from the beginning of time and would be found there on
the judgment-day. It was weird. We turned a corner in the darkness
and came on a large group—perhaps a score—of young children at
play in the middle of the street. I never saw such terror. They fled,
screaming, in all directions, swift as wild animals; it was a panic
of such instant and undiluted fear as I had never imagined. I cannot
forget their awful cry, their distorted faces, their flight, as if
for life, the moment they caught sight of us; it was a revelation.

A few minutes later we came out on a crowded square, full of shops,
men working at their trades, others lying full length on the ground;
it was a small but busy place—not that much was being done there,
but there were people, and occupations, and human affairs. It
was the gathering seat of the assembly of the elders, before whom
the affairs of the ksar are brought for judgment. No one paid us
the slightest attention; and after looking at the little stocks of
leather and grains and odds and ends, and glancing at the reclining
forms that gave color and gravity to the ordinary scene of an Arab
square, we entered again on the darkness and somnolence of the
winding streets, where there was no sun nor life nor sound, but
rather a retreat from all these things, from everything violent in
sensation or effort or existence; places of quiet, of cessation,
of the melancholy of things. We emerged by a mosque, and near
it a cemetery on the edge of the ksar—such a cemetery as they
all are, blind, dishevelled heaps of human ruins marked by rough,
naked common stones, the desert’s epitaph on life, inexpressibly
ignominious there in the bright, bare sunlight. We mounted and rode
down through gardens, as at first, on a ridge that commanded now one,
now another view of the palm and orchard interiors with their dry
beds, a strange mixture of barrenness below and fertility above,
a rough but pleasant way; and all at once we saw the great palmerai
stretching out below us in the plain, like a lake bathing the cliff,
a splendidness of dark verdure; black-green and blue-black lights
and darks filled it like a sea—cool to the eye, majestic, immense,
magnificent in the flood of the unbounded sunlight, a glory of
nature. It was a noble climax to the strange scenes of that morning
journey; and soon after we dismounted to make the steep descent on
the gray-brown rock of the cliff. The two boys, who had rejoined
us, brought down our horses, and we left the half-fallen towers
and crumbling walls in their yellow ruin behind us, with the young
Arabs still looking, and rode through the hot desert to Beni-Ounif.

This was the mysterious Figuig of old travellers. I had seen it,
but it still seemed to me unrealized, though not unreal. A vision
of palm-topped garden walls on crumbling mountain paths; of a
wind-blown, sunburnt high plateau; of a sun-drenched gully of a
street with a strange-windowed, lonely ruin looking down on horses
that hang their heads; a maze of darkened passages with a sense
of lurking in the shadows, of decay in the silence, of apparition
in the rare figures; a closed city of hidden streams and muffled
noises, walled orchards and shut houses, sunless ways, yet held
in the sun’s embrace, the high blue sky, the girdling mountains,
the open desert; and with its stern and rocky gardens of the dead,
too; a soil and a people made in the image of Islam, impregnated
with it, decrepit with it, full of lassitude and melancholy and
doom, mouldering away; yet set amid living fountains, lighted by
placid reservoirs where the tall palms sun themselves in the silent
waters as in another sky; queen, too, of that dark-green sea of the
palmerai, a marvel of nature; and last a vision of long-drawn walls
and dismantled towers crumbling in the red sun. It is so I remember
it; and it seems rather a mirage of the desert imagination than a
reality, a memory.


                                  IV

Beni-Ounif was dull. There was nothing interesting there except
the _mise en scène_. It was pleasant to be dining with officers,
for they were the principal patrons of the hotel, with whom stars
and crosses were as common as watch-guards in New York; and it
was stimulating to see the ensigns of the Legion of Honor where
they were something more than the international compliment of a
ribbon twisted in a black buttonhole and had their heroic meaning,
a decoration on an officer’s breast. The crosses I saw stood
for acts of bravery on the field of battle. There were a few other
guests who came and went, a French hunter, a Belgian professor who
told me of the prehistoric cabinets he had seen farther south, an
officer’s remarkable collection, and explained to me the geology of
the Sahara in brief and interesting lectures. The town itself never
lost for me the vacant and makeshift frontier look that it had at
first sight; one could walk from end to end of it in a few minutes
and come out on the desert, which was monotony petrified. Nothing
happened except the arrival and departure of the daily train. Once
I met on the edge of the desert the _goum_, a compact small body of
native Arab cavalry attached to the French arms, a splendid squad of
fighting men; rather heavy and broad-shouldered they looked, wrapped
in burnoose and turban, mature men whose life was war, black-bearded,
large-eyed, grim—predatory faces; and they were in their proper
place, with the naked mountains round and the desert under their
horses’ feet—a martial scene of the old raiding race. I should
not like to see them at work, I thought; their trade is blood, and
they looked it—strong, hard, fierce—pitiless men. But usually
there was nothing uncommon to my eyes. Once in the café, where
we sat over our long glasses of the fortified liquors and tonic
drinks of which there is so great a variety in desert towns, some
one brought in a beautiful great dead eagle. It was as if he had
been killed in his eyrie to see him there on the desert among the
soldiers. We returned to our glasses and our talk: tales of Paris,
tales of Odessa in the Revolution, tales of long Algerian rides,
encounters, anecdotes of the road—what tales! And other men’s
tales, too—Anatole France, Pierre Loti, Maurice Le Blanc, Claude
Farrère, Pierre Louÿs—all my favorites, for my friend knew them
better than I did, and made me new acquaintances “in the realm
of gold” that I like best to travel. What happy talk! and the
time went by. I went out alone to see the full moon rise over the
solemn desert by the reddish hills in the chill air, and fill the
great sky with that white flood of radiance that seemed every night
more ethereal, more remote from mankind, more an eternal thing;
and at the hotel we would meet again to dine late, for my friend
being a private soldier, we waited till the officers were gone;
and then again the tales and the happy talk, and good night. That
was life at Beni-Ounif.

“Would I like to go to the theatre?” I repeated, for it was
an unexpected invitation. “You might not think so, but there is
a theatre at Beni-Ounif,” said my friend. So it appeared that
the Legion, among the multitude of things it did, occasionally
gave a performance of private theatricals for its own amusement,
and my friend himself was to play that night. It was a beautiful
evening with a cold wind. I made my way through the burly military
group wrapped in heavy blue cloaks, with here and there a burnoosed
spahi or tall tirailleur, and entering the small hall was given a
seat in the front row among a few ladies and very young children,
two or three civilians, my Belgian acquaintance being one, and half
a dozen officers with their swords and crosses. “The tricolor
goes well with the palm,” I said to myself, as I turned to look at
the prettily decorated, not overlighted room, where trophies of the
colors alternated with panels of palm-leaves on either side and at
the rear, giving to the scene a simple, artistic effect of lightness
and gayety with a touch of beauty, especially in the palms. It was
characteristically French in refinement, simple elegance, and color;
there was nothing elaborate, but it was a charming border to the
eye, and no framework could have been so fit for that compact mass
of soldiers as was this lightly woven canopy of French flags and
the desert palm on the bare walls of that rude hall. But it was
the men who held my eyes. The room was packed with soldiers of the
Legion; a few spahis and tirailleurs stood in the rear or at the
sides; there was no place left to stand even; and I looked full
on their serried faces. My first thought was that I had never seen
soldiers before. I never saw such faces—mature, grave, settled,
with the look of habitual self-possession of men who command and
obey; resolute mouths, immobile features; there was great sadness
in their eyes that seemed to look from some point far back, heavy
and weary; they had endured much—it was in their pose and bearing
and on their countenances; they had ceased to think of life and
death—one felt that; but no detail can give the human depth of the
impression I felt at the sight—faces into which life had fused
all its iron. And there was, too, in the whole mass the sense of
physical life, of hardship and hardihood, and of bodily power to do
and bear and withstand—the fruit of the desert air, long marches,
terrible campaigns in the sands. It was a sight I shall always
remember as, humanly, one of the most remarkable I ever looked on.

The Foreign Legion is commonly believed to be made up of broken men
who have in some way found themselves eliminated from society, thrown
out or left out or gone out of their own will, whether by misfortune,
error, disappointment, or any of the various chances of life, and who
have joined the Legion to lose themselves, or because they did not
know what else to do with their lives. They come from all European
nations and are a cosmopolitan body; and, no doubt, here and there
among them is a brilliant talent or a fine quality of daring gone
astray; but I imagine a very large proportion of them are simply
friendless men who at some moment of abandonment find themselves
without resources and without a career, and see in the Legion a
last resource. I believe there are great numbers of such friendless
men in our civilization. Among the thousands of the Legion there
must be, of course, every color of the human past; the losers in
life fail for many reasons, and in their defeat become, it may be,
incidentally or temporarily, antisocial, or even habitually so, as
fate hardens round them with years; but in a great number of cases,
I believe, society has defaulted in its moral obligations to them
before they defaulted in their moral obligations to their neighbors;
and, holding such views, it was perhaps natural that, so far from
finding the Legion a band of outcast adventurers and derelicts,
I found them very human. I did not read romance or virtue into
them. I know the hard conditions of their lives. If there be an
inch of hero in a man, he is hero enough for me. The story of the
French occupation of Algeria is largely the story of the Legion. For
almost a century it has been one of the most effective units of the
French army all over the world; and here in Algeria it has been not
only a fighting force of the first order, but also a pioneer force of
civilization. The legionaries have built the roads, established the
military and civil stations, accomplished the first public works,
drained and planted; they have laid the material foundations of
the new order; they have not only conquered, but civilized in the
material sense, and the labor in that land and climate has been
an enormous toil. The reclamation of Africa is a great work, sure
to be looked on hereafter as one of the glories of France in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and I thought, as I turned and
the band began the overture, what a comment it was on society that
in this great work of the reclamation of Africa from barbarism and
blood and sodden misery so large a share was borne by this body of
friendless men for whom our civilization could find no use and cared
not for their fate. What a salvage of human power and capacity,
turned to great uses, was there here! and from moment to moment I
looked back on that body of much-enduring men with a keen recurring
sense of the infinite patience of mankind under the hard fates of
life, of the infinite honor and the infinite pity of it all.

To-night all was light gayety and pleasant jollity. The Legion
has one characteristic of a volunteer regiment—its men
can do everything, so various are the careers from which it is
recruited. Its music is famous, and the orchestra played excellently;
and as the first little play began, “Mentons Bleus,” the players
showed themselves good amateurs. The audience responded quickly
to the situations and the dialogue; there were brightened spirits
and much laughter, easy, quiet enjoyment and applause. The second
part was a series of songs, done by one performer after another,
each doing his stunt with verve and the comedy of the variety
stage; there was a full dozen of these light-hearted parts. In
the intermissions the men stayed in their seats, though about the
doorway there would be a little movement and changeful regrouping,
but it was an audience that sat in their places ready for more;
there was no smoking. The last number of the programme—a small,
pretty double sheet, like note-paper, done by some copying process
in pale blue, with a sword, rifle, and cap on the ground before two
palms lightly sketched in the lower corner of the title leaf—was
another one-act play, “Cher Maître,” and was received with
a spirit that seemed only to have been whetted by the previous
amusement; and when it was over the evening ended in a round of
generous applause and a smiling breaking up of the company after
their three hours’ enjoyment. It was pleasant to have been with
the Legion on such a night, and to have shared in its little village
_festa_, and I stood by the doorway and watched the men go by as
they passed out, till all were gone.

It was midnight. The radiant moon poured down that marvellous
white flood on the hollow of the desert where the little town lay
low and gleaming, very silent. But I could not rid my mind of the
soldiers’ lives. I thought of the torrid summer heats here in
garrison, of the burning marches yonder in the south, of the days
in sterile sands that make the sight of palm and garden a thing of
paradise—incredible fatigues, mortal exhaustion, monotony. One
cannot know the soldiers’ desert life without some experience;
but some impression of it may be gained from soldiers’ books, such
as one that is a favorite companion of mine, “Une Promenade dans
le Sahara,” by Charles Lagarde, a lieutenant in the Chasseurs
d’Afrique, a thoughtful book, full of artistic feeling, and
written with literary grace, the memorial of a soldier with the
heart of a poet, who served in South Algeria. In such books one
gets the environment, but not the life; one touch with the Legion is
worth them all. I fell to sleep for my last slumber at Beni-Ounif,
thinking of soldiers’ lives, friendless men—

  “Somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan.”


                                   V

It was a brilliant morning. I went to the edge of the desert and
looked off south with the wish to go on that all unknown horizons
wake, but which the desert horizon stirs, I think, with more longing
insistence, with a greater power of the vague, than any other; for
there it lies world-wide, mysterious, unpenetrated, and seems to open
a pathway through space itself, like the sea. All true travellers
know this feeling, the nostalgia for the “far country” that they
will never see; it is an emotion that is like a passion—mystical,
and belongs to the deep soul. The desert horizon, like the sea’s,
at every moment breeds this spell. But as I turned back, with the
sense of the chained foot, my disappointment was tempered by the
knowledge that I was to companion my friend, who had been ordered
to Tonkin; and I had timed my departure to go with his detachment
on its way north. As I went down to the train my Arab boy, with
the infinite hopefulness of such attachés, brought me a dead wolf,
if by chance I would like it; but I could not add it to my baggage,
whereat he was sorrowful, but was comforted. The station presented
a lively scene—many soldiers in their white duck trousers and
red caps; there was a band; the air was filled with good-bys and
laughing salutations; the car windows grew lined with leaning forms
and intent faces; the music struck up, high and gallant, and with
the last cries and shouts we were off on the line.

It was too short a ride, though the train climbed slowly up the
incline, while the desert grew a distant outlook and was shut from
view as we made into the winding valleys; and we mounted up through
the black defiles, the desolation of the shivered rock, the passes of
the toothed ranges, the blocking cliffs and columnar heights—all
the petrifaction and fantasy of that naked and severe land; but
I was less sensible of its enmity and melancholy than when I came
through it alone, though it was harsh and wild, a _terre perdue_. My
friend travelled with his comrades, but we had a long lunch in the
train before Aïn-Sefra, and a longer dinner when night began to
fall, with tales and talk. Tales of the mutiny of the _batallion
d’Afrique_—Othello tales these, fit for fearful ears; tales of
night surprises, Arabs crawling by inches for hours in the sands,
the sentinels killed without a sound, the first alarm bayonets
through the tents, and then the rouse, the square, the victory;
tales of the desert madness, the _cafard_. Stirring tales. Talk,
too, of home and friends left behind us in the world, of the dead
and the living, and of what might yet be for both of us. He told me
much of the Legion, for that interested me; but he never complained,
and if he caught some unspoken thought on my face from time to time,
“_C’est le métier_” he would say, and smile my sympathy
away. He was a youth after my own heart; but the night fell darker
and darker, and there would be an end. At the last station where
it was possible, he came back to me. It was good-by.




                               TOUGOURT

                               * * * * *

                                  IV

                               TOUGOURT


                                   I

It was a cold dawn in late April at Biskra. The carriage, long and
heavy, with three horses abreast, stood at the door. Ali, a sturdy
Arab, young but with no look of youth, wound in a gorgeous red sash,
sat on the box; and as I settled in my place, Hamet, the guide,
followed me gravely and sat down beside me, and at a word from
him we were briskly off on the long, uneventful drive to Tougourt,
over the desert route of about a hundred and thirty miles southward,
to be covered in two days’ travel. We were soon beside the sleepy
silence of the oasis, and passed the old yellow slope that was once
a fortress to guard it on the edge of the sands; we dipped along
by little fields of fresh green barley and rose on the steppe of
the _bois_, a tangle of low undergrowth, scarcely waist-high, of
twisted and almost leafless shrub, that clothes the desert there
with its characteristic dry, rough, tortured, and stunted but hardy
vegetation. A few Arabs were to be seen in places cutting it for
fire-wood. Camels, too, far away in almost any direction, loomed up,
solitary and ungainly as harbor-buoys on a windless morning tide. On
all sides lay the sharp black outlines of oasis clumps of palm-trees,
distinct, single, solid, each a distant island, with miles to cross
before one should land on its unknown shore; and behind us the range
of the Aurès seemed to block out the world with the wild beauty of
its precipices, which made one cliff of all the north as if to shut
out Europe. It was like a wall of the world. All about us was the
desert; everything seemed cold and gray and distant, lifeless, in the
pallor of the morning; but with every mile the whole world brightened
and warmed. Desert air intoxicates me; every breath of it is wine,
not so much to my blood or my nerves, but to my whole being of man;
and long before we reached Bordj Saada, the first halt, I was keyed
to the day. It was a glorious day, cloudless and blue, and drenched
with sunshine and radiance and warmth pouring on vast spaces; and
the Bordj, a disused military post, a sort of large stockade for
refuge and defence, standing solitary on its high ridge, was an old
friend and a place of memory for me; there once I had turned back,
and now I was going on. There was excitement in the moment, in the
look ahead; and so it was only as we swept round the curve down
into the valley of Oued Djedi and crossed its dry channel that I
felt myself embarked, as it were, on my first true desert voyage. I
had coasted the Sahara for a thousand miles here and there, like
a boy in a boat; but now I should be at last out of sight of land.

We were quite happy voyagers, the three of us. Ali, on the box,
sang from time to time some cadenced stave, careless as a bird,
in a world of his own; indeed the drive was an adventure to him,
for, as I afterward found, it was his first going to Tougourt; and
had not Hamet, almost as soon as we started, lifting one intent,
burning glance straight in my eyes—it was the first time I had
really seen him, as a person—told me that I had brought him good
luck, for that night his wife had borne him a boy? He was content. A
fine figure, too, was Hamet; he answered, as no other guide but one
I ever had, to the imagination; he filled my dream of what ought to
be. A mature man, rather thick-set, with a skin so bronzed that in
the shadow it was black, with the head of a desert sheik, noble,
powerful; when he moved he seemed still in repose, so sculptural
were all the lines of his figure, such dignity was in every chance
attitude; he seemed more like some distinguished aid to attend me
than a guide. His white burnoose fell in large folds, and as he threw
it partly over me in the first cool hours, he disclosed some light,
white underdress over whose bosom hung low a great gold chain with
beads under; a revolver swung in a leather case, rather tightly
drawn below his right breast with a strap over the shoulder; white
stockings and slippers completed his garb. We talked of trifles,
and the conversation was charming, not too fluent—talk of the road;
but what I remember is my pleasure in finding again what often seems
to me that lost grace of a fine natural demeanor in men. It is of
less consequence to me what a man says than is his manner of saying
it, and speech is not of the lips only, but of the whole man; and,
in my experience, it is the unlearned who are also unspoiled, that,
all in all, say things best. And ever as we talked or were silent the
horses went on, the brilliant bare line of the Aurès sank slowly
down, and round us was the waste of rock with its fitful tangle
of tamarack and drin, the sea of sand with its ridged breadths,
the near or distant horizon lines as the track rose and fell;
and with the hours the panorama of the road began to disclose itself.

The road was really a broad, camel-trodden route on which the
carriageway, winding about, found going as best it could; the
railway that will some time be had been surveyed along it, and
the telegraph-poles that already bore the wire far beyond Tougourt
into the desert were seldom far away. On the earlier part of the
journey the going was excellent in that dry season. It was not
a lonely road, though for long stretches it was solitary. Over
the brink of a rise suddenly would spring up a half-dozen human
figures, sharp outlines on the blue sky, and a flock would come
tumbling after as if clotted about their feet, and there might be
a donkey or two; it was a Bedouin family on its northern migration
to the summer pasturage. What an isolated fragment of human life it
seemed, flotsam tossing about with the seasons, as little related
to anything neighborly as seaweed, yet spawning century after
century, living on, with the milk of goats, in such a waste; and
how infinitely fresh was the simple scene! one or two men, a boy,
women, children, and goats tramping in the desert toward water and
green food, a type of humanity for ages—and it was such a wretched
subsistence! But what a bodily vigor, what a look of independence,
what a sense of liberty there was there, too! Now it would be two
or three camels with the canopy in which women ride, with flocks,
too, and more men and boys, more warmly clad, with more color and
importance—some wealthier head man with his family going the
same northward journey. Or, as the carriage crested some ridge, we
would see miles ahead a long line creeping on toward us—a trade
caravan; and after a while it would pass, the camels pouting in
high air, under the loads of balanced boxes or bales laid across
them, lumbering dumbly along in the great silence, like convicts,
as it always seems to me, from another sphere of existence.

Many creatures give me vividly this impression of having haplessly
intruded into a state of being not meant for them. The turtles in
the swamps of my boyhood, leaning their sly and protruded heads out
of their impossible shells, the fish that have great staring eyes
in aquariums, frogs and toads and all centipedal sea creatures,
are to me foreigners to life, strays, misbirths, “moving about
in worlds not realized,” and all grotesque forms of life—even
human deformity when it becomes grotesque—wake in me something
between amusement and pity that they should be at all. I feel like
saying as a guide, wishing to correct a friend of mine, once said:
“Monsieur, you are a mistake.” But of all such creatures, the
camel fills me with the most profound and incurable despair. He
is the most homeless-looking of all creatures. He has been the
companion and helpmate of man from the dawn of human life, and our
debt to him through uncounted ages and in places where the human lot
has been most penurious and desperate is untold; but man has never
been able to enlighten him; he looks, on all occasions and under
all circumstances, hopelessly bored with existence, unutterably sick
of humanity. There is a suicidal mood in animal life, and at times
one can see glimpses and intimations of it surely in the eyes of
animals; the camel embodies it, like a stare. I wish they were all
dead; and when I see their bones in the sand, as I often do, I am
glad that they are gone and have left the ribs of their tabernacle
of life behind them by the wayside. Every desert traveller writes a
little essay on the camel. This is mine. I will not modify it even
for the sake of the meharis that come down the route, overtaking
us from Biskra; they are the racers that have just competed in the
yearly trial of speed from Tougourt—aristocrats of the species;
they have a clear gray tone and slender delicacies of flank and
skin; all day they will be speeding ahead and dropping behind us; the
desert is their cloth of gold and they its chivalry—splendid beasts
they are, as native to this blown empire of the sand and the sun and
the free air as a bird to the sky—and they lift their blunt noses
over it with unconquerable contempt. It is amazing how the creature,
supercilious or abject, refuses to be comforted. There is no link
between him and man. If you seek a type for the irreconcilable,
find it in the camel.

It is said that one meets his enemy in every place, and every
traveller experiences these surprising encounters that prove the
smallness of the world; but I better the proverb, for it is a friend
I meet in the most solitary places. On the loneliest road of Greece a
passing traveller called out my name; in the high passes of Algiers
I came face to face with a schoolmate; and, however repeated, the
experience never loses its surprise. Surely I had seen that gaunt
figure pressing up on a stout mule from the head of the fresh trade
caravan that was just approaching; that face, like a bird of prey,
that predatory nose before the high forehead and bold eyes—yes,
it was Yussef, my guide of years ago, with welcome all over his
countenance and quick salutations to his old companion. He was a
caravan man now, for the nonce, and coming up from the Souf. How
natural it was to meet on the desert, with the brief words that
resumed the years and abolished the time that had sped away and
renewed the eternal now. But we must follow the meharis, slim
forms on the horizon ahead, and we went on to overtake them at Aïn
Chegga, a mere stopping place, where there was on one side of the
way a sort of desert farm, and a relay of horses waiting for us,
and on the other a small, lonesome building by itself where we
could lunch from our own stores. The sun was hot now and the shade
and rest grateful; but we had a long way to go. With thoughtless
generosity we gave our fragments of bread to some adjacent boys,
and started off rapidly with the fresh horses on the great plain.

The road was lonelier than in the morning hours; the solitude began
to make itself felt, the silence of the heat, the encompassment of
the rolling distances, the splendor of the sky. There was hardly
any life except the occasional shrub, the drin. I saw a falcon
once, and once a raven; but we were alone, as if on the sea. Then
the Sahara began to give up its bliss—the unspeakable thing—the
inner calm, the sense of repose, of relief, the feeling of separation
from life, the falling away of the burden, the freedom from it all
in the freedom of those blue and silent distances over sandy and
rock-paved tracts, full of the sun. How quiet it was, how large,
and what a sense of effortless elemental power—of nature in her
pure and lifeless being! It is easy to think on the desert, thought
is there so near to fact—a still fresh imprint in consciousness;
thought and being are hardly separate there; and there nature seems
to me more truly felt in her naked essence, lifeless, for life to her
is but an incident, a detail, uncared for, unessential. She does but
incline her poles and it is gone. Taken in the millennial æons of
her existence, it is a lifeless universe that is, and on the desert
it seems so. This is the spectacle of power where man is not—like
the sea, like the vault of heaven, like all that is infinite. What a
repose it is to behold it, to feel it, to know it—this elimination,
not only of humanity, but of life, from things! The desert—it is
the truth. How golden is the sunlight, how majestic the immobile
earth, how glorious the reach of it—this infinite! And one falls
asleep in it, cradled and fascinated and careless, flooded slowly
by that peace which pours in upon the spirit to lull and strengthen
and quiet it, and to revive it changed and more in nature’s image,
purged—so it seems—of its too human past.

It was late in the afternoon. Hamet roused himself as we passed
down to Oued Itel and crossed its dry bed, and Ali ceased from his
vagrant music as the horses breasted the slope beyond. We came out
on a high ridge. It was a magnificent view. The long valley of the
great chotts lay below us transversely, like a vast river bottom;
far off to the northeast glittered, pale and white, Chott Melrir,
like a sea of salt, and before us Chott Merouan stretched across
like a floor, streaked with blotches of saltpetre and dark stains of
soil. The scene made the impression on me of immense flats at a dead
low tide, reaching on the left into distances without a sea. It was a
scene of desolation, of unspeakable barrenness, of the waste world;
its dull, white lights were infinitely fantastic on the grays and
the blacks, and the lights in the sky were cold; the solitude of
it was complete; but its great extent, its emptiness, its enclosing
walls of shadow in the falling day crinkling the whole upper plane
of the endless landscape round its blanching hollows and horizontal
vistas below, stamped it indelibly on my eyes. I was not prepared
for it; it was an enlargement, a new aspect of the world. This was
the southwestern end of the chain of chotts, or salt wastes, that
lie mostly below sea-level and are the dried-up bed of the ancient
inland arm of the sea that washed this valley in some distant age;
they stretch northeasterly and touch the Mediterranean near Gabès
and the suggestion is constantly made that the sea be let into them
again by a canal, thus flooding and transforming this part of the
Sahara. It may some time be done; but there is some doubt about the
lay of the levels and whether such an engineering feat would not
result merely in stagnant waters. Meanwhile it is a vast barren
basin, saline, and in the wet season dangerous with quicksands,
unsafe ground, a morass of death for man and beast. The ridge where
I stood commanded a long view of this sterile and melancholy waste;
but I did not feel it to be sad; I only felt it to be; it had
such grandeur.

We went down by a rough descent and began the crossing of the chott
before us, Merouan, on its westerly edge. The road ran on flat
ground, often wet and thick with a coating of black mud, and there
was the smell of saltpetre in the air; the view on either side was
merely desolate, night was falling, it began to be chill; and by
the time we reached the farther side the stars came out. It was a
darkened scene when we rode into the first oasis of young palms,
without inhabitants, which belonged to some French company. It was
full night when we emerged again on the sands; a splendor of stars
was over us and utter solitude around; it was long since we had
seen any one, and as the second oasis came into view it looked
like a low black island cliff on the sea, and as deserted. We
drove into its shadows by a broad road like an avenue, with the
motionless palms thick on either side, as in a park; there was no
sign or sound of life. It was like night in a forest, heavy with
darkness and silence, except where the stars made a track above and
our lights threw a pale gleam about. This oasis, which was large,
also seemed uninhabited; and we passed through it on the straight
road which was cut by other crossing roads, and came out on the
desert by the telegraph-poles. The going was through heavy sand,
which after a mile or two was heavier; our hubs were now in drifts
of it. Hamet took the lights and explored to find tracks of wheels,
and the horses drew us with difficulty into what seemed a route;
in ten minutes it was impracticable. We crossed with much bumping
and careening to the other side of the telegraph-poles, and that
was no better; forward and back and sidelong, with much inspection
of the ground, we plied the search; we were off the route.

We drove back to the oasis thinking we had missed the right way out,
and on its edge turned at right angles down a good road; at the
corner we found ourselves in the dunes—there was no semblance of
a route. We returned to the centre of the silent palm grove, where
there were branching ways, and taking another track were blocked by
a ditch, and avoiding that, coasting another and ruder side of the
grove, again at the upper corner of the oasis struck the impassable;
so we went back to our starting-place. Hamet took the lanterns
and gathered up his revolver and set out apparently to find the
guardian, if there was one. It was then Ali told me he had never
been to Tougourt before; Hamet was so experienced a guide that it was
thought a good opportunity to break in a new driver. These French
oases across the old route, with their new roads, were confusing;
and Hamet had not been down to Tougourt of late. The silence of the
grove was great, not wholly unbroken now: there were animal cries,
insect buzzings, hootings, noises of a wood, and every sound was
intensified in the deep quiet, the strange surroundings. It was
very late. We had spent hours in our slow progress wandering about
in the sands and the grove in the uncertain light. Hamet was gone
quite a long time, but at last we saw his waving lantern in the
wide dark avenue and drove toward him. He got in, said something
to Ali, and off we went on our original track, but turned sharply
to the right before issuing from the wood, down a broad way;
we were soon skirting the western edge of the oasis; branches
brushed the carriage; the ruts grew deep, the track grew narrow,
the carriage careened; we got out, the wheels half in the ditch,
horses backing. Hamet threw up his hands. It was midnight. We would
camp where we were. The route was lost, whatever might be our state;
and I did not wonder, for as nearly as I could judge we were then
heading north by east, if I knew the polestar. We were on the only
corner of the oasis we had not hitherto visited; the spot had one
recommendation for a camp—it was a very out-of-the-way place. The
horses were taken out, and each of us disposed himself for the night
according to his fancy. It was intensely cold, and I rolled myself
in my rugs and sweaters and curled up on the carriage seat and at
once fell fast asleep.

An hour later I awoke, and unwinding myself got out. It was night
on the desert. Ali was asleep on the box, upright, with his chin
against his breast. Hamet lay in his burnoose in the sand some
little distance away. The horses stood in some low brush near the
ditch. The palm grove, impenetrably black, stood behind, edging the
long, low line of the sky; there was a chorus of frogs monotonously
chanting; and before me to the west was the vague of the sands,
with indistinguishable lines and obscure hillocks, overlaid with
darkness. Only the sky gave distance to the silent solitude—such
a sky as one does not see elsewhere, magnificent with multitudes
of stars, bright and lucid, or fine and innumerable, melting into
nebulous clouds and milky tracts, sparkling and brilliant in that
keen, clear, cloudless cold, all the horizon round. I was alone,
and I was glad. It was a wonderful moment and scene. Hamet stirred
in his place, and I went back to my post and slept soundly and well.


                                  II

I woke at the first streak of dawn. Two beautiful morning stars still
hung, large and liquid, in the fading night, but the growing pallor
of daybreak already disclosed the wild and desolate spot where
we had fortunately stopped. Drifts of trackless sand stretched
interminably before us; the young palms showed low and forlorn
in the gray air; the scanty brush by the ditch was starved and
miserable; everything had a meagre, chill, abandoned look. As soon
as it was light we reversed our course, and re-entering the oasis
hailed a well-hidden group of buildings with a koubba that Hamet
seemed to have discovered the night before. An old Arab gave us our
bearings. We were seventeen kilometres short of Mraïer, the oasis
which we should have reached; and now, making the right turn-off,
we saw in another direction over the sands the black line of palms
toward which we had gone astray. We soon covered the distance to
Mraïer, which was a large oasis with a considerable village and
a caravanserai whose gates were crowded with camels; here we got
a very welcome breakfast, but we did not linger, and were quickly
out again on the desert on the long day’s ride before us.

Since we passed the chott we were in the valley of Oued Rir, along
which is strewn a chain of oases like a necklace as far as to
Tougourt and beyond. We were really on the crust of what has been
well called a subterranean Nile, formed by the converging flow of two
Saharan rivers, Oued Igharghar and Oued Mya, whose underground bed
is pierced by wells and the waters gathered and distributed to feed
the oases. There are now forty-six of these palm gardens that lie at
a distance of a few miles, one from another, spotting the arid sands
with their black-green isles of solid verdure, making a fantastic
and beautiful landscape of the rolling plain of moving sands, with
many heights and depressions, stretching with desert breadth on and
on under the uninterrupted blue of the glowing sky. The district
has long been a little realm by itself, sustaining with much toil
the meagre life of its people and periodically invaded and subdued
by the great passing kingdoms of the north. Its prosperity, however,
really dates from the French occupation. At that time the oases were
dying out under the invasion of the unresting sands that slowly were
burying them up. The French almost at once with their superior skill
sank artesian wells, and the new flood of water brought immediate
change. The number of the inhabitants has doubled; the product of
dates, which are of the best quality, has increased many-fold; and
new oases of great extent and value have been planted by French
companies. This is one of the great works of public beneficence
accomplished by France for the native population; and evidence of
prosperity was to be seen on every hand all the way.

The route for the most part was sandy with occasional stretches
of rock, often a beautifully colored quartz, whose brilliant and
strange veins harmonized well with the deep-toned landscape; but
the eye wandered off to the horizon and drifts of sand, as the
heavens began to fill with light and the spaces grew brilliant;
in that vacancy and breadth every detail grew strangely important
and interesting; a single palm, a far glimmer of salt, a herd of
goats would hold the eye, and, as the day grew on, the deceptive
atmosphere gave a fresh touch of the fantastic, playing with the
lines and forms of objects. We passed from Mraïer, leaving these
island oases on the horizon as the route threaded its way more
or less remote from them, and at intervals we would touch one—a
palm grove on the right, and the village by itself on higher dry
ground to the left. Two of these villages, of considerable size,
were entirely new, having been built within two years; they were
constructed of the sun-dried mud commonly used, but they did not have
the dilapidated look of the ksar; they were clean and fresh, a new
home for the people who had abandoned the old, unhealthy site that
they had formerly occupied, and had made a new town for themselves;
and Hamet, who told me this, said other villages had done the same,
and he seemed proud of their enterprise and prosperity.

We went on now through heavy sand at times—and always there was
the broad prospect, the gray and brown ribbed distance, the blue
glow—a universal light, a boundless freedom, the desert solitude
of the dry, soft air. “_C’est le vrai Sahara_” said Hamet,
content. For myself I could not free my senses of the previous
day’s impression of the great chotts as of the shore of a world,
and the landscape continued to have a prevailing marine character. I
do not mean that the desert was like the ocean; it was not. But
the outlooks, the levels, the sand-colored and blue-bathed spaces
were like scenes by the seashore; only there was no sea there. The
affluence of light, the shadowless brilliancy, the silences,
the absence of humanity and human things as again and again they
dropped from us and ceased to be, were ocean traits; but there was
no sea—only the wind sculpture of the sands, beautifully mottled
and printed, and delicately modulated by the wind’s breath, only
a blue distance, an island horizon. Even the birds—there were
many larks to-day—seemed sea-birds, so lonesomely flying. But
there was never any sea. It was the kingdom of the sands.

Here, not far from the route, I saw what was meant by the invasion of
the sand. The oasis on its farther side toward the desert was half
blown over with the white drifts of it that made in like a tide;
the trunks of the palms were buried to a third of their height
in it; the whole garden was bedded with it, and as we drew away
from the place, looking back, the little oasis with its bare palm
stems resembled a wreck driving in the sea of sands. Elsewhere I
saw the barriers, fences of palm leaves and fagots, raised against
the encroaching dunes, where the sand was packed against them like
high snow-drifts. The sand grew heavier now, and as we came to
Ourlana, about which palmerais lay clustering in all directions,
the horses could hardly drag through the deep, loose mass up to the
low building and enclosure where was our noon stopping place. The
resources of the house were scanty: only an omelet, but an excellent
one, and coffee; bread, too, and I had wine. The family, a small one
with boy and girl, whom chocolate soon won to my side, was pleasant,
and there was a welcome feeling of human society about the incident;
but as I lit a cigarette and watched the fresh horses put in—for
here we found our second relay that had been sent ahead some days
before—I saw that, if the population seemed scanty, it was not
for any lack of numbers. A short distance beyond our enclosure,
and on a line with it, in the same bare sandy waste, stood another
long building with a great dome, evidently a government structure,
and at right angles to it before the door was forming a long line of
young children; it was the village school—these were the native
boys marching in to the afternoon session, for all the world like
an American school at home. I had not expected to see that on the
Sahara. I photographed it at once—a striking token of modern
civilization; and I saw no happier sight than those playful little
Arabs going to school.

We dipped ahead into the oasis by the long lines of palms lifting
their bare stems far overhead and fretting the sky with their
decorative border of tufts. Here and there were fruit trees, and
occasionally vegetables beneath, but as a rule there were only
the palms rising from bare earth, cut by ditches in which flowed
the water; there was no orchard or garden character to the soil,
only a barren underground, but all above was forest silence and
the beauty of tall trees. It was spring, and the trees had begun to
put out their great spikes and plumes of white blossoms in places,
and the air was warm and soft. A palm fascinates me with the beauty
of its formal lines; where two or three are gathered together they
make a picture; a single one in the distance gives composition to
a whole landscape. This was, notwithstanding the interludes of the
oases, a continuously desert ride, and I remember it mostly for its
beauty of color and line, and a strange intensity and aloofness
of the beauty; there was nothing human in it. It seemed to live
by its own glow in a world that had never known man; the scene of
some other planet where he had never been. There was, too, over
all the monotony and immobility of things, a film of changefulness,
a waver of surface, a shifting of lights and planes; it was full of
the fascination of horizons, the elusiveness of far objects, and
the feeling of endlessness in it, like the sky, was a deep chord
never lost. It was beyond Ourlana that I noticed to the southwest,
a mile or two away, three or four detached palms by a lake; their
tall stems leaned through the transparent air above a low bank
over a liquid, mirror-like belt of quiet water, a perfect oriental
scene. It was my first mirage; and two or three times more I saw it
that afternoon—the perfect symbol of all the illusion of life. How
beautiful it was, how was its beauty enhanced framed there in the
waste world, how after a while it melted away!

Oasis after oasis dropped from us on the left and the right,
and in the late afternoon we were climbing a sharp rise through
the deepest sand we had yet encountered, so that we all got out
and walked to relieve the horses, and ourselves toiled up the
slope; and soon from the ridge we saw a broad panorama like that
of the day before; but instead of that salt desolation, here the
eye surveyed an endless lowland through which ahead ran a long,
dark cluster of oases, one beyond another, like an archipelago;
and Hamet, pointing to one far beyond all, on the very edge of the
horizon, said: “Tougourt.” We descended to the valley, passing
a lonely old gray mosque, or koubba, of some desert saint by the
way—very solemn and impressive it was in the failing light,
far from men; and we rolled on for miles over land like a floor,
as on a Western prairie; and the stars came out; and at intervals
a dark grove went by; and we were again in the sands; and another
grove loomed up with its look of a black low island, and we passed
on beside it. I thought each, as it came in view, was our goal,
but we kept steadily on. It was nigh ten o’clock when we saw,
some miles away, the two great lights, like low harbor lights, that
are the lights of the gate of Tougourt. Ali was perceptibly relieved
when we made sure of them; for they were unmistakable at last.

Then, in that last half-hour, I witnessed a strange phenomenon. The
whole sky was powdered with stars; I had never seen such a
myriad glimmer and glow, thickening, filling the heavenly spaces,
innumerable; and all at once they seemed to interlink, great and
small, with rays passing between them, and while they shone in
their places, infinite in multitude, light fell from them in long
lines, like falling rain, down the whole concave of night from the
zenith to the horizon on every side. It was a Niagara of stars. The
celestial dome without a break was sheeted with the starry rain,
pouring down the hollow sphere of darkness, from the apex to the
desert rims. No words can describe that sight, as a mere vision;
still less can they tell its mystical effect at the moment. It
was like beholding a miracle. And it was not momentary; for half
an hour, as we drove over the dark level, obscure, silent, lonely,
I was arched in and shadowed by that ceaseless, starry rain on all
sides round; and as we passed the great twin lights of the gates,
and entered Tougourt, and drew up in the dim and solitary square,
it was still falling.


                                  III

I emerged the next morning from the arcaded entrance of the hotel,
which was one of a continuous line of low buildings making the
business side of the public square, and glancing up I saw a great
dog looking down on me from the flat roof. There was little other
sign of life. The square was a large, irregular space which seemed
the more extensive owing to the low level of the adjoining buildings
over which rose the massive tower of the kasbah close at hand on the
right and, diagonally across, the high dome of the French Bureau,
with its arcaded front beneath, filling that eastern side. A fountain
stood in the midst of the bare space, and beyond it was a charming
little park of trees; and still farther the white gleam of the
barracks, through the green and on either side, closed the vista
to the south. The Moresque architecture, which the French affect
in the desert, with its white lights and open structure, gave a
pleasing amplitude to the scene; and the same style was taken up
by the main street straight down my left, whose line was edged by a
long arcade with low, round arches, and the view lost itself beyond
in the market square with thick tufts of palms fringing the sky.
A few burnoosed figures were scattered here and there.

Hamet joined me at once, still content; he held in his hand a
telegram from his new boy, or those who could interpret for him. We
turned at once to the near corner by the kasbah, where was the
entrance to the old town and the mosque—a precinct of covered
streets, narrow, tortuous ways, with blank walls, dim light. There
were few passers-by; occasionally there was a glimpse of some
human scene; but the general effect, though the houses were often
well built, was dingy, poor, and mean, as such an obscure warren
of streets must seem to us, and there was nothing here of the
picturesque gloom and threatening mystery of Figuig. I remember
it as a desert hive of the human swarm; it was a new, strange,
dark mode of man’s animal existence. This was a typical desert
town, an old capital of the caravans. It had been thus for ages;
and my feeling, as I wandered about, was less that of the life than
of its everlastingness.

We went back to the mosque and climbed the minaret. It was a welcome
change to step out on the balcony into the flood of azure. The true
Sahara stretched round us—the roll of the white sands, motion
in immobility; and all about, as far as one could see, the dark
palm islands in the foreground and on every horizon. The terrace
roofs of the old town lay dark under our feet; off there to the
west in the sand were the tombs of its fifty kings; eastward the
palm gardens, bordering and overflowing into the new quarter with
its modern buildings, lifted their fronds; and near at hand the
tower of the kasbah, and here and there a white-domed koubba, rose
in the dreaming air; and the streets with their life were spread
beneath. Tougourt, at the confluence of the underground streams,
is the natural capital of the Rir country, a commanding point; on
the north and west it is walled against the inroad of the sands;
south and east is a more smiling scene, but the white sand lies
everywhere between, like roads of the sea; it is the queen of the
oases, and one understood in that sparkling air why it was called
a jewel of the desert. I went down to the gardens, where there
were fruit trees and vegetables among the palms, but for the most
part there was as usual only the barren surface of earth, fed with
little canals and crossed by narrow, raised footways, over which
sprang the fanshaped or circular tufts of swarded green. On that
side, too, was a native village—dreary walls of sun-dried earth
with open ways; they seemed merely a new form of the naked ground
shaped perpendicularly and squared—windowless, sealed, forlorn. I
entered one or two. Indeed, I went everywhere that morning, for
the distances were short.

In the afternoon I sat down by a table near a café in the market
square, and I remained there for hours over my coffee, watching the
scene. All Arab markets are much alike, but this was prettily framed.
On my right a palm grove rose over a low wall; on the left, across
the broad space, the low line of shops, with a glistening koubba
dome in their midst, broke the blue sky; and all between, in front,
was the market-place. In the foreground were a few raised booths,
or tables, and at the near end by a group of three or four palms was
a butcher’s stock in trade, the carcasses hanging on the limbs
of a dead tree. Farther off to the left squatted a half-dozen
Bedouins round little fagots of brushwood spread on the ground,
and beyond them a group of animals huddled; in the centre, on
the earth, one behind another into the distance, were many little
squares and heaps of country goods, each with its guardian group
as at a fair—vegetables, grains, cloths, slippers, ropes, caps,
utensils, that together measured the scale of the simple wants of
the desert. The place, though not crowded, was well filled with
an ever-moving and changing throng, gathering into groups here and
there—turbaned people of every tint and costume, young and old,
poor and prosperous, picturesque alike in their bright colors or worn
rags; but the white or brown flowing garments predominated. There
were Arab and Berber faces of purer race; but in the people at large
there was a strong negroid character, showing the deeper infusion
of negro blood which one notices as he goes south of the Atlas. All
the afternoon the quiet but interested crowd swarmed about; and
round me at the close tables were soldiers and Arabs who seemed of
a more prosperous class, drinking and talking, playing at cards,
chess, and dominos, and some were old and grave and silent. At our
table there was always one or two, who came and went, to whom Hamet
would perhaps present me, a thin-featured cadi, a burly merchant,
and we talked a little; but I left the talk to them and watched
the scene and from time to time snapped my camera. A caravan came
down the street, with great boxes strapped on the camels, and I
thought the first two would sweep me, camera, table, and all, out
of the way; but the long line got by at last, ungainly beasts with
their pawing necks and sardonic mouths. At Tougourt one was always
meeting a caravan. As I stood, at a later hour, in a lonely corner
by the wall outside the gates, one was just kneeling down on the
great sweep of the sand-hill to camp in the melancholy light that
was falling from the darkening sky—a sombre scene; and when I
came out of the hotel at night I found another sleeping, humped and
shadowy, on the public square. The camel was as omnipresent as the
palm, and belonged to the same dunes and sky; and as I sat watching
there through the uneventful and unhurried hours, the market-place
was a microcosm of the desert world.


                                  IV

I spent the evening in the _Café Maure_ of the Ouled-Naïls. They
are _la femme_ of the Sahara, daughters of a tribe whose centre
is at Djelfa, not far from Laghouat, leagues away to the west, and
thence they are dispersed through the desert, adept dancing-girls
who perform in cafés; and in that primitive society, it is said,
no reproach attaches to their mode of life, which yields them a dowry
and brings them at last a husband. The custom is not peculiar to the
Sahara; I have read of its existence in Japan and in the north of
Scotland in the eighteenth century. I had met with them before, and
was familiar with their figures, but always in a tourist atmosphere;
here they were on their own soil, and _au naturel_, and I expected
a different impression.

The room was rather large, with the furnace and the utensils for
coffee in the corner near the entrance; four or five musicians,
on a raised platform, were discoursing their shrill barbarian art,
but it pleases me with its plaintive intensity and rapid crescendos,
in its savage surroundings; a bench went round the wall, and there
were tables, at one of which Hamet and I sat down, and coffee was
brought. There were not many in the room—a sprinkling of soldiers,
mostly in the blue of the tirailleurs, Arabs, old and gray-bearded,
or younger and stalwart like Ali, whom I had lost sight of and
now found here, much more attractive than I had thought possible,
with a desert rose in his mouth and a handsome comrade. A few women
with the high head-dress and heavy clothes they wear were scattered
about. Close behind me, and to my left, was a wide entrance to the
dark shadows of the half-lighted court whose cell-like rooms I had
inspected in the morning, and men and women were passing in and
out, singly and in groups, all the evening. For a while there was
no dancing—only the music; but at some sign or call a full-grown
woman, who seemed large and heavy, began the slow cadence and sway
of the dance. I had often seen the performance, but never in such
a setting; at Biskra and in the north it is a show; here it was
a life. She finished, and I beckoned to a young slip of a girl
standing near. She came, leaning her dark hands on the table, with
those unthinking eyes that are so wandering and unconcerned until
they fill with that liquid, superficial light which in the south
is so like a caress. I offered her my cigarettes, and she smiled,
and permitted me to examine the bracelets on her arms and the
silver ornaments that hung from her few necklaces; she was simply
dressed and not overornamented; she was probably poor in such riches;
there was no necklace of golden louis that one sometimes sees; but
there were bracelets on her ankles, and she wore the head-dress,
with heavy, twisted braids of hair. A blue star was tattooed on her
forehead, and her features were small but fine, with firm lines and
rounded cheek and chin; she was too young to be handsome, but she
was pretty for her type and she had the pleasant charm that youth
gives to the children of every tint and race. She stood by us a while
with a little talk, and as the music began she drew back and danced
before us; and if she had less muscular power and vivacity than the
previous dancer, she had more grace in her slighter motions. She
used her handkerchief as a background to pose her head and profile
her features and form; and all through the dance she shot her vivid
glances, that had an elasticity and verve of steel, at me. She
came back to take our applause and thanks, and talked with Hamet,
for her simple French phrases were exhausted; there was nothing
meretricious in her demeanor, rather an extraordinary simplicity
and naturalness of behavior; she seemed a thing of nature. The room
began to fill now; three women were dancing; and she went over to
the bench by the wall opposite, and I noticed a young boy of eight
or ten years ran to sit by her and made up to her like a little
brother. There were three or four such young boys there.

The scene was now at its full value as a picture; not that there
was any throng or excitement, and to a European eye it might seem
only dull, provincial, rude; the rather feebly lighted room was
obscure in the corners and the walls were naked; the furnace corner,
however, was full of dark movement, the sharp music broke out afresh,
the dance was almost sombre in its monotony, seen mechanically and
without any apparent interest by the Arabs, wrinkled and grizzled,
banked together or leaning immobile on the bench by the wall; and
the cavernous shadow of the court behind me made a fine background
to the figures or groups that disappeared or emerged, or sometimes
stood stationary there in the semi-obscurity. To my color and
shadow loving eye it was an interesting scene; and its rudeness
enhanced its quality. I noticed many a slight thing: a tall negro
stalked along the opposite wall with a handful of candles which
he offered to a woman and found no welcome for, and he went away
apparently exceeding sorrowful. And I sat there long in the midst
of it, thinking of striped tents by the city wall in the sand near
the graves; of streets in the Orient and the north where the women
sit by the door-post like idols; and especially reconstructing in
imagination the scenes of a romance by an Arab, which I had lately
read, depicting the life of an Ouled-Naïl along these very routes
where I had been passing, a book full of desert truth—“Khadra,”
it is called. Toward ten o’clock we rose to go, and I caught the
eye of the young girl I had talked with, and had a smile for good-by.


                                   V

The horses stood at the door early the next morning for a drive to
Temacin, some thirteen kilometres south. We were soon out of town,
travelling beside an oasis on the left and going in the open desert;
a boy joined us from the oasis and excitedly struggled to keep up
with the carriage, no difficult task, for the route was heavy with
sand; two other boys on donkeys ahead were having a race; and the
route had always some touches of travel. The openness of the view
was boundless, and I had not seen finer sands, stretching away in
long rolls and ridges, and mounded into splendid dunes, with palms
here and there for horizon lines. There were always groups and little
strings of camels, isolated but living, in the expanse over which the
eye roamed; we passed from time to time within view of clumps of lost
palms, little oases buried and left in the sands, half-submerged,
derelicts; now there were Bedouin tents, low, striped shelters,
by ones or twos, pitched on the sterile waste, looking infinitely
solitary, at a distance from a small village on a ridge, that
itself seemed a heap of ruined and ribbed walls left abandoned. The
morning was hot, the sun beat down, and every line and tracery
of the wind was visible on the sand. The surface of the dunes was
beautiful—light and full of the spirit of fantasy; the modulation
was exquisite, ribbed and fretted, furrowed in lines and touched all
over with little disks and curves, like the imprint of small shells;
and their mottled and wavy surfaces broke the monotony of the vast
slopes and dunes like an infinite enamelling of nature. It was the
land of the blue distance, the simple in the grand, the apotheosis
of paucity in the means, of poverty in the substance, elemental,
abstract, superb: the glory of the desert. I never so felt it as
on that morning. I watched the slender, film-like, far-off minaret
of Temacin take body and height as we drew nearer and nearer, and
saw plainly and distinctly at last the boldly perched, irregular
oblong of walls and roofs that topped a rising ridge of the sands,
with its minaret like a dark, mediæval tower standing in heaven with
a lance-like solitude. Its top was bordered with a broad frieze of
colored tiles and capped with a pyramidal head or balcony pierced
with slim Moorish arches. There were men working under the wall; but
the town looked marvellously silent and alone, dark and withdrawn,
like an impenetrable earthen ruin, incommunicable; it rose as if
made of the earth itself, with the dilapidation of old earthworks,
forbidding and melancholy, with no touch of life except the gleam
of its tiled minaret; in all that sun it seemed sunless—ruinous,
decadent, infinitely old. Soon after we passed another heap of
earth walls on a sand-mound, a small village, and came almost at
once to Tamelhat, the zaouia, which we had set out to see.

High walls surrounded the enclosure, which was extensive. Tamelhat is
a holy village, a chief seat of the religious order of the Tidjania
and daughter of the mother zaouia at Aïn Madhi, near Laghouat,
with which it shares the devotion of this important brotherhood,
one of the most influential of the Moslem associations in North
Africa. The zaouia is a sort of monastery or abbey; but I was not
prepared to find it so large an establishment. We left the carriage
at the gate and passed in to a second gate, and I was struck by the
ornamental work and texts on them and on the walls. A straight avenue
led down to an open space where the mosque stood on the right side
of the street as we turned sharply upon it. Three square windows
set in little ornamented arches in the centre broke the broad
white space of the wall, and there were other windows irregularly
placed. A little to one side was a heavy door, with a double row of
faience set over its square top and descending on beautiful onyx
pillars. An octagonal dome, tipped with a shaft of three golden
balls, completed the building above. It was a pretty exterior with
a touch of art in the line of windows, and as I passed into the
interior by the lovely onyx columns it seemed like a reminiscence,
almost a renaissance, to find before my gaze the familiar blue
and green tiles, plaques of wrought plaster in arabesque, pretty
bits of faience adornment—forms of the ornament and color so
delightful to me. The interior was roomy, with good spaces, and
lofty above; in the main fore part a palanquin was in one corner,
and a few tombs were placed here and there; but the shrine, the
tomb of the Marabout who founded the zaouia, stood in the space to
the left, directly under the dome, as in a chapel. It was heavily
covered with stuffs, as usual, and overhung with many banners; a
grill ran round it, and outside of that a wooden rail; the tomb also
bore Arabian texts. The whole effect, notwithstanding the bareness,
the few elements, the uncostly materials, had the grand simplicity
of the Moslem faith; it was impressive—imposing to a simple soul;
but, beyond the restful sense of the neighborhood of beautiful and
sacred things in that far and desert solitude, what pleased me most
and the feature I carried away to be my memory of it was the ample
lights in the cool spaces by the open windows above the tomb toward
the street, where the birds were continually fluttering in and out,
unfrightened and undisturbed, as if this was their quiet home.

I thanked the Arab sacristan who stood looking at me with old
and tranquil eyes, and we went out and walked up the street,
which seemed like a long cloister. There were grilled windows on
the well-built walls at intervals; a few men sat here and there
on benches along the way; it seemed a place of peace. The street,
which was quite long and straight, ended in a large court near which
was the dwelling of the Marabout. Hamet asked me if I would like
to see him, and I gladly assented. After a brief interval an Arab
came to us, to whom I gave my coat and what things I was carrying;
and leaving them below, he guided us up an irregular stairway,
as in an old house, and took us into a rather large, high room,
plainly plastered and bare. The desert saint—such he was—was
seated on the floor in the middle of one side by the wall on a
rug; he was old and large, white-bearded, with a heavy look, as
if he were used to much repose and was aged. He gave me his hand
as I stooped down to him, and after a word or two invited me to
be seated at a plain table before him in the middle of the room;
and attendants silently brought food. There was already in the
room the caïd of Temacin, a stout and prosperous-looking Arab,
to whom Hamet presented me, and the three of us sat down to what
turned out to be a hearty breakfast. Two or three other tall Arabs,
apparently belonging to the family, sat by the wall to my left,
as I faced the Marabout, and at a doorway in the corner on the
right stood a group of different ages, younger, with one or two
boys, intelligent and bright-eyed. The caïd and myself talked in
low tones, and no one else spoke, except from time to time the
Marabout gave some direction to the attendants, apparently of a
hospitable nature, as each time it resulted in fresh dishes. There
was pastry that resembled rolls, and after a few moments, served in
another form, hot with sugar, it resembled pancakes, but I dare say
it was something quite different, and the Marabout urged it upon
me; there was another combination that reminded me distantly of
doughnuts, with which the hot food ended; but there was a dessert
of French cakes, almonds, and a dried aromatic kernel like peas,
and much to my surprise there were oranges that must have come on
camel-back from Biskra. There was coffee, too, with a curious pot
and sugar-bowl, and the whole service was excellent, the attendants
kindly and pressing, though very quiet. It appeared afterward that
no one ever sees the saint eat; his food is brought and left, and
he takes what he likes alone. I observed him through the meal,
and occasionally he addressed a sentence of inquiry or interest
to us. The impression he made on me was one of great indolence,
as if he had never done anything for himself, and also of what I
can only describe as a somnolent temperament, heavy and rousing
himself at times; but it may have been only age. The profound
silence and atmosphere of awed respect were remarkable; the few
words spoken were hardly above a whisper, and the caïd and I used
low tones. It was a hospitable and generous breakfast, however, and
the manner of it wholly pleasant and friendly; and as I again took
the old Marabout’s large, soft hand, and expressed my pleasure and
thanks for having been thus received, he seemed to me very cordial
and kind; and for my part I was glad that I had found the unusual
experience of breakfasting with a saint so agreeable. The caïd and
I parted below, and I walked back through the tranquil street and
by the mosque with the bird-haunted windows and the onyx portal,
well pleased with my morning in such a place of peace and good-will.

We drove back through the hot horizons of a burning noon; by sombre
Temacin with its far-seen tower, old watcher of the desert; by the
distant western oasis with its two gleaming koubbas, that seemed
to dissolve between the sands and the blue; by the Bedouin tents
crouched in the long drifts below the brow of the earthen ruin
whose walls gaped on the hill with fissure and breach. We passed a
bevy of bright-colored Bedouin women hurrying in their finery to
some Marabout to pray. The long slopes and mounded dunes had not
lost that wonderful enamel of the breath of the wind. All nature
seemed to stretch out in the glory of the heat. It was spring on the
desert; it was a dreaming world. “_Le vrai Sahara_,” said Hamet,
half to himself. And slowly over the palmy plain, beyond the lost
oasis, the tower and minaret of Tougourt, slim lines on the sky, grew
distinct in their turn, and solid, and near, and we drove in through
the garden green as over a threshold of verdure. It was a great ride.

The day ended lazily. I had the pleasure of a few courteous
words with the agha of Tougourt, to add to my hospitable
distinctions. “He is an Arabian prince,” said Hamet proudly, as
we walked away. Along the arcade I saw a Jew seated cross-legged,
with his back to the jamb of his shop; he held a heavy folio
volume on his lap and seemed to peruse it with grave attention;
that was the only time I ever saw a native reading a book in North
Africa, and I looked curiously at the fine venerable face. The
boys were playing leap-frog before the hotel as I came back from
my walk; they had thrown off their haiks, or jackets, or whatever
their upper garment might be. How they played! with what strong,
young sinews and vivacity of rivalry and happiness! though the
children of the street seemed often poor, destitute, and with
faces of want. I photographed two of these Bedouin boys, with whom
I had made friends. In the evening I sat outside and watched the
camp-fires burning by the camels in the square. I thought of the
massacring of the French garrison here forty years ago, and of the
protests that a military interpreter, Fernand Philippe, records from
the lips of the soldiers when a year or two later the government
contemplated withdrawing from this advanced desert post. It was a
place of home-sickness, of fever, and of utter isolation; but the
soldiers wished to stay—withdraw? never!—and all this peace
and prosperity that I had witnessed was the French peace.


                                  VI

It was three o’clock in the morning when I went out to start on
the return under the stars. The streets were dark and silent as
we drove out; but the heavens were brilliant, and the twin lights
of Tougourt shone behind us like lighthouses as we made out into
the sandy plain. A few miles on we passed a company of soldiers
convoying a baggage-train—strong, fine faces above their heavy
cloaks, marching along in the night. The stars faded and day broke
quietly—a faint green, a dash of pink, a low, black band of cloud,
and the great luminary rolled up over the horizontal waste. The
morning hours found us soon in the heavy sands of the upland, with
the old gray mosque and stretches of the _bois_, the desert drin, and
we descended into the country of the marine views, the land of the
mirage, mirror-like waters shoaling on banks of palm, dreaming their
dream; and now it was Ourlana and the school, fresh horses and an
early arrival at Mraïer, and sleep in the caravanserai amid horses
and camels and passing soldiers, a busy yard. The chotts looked less
melancholy as we passed over the lowland in the bright forenoon, and
again there shimmered the far salt—the ocean look where there was
no sea, close marine views, and there was much mirage; and we climbed
the ascent and glided on over the colored quartz, and the range of
the Aurès rose once more above the horizon, beautiful and calling,
and Aïn Chegga seemed a familiar way-station. Fresh horses, and the
last start, and Bordj Saada seemed a suburb; and as we drove into
Biskra, with its road well filled with pedestrians and carriages,
it seemed like a return to Europe—so soon does the traveller’s
eye become accustomed to what at first was “rich and strange.”
And Hamet went to his baby boy.




                          SCENES AND VISIONS

                               * * * * *

                                   V

                          SCENES AND VISIONS


                                   I

It was in my early days in the desert, and Yussef told me
tales. There was a Bedouin camp—indicated vaguely in the
distance by a gesture; a real desert encampment. “Were there many
tents? Twenty? A hundred?” “There might be—thousands!—who
could know?” It was near an old French fort where some relative,
variously designated as little brother, step-brother, nephew, cousin,
was in charge; we would be welcome; there would be cous-cous, real
cous-cous, made in the desert. It was mid-winter; but a caravan
had come in last night—the roads were good.

So we set out on a bright, cold morning with a heavy carriage and
two large, strong horses, with wraps and rugs in plenty, and some
Christian stores, and drove out by old Biskra as the low sun began
his great circuit over the extended plain. It was my first venture
into those long reaches of the waste, with their interminable roll
into the horizons. The beautiful cliffs of the Aurès began to stand
up in their true grandeur, detaching themselves from the level,
massing their long line and isolating the range in blue heaven—a
wall of the world; the desert floor spread out like endless shallows
of a sea of marshes, rising and falling with a vast undulation
of shadows, far away; the winter desolation solemnized the quiet
scene. The road was good enough at first, firm, though muddy; but
the amount of water was surprising, and after a few kilometres,
when old Biskra was only a dark-ribbed reef behind us, not to be
distinguished from the other oases that dotted the distances about,
the scene suggested more than ever an archipelago. It was soon
heavy going continuously, and we were at our best when we could
keep the edge of a ridge along which a lively brown stream poured
turbulently. The land was wet, soaked, but not submerged; and on all
sides, at varying distances, were living objects—flocks, camels,
men—and the herds, though they were really far apart, gained an
effect of number from the great spaces that the eye took in. Except
for the character of the landscape, it would have been a monotonous
drive; and it was high noon when we drew up at the old French fort,
Bordj Saada.

I went toward the brow of the hill. A solitary Arab, an old man,
was doing his devotions, and after I had passed, I turned and
looked at him. It was the first time I had seen an Arab praying in
the desert. With his face toward Mecca, he extended his arms and
made his genuflexions, prostrating himself, oblivious to all about
him; he was alone with his God. The ease and immediacy with which
an Arab withdraws into his religion, independently of time, place,
and circumstance, is one of the primary traits of the physiognomy of
the land. I kept on to the crest of the rise, and as my eyes ranged
over the great circuit of the field of vision the impressions that
had vaguely fed me all the morning came to a climax and, as it
were, focussed; it was a scene of the patriarchal age. It was as
if the dark film of my memories had suddenly developed in my eyes
the picture of Biblical life—the Scriptural landscape. The sky was
filled with gray clouds in strata, spotting the expanse, where tracts
of light interchanged with the shadows; and in the eternal vacancy,
scarcely disturbed by the far, dark line of some emerging oasis,
everywhere in the sea of light and distance were herds of camels,
standing thin and tall, but distinct, in the long perspectives,
solitary or netted wanderingly together, and straggling flocks
with Bedouin boys in couples; here and there a low, brown Bedouin
tent crouched to the soil; yonder was a brace of horsemen riding;
the long line of a caravan behind me was rounding the sweep of the
hill up from Tougourt, with its dwarfed camel leaders rudely clad.
Few elements, but widely distributed. Flocks and herds and weather;
the life close to nature; the lowly companionship of animals;
the deeper feeling always intensified in broad prospects, of the
spiritual brooding of nature around—in the blue and the sun and
the cloud, in the distant mountain range, and in land and water:
the simple, early, primitive world. It lay unfolded in such infinite
silence, with such an effect of agelessness and continuity, of the
elemental thing—human life on earth! To me it was early centuries
made visible. It was desert life first grasped by my eye—primary,
quiet, enduring; and how humble in its grandeur! The impression did
not pass quickly away, but persisted long afterward; however obscured
by the superficial incidents of the day, it emerged again; the mood
was always there within. It is not unusual for me, and I suppose
not for others, to live thus at times in a double consciousness of
the outward and the inward life, a twofold stream of being whose
currents never mix, whose fountains are different; but on that day
I especially marked the preoccupation and excitement of the deeper
element. It was as if from some Pisgah height I actually saw the
old Scriptural world.

Yussef came to tell me that the cous-cous was ready, for we had been
much delayed and everything was more than prepared when we arrived. I
went back to the old French post, an extensive four-walled structure,
built like a _fondouk_, with stables and rooms on the inner sides, as
a military rallying-point for storage and harborage, and commanding
the route to Tougourt. It had been long disused and was in charge,
apparently, of Yussef’s “little brother,” who turned out to
be a full-grown man with a wife. She had cooked the cous-cous,
and as I sat down to my meal in one of the bare interior cells
looking on the great yard, it was brought in smoking. It is made
of farina with small pieces of lamb mixed with it, and was piled
up in a great, yellowish cone, enough for twenty appetites; and
it was hot, not only in the ordinary sense of fragrant fuming,
but it had bowels of red pepper. It was excellent, and I formed a
liking for this _pièce de résistance_ of an Arab feast that has
never since betrayed me. Afterward there was coffee, with dates
and an orange. So far as the meal was concerned, our plan had
been a brilliant success. I lit a cigar with contentment, leaving
Yussef and the rest to their own share of the improvised fête, and
when he appeared again I said impassively, “Well, the camp”;
for I had not seen any signs of that Timbuctoo which had lured me
forth on the winter desert. “Do you want to see the camp?” said
Yussef. “Yes,” I answered; “where is it?” It was close by.

He led me out down the northern hillside a short distance, toward
a small enclosure on the slope, stopped, and said “_Voilà!_”
There was one Bedouin tent. A low hedge of fagots surrounded it,
on which a yellow dog frantically volleyed defiance. “Well,” I
said, “come on; I want to see it.” But he stayed in his tracks;
and, as I looked back questioningly, he said with great solemnity:
“Too much dog!” A woman appeared, and he hailed her, and we
went off to halloo to her husband, who presently approached and
very willingly led me toward the tent. The woman had collared the
dog, and the man shouted to him, but he was irreconcilable. The
last word in my vocabulary of abuse—that beyond which nothing
can go—is “the manners of a Kabyle dog”; and this one was a
fair specimen. As I came into the enclosure and stooped to enter
the tent, his fury knew no bounds. The woman, bending down, held
him securely with her arm tight about his neck, and the daughter,
a young and pretty girl, clutched his hind legs in a firm grip; and
he howled as well as he could. This was the central group in that
low interior; and the woman, with her black hair and full, gleaming
eyes, a face that in shape resembled that of an Indian squaw, heavy
silver hoops in her ears, and a short, muscular, full-bosomed frame,
was a striking and vital figure as she half strangled the beast
and cheerfully and with interest guided my undue curiosity. I
looked over the rude cooking arrangements, the bed, the strange
implements—all the scanty furnishing of that human nest, almost
hidden in the wet ground of winter, close to the earth. They were all
polite and kindly and let me see and handle what I would. The space
was small, and one could not stand upright. This was “their toil,
their wealth”—I thought of the Syracusan fishers of the old idyl;
and as I came away with snatches of it in my head, and the faithful
watch-dog again danced and barked maniacally on the fagot-fence, I
was glad that the poor fishers “had no watch-dog”; and I forgot
to reproach Yussef for his tale of Timbuctoo—numbers are vague
things at best, and in Africa quite indescribable in their behavior.

While the horses were being harnessed, I sought out my hostess,
the “little brother’s” wife, and found her in a deep, large
kitchen in one corner of the enclosure. She was dressed to receive
me in all her finery. She was tall and gaunt, and garbed like an
Ouled-Naïl—bright stuffs, rings, necklaces, ornaments, a barbaric
vision to my then unfamiliar eyes, and with the tinsel a good deal
rubbed off in places. She did the honors with touches of coquetry,
and showed me the place where the cous-cous had been concocted,
the cradle with the baby, and the _ménage_, and she took me up a
dark, winding, stone stairway to the bedroom above. It was _triste_
there—a place for a traveller’s murder, I thought, in some French
romance of feudal journey; when we descended, the cavernous gloom
and rude largeness of the kitchen, in which a good many chickens
were wandering about, seemed almost like a return to sunshine and
life. Then we said good-by to the little group of various persons
who had served us with so much good-will, and drove off by another
route, westward, toward the oasis of Oumach, a dark line far away.

We swept into the country on higher ground, under a clearing sky,
and the panorama came back—the primeval story of shepherd and
herding races, in the immutable grandeur of the great lines that
framed it. We were going toward the sun, and there seemed no limit
to the scene before and about us. It was the plane of its extension
that was wonderful—and everywhere the intensity of the silence,
the clarity of distant objects, and that quality of the infinite
which no words, but only a real memory, can convey. Flocks and herds
and men, scattered at great intervals, lessened behind us and drew
near in the offing. The road was mud, but by no means the slough of
the morning. We met no one; only we were abroad in the wet waste. We
passed but one house, where there was an Arab—also with dogs,
but not of the Kabyle variety—who gave us coffee; and the sun was
westering far when we came to the angle where we struck the Biskra
route and turned homeward. The dense blackness of the Oumach palms
showed like an island in the dying day, as we passed them, near at
hand; it was too late, too wet to stop there; and shortly afterward
the sun went down in a clear sky, immense and red on the desert
edge. Then I saw what was to me a remarkable phenomenon: a sunset
on the earth instead of in the heavens. The ground, more or less
overgrown with scattered vegetation, sloped upward in a long, bold,
westerly swell, and cut the horizon clear with its whole breadth;
and this wide-flung earth surface through its entire width flamed
scarlet, like a low prairie fire, burning with light; the ground
glowed rosy red, and the plants and shrubs and every growing thing
stood up, distinct in every twig and blade, as if on fire with gold,
burning unconsumed, and slowly all turned to scarlet and faded to
rich crimson, softened, paled and died. It was all on the earth;
at least, if there was any color in the clear sky above, except the
long horizon glow, I did not see it. I remembered a line of Keats
that had always troubled me, because I did not know what he meant:

  “While barrëd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.”

I suppose it was a similar scene that he had witnessed. But in my
own experience I never saw anything remotely resembling the marvel
of that desert-kindled flame that brought black night.

It grew dark rapidly. There was no moon. The stars flocked out. In
the obscurity the slight noises of the wind grew insistent; the
cries of the camels in the darkness sounded weird. The road became
much worse. We dipped into pools, and as we advanced the tract was
entirely flooded. We went at a snail’s pace, the horses finding
their way in the level waters that stretched out like a lake in
the gloom. It was full night now. The water was at the hubs, and
with a lurch it came in on the carriage floor. We stopped, for it
was clear we were off the raised ground of the route on one side
or the other. Yussef had been very uneasy, as he might well be,
for two of the White Brothers had been drowned the previous week,
travelling somewhere in this wide waste. He threw his burnoose up
and knotted it, and drew up his garments beneath, and waded out to
determine the lay of the slopes. Then we turned to the rising side,
and after a hundred feet got onto the floor of the route again and
kept it till we had passed the flooded tract. There were two or three
Bedouin camp-fires on the west, and once we heard the sound of many
voices in the darkness round one of them. Yussef, who was constantly
in movement, asked me if I had a revolver, and where was it? It was
very handy. “_Bon!_” he said, with satisfaction. But nothing
could long distract my attention from the magnificence of the sky.
There was not a cloud. Sirius was in the east, and Orion rising;
and one by one I picked out the heaven marks of my boyhood, north
and west; but they shone with a splendor, a molten luminousness,
a size and lowness undreamed of, and the lesser constellations
were obscured by the multitude of starry lights—it was my first
view of the desert sky at night. The whole heaven was nebulous
with scintillating sparks and milky drifts, innumerable around
and about the old leaders of the flock. It was a revelation of the
starry universe. I was brought back from my reverie by Yussef’s
whole-souled ejaculation—“_Voilà! vieux Biskra!_” as he sank
back with a long sigh of relief into his seat. The oasis was dark
before us, and we were soon going by the earthen walls of the silent
village and passing under the tall black palms that bordered the
starred sky with their fronds, and caught the old constellations
in their tops, from which Orion, eastward, lifted himself free in
heaven. It was the end.

But how many times since then have the sights of that drive come
back to me! When I think of Esau and Ishmael, of Mizpah and Goshen,
I live over again the panorama of that winter day. It was not a
scene I had beheld; it was a vision.


                                  II

The dunes lie to the west of Biskra. They are real sand-hills;
one can climb on them, there are echoes to be waked, and the
plain stretches finely to the mountains behind; but it is the
forward view that holds the eye. The altitude is not great, but
high enough to give a perch something of the commanding power of a
cliff prospect over the sea, and the dunes themselves reminded me
vaguely of the Ipswich sand-hills of my own coast and their sterile
sea-views. The magical thing in the desert is its unexpectedness;
it is not at all like what one would have thought. It is not to me
oceanic; but in those first days, owing to the moisture of the air
and the wetness, it was more so than at a later time. At some hours
and under some lights the desert from the dunes had touches of an
April sea, fragments of its color; it was blue—not with the solid
blue of ocean, but with ethereal tints, insubstantial veils, like
inland August haze, or, to speak exactly, with the moist blueness
of March. A brilliant March over stretches of melting snow crust
by the sea is the bluest of all months; the sky and the ocean
are deeply tinged, and the trickling waters of the snow surface
reflect the heaven through pale gradations of the universal hue,
which, though nowhere intense, has great luminous volume; it is
a blue world. I suppose it was the low moisture rising from the
desert that took the reflections in bands and spaces; the scene
showed at times vast, distant lakes of pale azure, violet lagoons,
strips of fallen sky, indigo outlooks—far away —and all in that
almost aerial tone, insubstantial, watery, spring-like, infinitely
soft and delicate. From the heights of El Kantara, at the mouth
of the pass that looks down on Biskra, such a scene is superb in
the morning air, and one might well think he was going down to
the roads of an inland sea unlike all others; and from the dunes,
in certain weather conditions, though on a far lesser scale, one
has this vision of the blue desert.

But it was not the blue desert that made the dunes a leaf in my
book of memory; it was a brown little Bedouin boy on a sand-hillock
whom I observed on my way home. I made his acquaintance. He was
about ten years old; his ragged, earth-colored garment blew round
his sturdy bare legs; he was capped with black hair, and his small
herd of goats fed beside him. He was shy, and his stolid, great eyes
looked up at me—those young Arab eyes, expressionless, but which
a touch of joy irradiates, seeming to liquefy their shallow light,
making them soft like a caress. He was willing to be acquainted. I
fed him with chocolate, and extracted from him the four French
words he knew; but, notwithstanding the good offices of Chèrif,
whom I had with me, the best educated of the guides, and now
the master of the French-Arab school there, our conversation was
mostly confined to mutual kind looks. I left him after a while,
and a few moments later, as I was walking toward the carriage,
he began to sing. I turned. There he stood, erect on the hillock
against the desert slope and the low sky, with unloosed voice. The
high treble rose with a certain breadth and volume; but its quality
was its intensity. I would not have believed the silent little
fellow had so much voice in him. “What is it?” I said. “It
is for you,” said the polite Chèrif; “it is to thank you.”
“What does he sing?” I asked. “_Un chant d’amour_” replied
Chèrif; and I could get no more from him except “blue eyes”
and “_l’amour_.” I looked up at the boy’s earnest face,
as he sang bravely on, and listened; and when he had stopped we
drove away, and the high treble began again on the hillside.

The Arabs sing much, but this was the first time I heard song in
the desert. I always think of the desert silence as embosoming
such song, like the hum of insects in the grass; though it may
be rare as a bird’s wing, it is there in the great spaces; the
desert, to my imagination, is a song-laden air, like Italy; but the
Italian is garden song, the desert is wilderness song; the Italian
is human, the desert song seems almost a part of nature, a part
of the desert. I remember the Bedouin flutes and the low rhythms
of the road and the camp; but when I take up a book of Arab song,
I see the vision of the Bedouin boy on the hillock among his goats,
carolling his _chant d’amour_.


                                  III

It was the time of the April fêtes at Biskra, and I went out in
the delightful warmth of the early afternoon to see. There were
to be races, but I was especially attracted by the promise of a
falcon hunt. A long line of white-robed Arabs streamed into the
country fields, and I drove amidst them by a quiet road shimmering
with dust, and when I turned by the great pen where the horses were
kept, into the enclosure, the crowd was already assembled. It was
a large, open plain whose side-lines were defined by the crowds
of spectators who did not enter. In the field were many scattered
groups. French soldiers, lining the course, and a squad gathered on
a neighboring hill gave the picturesqueness of military color to the
scene; a little group of soldier camels enlivened the foreground;
and everywhere were boys leading fine horses, venders of all sorts,
velvet-eyed children in gala clothes, grave Arab men. I wandered over
to where a company of white Mzabites, girt with brown cords, sat in
a circle, with guns in their hands, and a superb banner on a staff
floating over them, and to the place where the Ouled-Naïls—some
forty of them—displayed their charms and ornaments with holiday
faces. It was an animated scene of waiting—festal, decorative;
native and European soldiers, pawing horses, prancing cavaliers,
crowds of white-robed Arabs, with ample spaces. The carriage of the
caïd of Biskra, drawn by two beautiful mules, stood next to me;
he was a grave old man, a mould of courteous dignity, and with him
were some young children in gay vests—a charming party. But the
brilliant note of color was given by the red cloaks of the caïds
and sub-caïds, blowing in the wind as they rode here and there on
beautiful and spirited horses. Then there was a drawing in to the
course, and the races went on—tense moments of excitement as the
horses sped by, pauses and waits, like races everywhere.

One scene stands out from the memories of that day. It was just
before the hunting with the falcon began. It was a great and
solemn scene, fit for a painter’s eye, but no earthly canvas
could hold it. The landscape lines were all low and long, immense
in extension, the rigid lines of the desert firm and broad. The
scheme of composition was one of horizontal planes. In the eastern
sky the pink range of naked rock, the Aurès, cut the liquid blue
with its almost rosy edges, a bank of color reaching far away
into the distance; in the foreground, perhaps half a mile off,
a second line of red-toned sand-hills notched the range low down;
beneath them, and below the horizon line of the earth, stretched
a long row of white-robed Arabs massed standing in a continuous
line, and grouped together as in a bas-relief. Every figure was
distinct in the brilliant light poured from the descending sun
on the vast distances round about. I had never seen humanity and
nature posed in just that way. It was a processional bas-relief,
immovable and majestic, sculptured on the sand-hills and the rock;
it was monumental, architectural, Egyptian. The sight defined for
me one quality of desert landscape which I had vaguely felt; it
is the bas-relief of nature. The lowness of the visual plane, the
clarity of the human figures, the framing of the scene against which
everything is relieved, suggest to me the effects of bas-relief;
the repose of the Arab, too, the fall of the folds of his garment,
the simple actions, have more of the sculptural as a living-thing
than I have elsewhere observed. This scene was a supreme example of
my meaning and of the artistic intuitions involved; it simplified
my perceptions and also universalized them. I saw in it the arts
of Egypt on which the immensity of nature still rested, as truly a
desert art as the Moorish arabesques at Tlemcen. It was under this
splendid and glowing entablature that the black falcon was loosed
in air.

The gazelle—delicate and fragile creature—ran a short way ahead;
the horsemen followed behind; the bird circled above, sighted his
prey, darted swiftly on, and swooped down, striking the animal’s
head. The gazelle staggered and ran on as the bird rose, and from
his height the falcon swooped again and struck; the animal fell,
but sprang up and ran here and there terrified. Again—and again
the little creature collapsed and bounded, ran on, but it was dazed
and circled feebly; and again the black shadow shot down from the
blue, and it was over. The horsemen ran in, and took the falcon
from the convulsive body, killed the gazelle, and flung a piece of
the flesh to the victor. It was brief and brutal; but it was the
reality of life, not human life, but Life itself on earth—the
spirit of life as it might be in the desert without a human eye. I
drove back through the sunset cloud of dust among the solid press,
and came out on long lines of white-robed figures in procession ahead
by the countryside, vividly green with the warm spring. I had seen
two visions: one, that seemed almost of the eternal; the other,
of life’s moment—the living bas-relief on the mountain wall,
the gazelle’s death agony in the sand. I think that the earth
never seemed to me more like a great amphitheatre than then—a
spectacle, solemn, inscrutable, fated.


                                  IV

The processional is an inherent trait in the desert landscape,
owing to the fewness of the human figures and their concentration in
the vastness of the horizons. Everything seems strung out—herds
of goats, wandering camels, even the scattered palms; and in
the caravans or troops of horse or military trains the feature is
emphasized. It is the trait of a migratory land. The _mise en scène_
for a procession, in the true sense, is superb. The eye centres the
scene on the great space and views it whole and entire at a glance;
one could see the migration of a tribe or the march of an armed
host so.

These reflections came to me the next day when I returned to the
race-ground. The general scene was the same. A procession was
already forming at the upper end of the field. The white-robed
Mzabite group, with brown girdings round their loins and crossing
their backs and lacing their turbans, whom I had seen the previous
day with their guns, squatting about the splendid banner, were the
leaders of the formation, which was on foot. This was peculiarly
the Arabs’ day. On the rising ground the procession gradually
took shape and stretched out against the sky and the low palms,
a long, white line of moving figures, with the high standard borne
proudly advanced, Arab music, guns gleaming and sometimes held in
the air. It moved, not with a martial look in the European sense,
but with an aspect of oriental war. They were marching to be reviewed
by their chief near the centre of the course, and to perform before
him their _fantasia_, an Arab war game, in which one rank advances
rapidly upon another, fires, and whirls swiftly back. They came
down the track in gallant show, and as they passed the old chief
the mêlée began. Those in front turned to face the rank behind;
the second line rushed frantically forward in confusion, every
man for himself, fired their guns almost amid the feet of those
before them, whirled back waving their weapons, and came on again,
repeating the manœuvre. There was a great noise of powder, plenty of
smoke and commotion; their bodies were all in violent action, their
faces distorted with excitement, their garments fluttering. They
came squad after squad, as the groups slowly worked by, and the din
began farther up the line. It was a great game, vivid, spectacular,
with the smell of powder biting the nostrils, the rouse of fighting
blood, the drifting clouds of smoke—a waking dream of personal
combat; and they thoroughly enjoyed it.

Then came the turn of the _goum_, the cavalry. The caïds, splendid
figures in their brilliant red burnooses, came first. Each, single
and alone, charged down the course on the gallop with headlong speed,
holding in the right hand a gun in air and in the left a sabre;
and as they passed the old chief they saluted with the sabre and
discharged the gun, and swept on till the thunder of their hoofs died
away down the track. The _goum_ followed, a fine body of horsemen,
with similar tactics. The Arabs are expert in horsemanship as an art
of riding, but it is said they are deficient in that part of the art
which lies in care for the mount; they kill their horses. On that
day the spectacular charging, the discharge of firearms in motion,
the jockey-like cling and rhythm of bodies under the streaming
folds of the riders, the _élan_ of the troop, were fascinating,
as all skilled physical motion and its accoutrement is to my eyes;
but whether my battle sensations were exhausted, or for some other
reason, the sight did not interest me so much as the earlier mimic
combat on foot. It was not the proper setting for the _fantasia_
of the _goum_. One should see it in the desert when the charging
troop comes over the sands to salute some chief or Marabout with
his grouped attendants, riding as if to overwhelm, discharging its
guns at close quarters, wheeling just in time to avoid the shock
of the horses. Here on the race-course it was a show; there in the
sands it is a native custom, vivid and gallant with the spirit of
a race—a flower of desert chivalry.

What had drawn me to the fête was the desire to see the Arab
temperament in some of its violent manifestations. One habitual
trait of Arab life to the eye is the repose of its figures,
seated or in motion; the grave courtesy, the immobile posture,
the public dignity—the decorum. But, speaking of the race, this
is the repose of a tropic animal; it wakes to an instant intensity
of action, to a tiger violence. It was something of this side of
Arab nature that I sought; and I found some suggestion of it in
the mimicry of personal combat, the excitement, the confusion,
the distorted faces and bodily vehemence of the play; and also
in the _goum_ some intimation of the look of their leaders, the
old feudality of the desert. It all helped me to reconstruct the
warrior, marauding, internecine, old desert world; but it was only
fragments of vision. What a vivid race in its splendid and gallant
spirit—as full of fascination there as it is dingy in its sodden
poverty, earth-bound and earth-soiled, pitiable in its _misère_.


                                   V

It was the music of the Aïssaouas in the night. The din was
terrific, barbaric, ear-piercing, instruments and voices, as I
entered the little, roughly boarded hall, sufficiently but none
too well lighted, in which hung a slight haze of smoky vapor. There
were upward of a score of the order with their chief standing, and
a few men were seated on one side, who made a place for me among
them. The group in front, close by, filled a small, oblong space,
in the midst of which over a fire was a fuming pot; near by it two or
three musicians were beating the native drum, others struck cymbals,
and a line of men, standing and swaying, lifted a keening rhythm
of human voices in a continuous cry. A monotonous unison governed
the whole music, which came in cadences, falling to a lower note
and slower motion, then rising with swift acceleration to a sort
of paroxysm, shrill and rapidly vibrating, and again dropping
down till a fresh impetus sent the hard, strong, climbing pulse
of the rhythm on its high crescendo. There was never any pause;
again and again it culminated and fell away; but it could no more
stop than blood. Cymbals, drums, voices—continuous din at first,
and then a felt rhythm; it was a whip on the senses. Three or four
of the figures were more excited; occasionally one bent his head
into the fumes of the pot and took long breaths; these would dance,
utter wild cries, creep about with muscular contortions, but no one
seemed to pay much attention except the chief. He was a tall, large
man, of uncommon physical vitality evidently, heavily wrapped in a
white burnoose, turbaned; and it was plain that nothing in the room
escaped his eye for a moment, as he stood to one side overlooking,
and from time to time giving an order of care or restraint for
the more excited participants. Once accustomed to the noise and
the lights, my eyes found much detail. A man just at my right,
with the stare and spasmodic gesture of a halfwitted person, was
devouring pieces of the great leaves of the thorn cactus as if it
were lettuce. Another went about chewing pieces of broken glass,
which he begged for pitifully, to all appearance, and was as pleased
when he got it as a child with candy; he ate it with avidity,
like a ravenous animal. There seemed to be no arrangement about
anything, nothing designated beforehand, but every one did as he
pleased, while the shrill music rose and fell, the feet beat time,
and the few who were given over to the intoxication, turbanless and
half-garmented, swung among their brothers in a kind of exaltation
and partial collapse that were dervish-like.

Suddenly a young man who was standing near me undid his turban,
threw off the blouse he wore, and, entering the central group among
the musicians, bent down his head over the fire and inhaled the
fumes with long gasps. He joined in the cry of the voices, danced,
and grew quickly excited; he drew his shirt over his head, and thus,
half naked, went again to the fire. At a sign from the chief two
other men attended him, one on each side, and supported him; and
shortly after—he may have been ten minutes under the influences,
in all—the chief joined them, and the group came slowly toward
me, making the circuit of the others. The youth knelt directly
between my knees. He was, perhaps, eighteen, with a handsome face
somewhat ascetically lined, but that may have been due merely to
his poverty. He was well formed and muscled, bare to the waist. He
seemed entirely dazed, and dependent for direction on those about
him; his body was bathed in sweat and trembled violently all over;
every particle of his flesh quivered; his eyes rolled, showing the
whites in vivid contrast to his black hair, and he panted, as if he
craved something intensely and blindly. He threw his head far back,
exposing his throat, and one of the men, who held a long, straight
sword over him, sank the point just at the base of the throat. It
was not a deep cut, but the blood flowed freely, trickling down his
breast. The whole took place so near me that I could easily have
touched the youth without reaching; my knees were almost against his
arms. The others helped him to rise, still apparently unconscious,
and led him off to one side. Then the surprising thing occurred. The
chief held the boy in his arms tenderly, stroked him, caressed his
cheeks, kissed him; the boy’s head lay on his breast. Suddenly,
as if with a snap, he came to, and instantly seemed perfectly normal,
with no trembling, no convulsion, no sign of his previous state. He
was let alone, and in the most unconcerned manner put on his shirt
and blouse, arranged his turban, and after standing about a few
minutes went away.

I stayed on, and my attention was attracted by a little fellow of
eight or ten years, a bright street boy, who was wandering about
among the others. He got some sort of permission from the chief,
and they passed a knife through his right cheek—clear through. He
was very proud of the feat, and walked up and down, shaking his head
to make the knife waggle on its outer hilted side; but he was not
at all excited. I remained perhaps an hour, and then shook hands
with the chief, who was gravely courteous, and I went out under
the stars; and the din died away in the distance.

The Aïssaouas are an order of magicians and are widely spread
from Morocco, where they have their centre at Meknèz, through
Algeria and Tunis. Their founder was Sidi Mohammed-ben-Aïssa,
of whom many marvellous miracles are related, but all are of the
nature of prestidigitation; the association is, indeed, in some
ways, a guild of that art. Its repute, however, among the Moslems,
has its roots in the old magic of Africa, and rests on the habits
of superstition which are the common ground of the veneration of
the miracle-working Marabouts. The Aïssaouas claim immunity from
many mortal ills. Nothing that they may eat—scorpions, stones,
glass—can harm them; poisons are innocuous; wounds close at once
and disappear. They are naturally the physicians for such ills
in others, and are snake-charmers and wonder-workers. They are
very nomadic in their habits, and go widely through the land.
Many wild reports are current of their rites at their fêtes,
of their sacrificing animals and tearing the flesh in pieces and
devouring it raw; but these and other like things are traits of
the orgiastic state in the lower stages of civilization everywhere.

It was a faint shadow of the primeval that I had seen. That human
cry, mixed with the sharp cymbals and the drums, frantically
wavering and receding, was an echo from the central forests far
inland; and that fire with the pot was the ghost of fetichistic
rite, perhaps the oldest altar of mankind. The scene, the swaying
figures, the intoxication of the body, the atmosphere, belonged
to the earliest psychic experiences of the race. It suggested the
invisible superstition that lays over and fills the present minds
of the populace and the desert dwellers. I found the little boy
on the street the next day, and he recognized me. I examined his
mouth closely, and there was only a white roughness, like a scar,
on the inside of his cheek and a scratch on the outside. He became
very friendly; and my pleasantest memory of the Aïssaouas is of
his street-boy figure standing on the desert, a quarter of a mile
or more down the railway track, where he had gone to get near to
my train and give me his last good-by with waving hands.


                                  VI

The fascination of the desert, that which makes a desert lover,
is not in its incidents, voyages, sights; it is in its life. It is
the life of nature. I do not mean the picturesqueness of its human
traits, the passage of men and animals over a scene with which they
are so sympathetically colored as to seem only a part of its flora
and fauna, its transitory efflorescence; nor the landscape with
its breadths, infinities, hallucinations, hierarchies of color,
_élans_ of the soul and poems of the eye, with which they are in
conscious contact. It is a more intimate tie, and something that
passes within—purifies, refreshes, and releases. The brain ceases
to act; the nerves are put to sleep; the fever is over. The Old
World has receded far away; years, decades have passed, dropping
their burden of oblivion on all that was, and especially on what
was acrid and fiery in the past. It is a return to nature in which
she seems to have cast out devils. The senses bring their messages,
but they have lost their material utilities. The soul rests in
its sensations as a bird floats in the air. It is a foretaste of
Nirvana. Thought has ceased; duty is silent; labor has vanished;
and the life that is deeper than these and of which they were but
mortal fragments, “unconcerning things,” resurges, vibrates,
flowers. What a relief! what a transmigration! and what a new
sense of vitality—almost of a new sort of vitality! It is the
repose, the silence, the concentration of being within—the
peace. In the Western world one may attain this at times; the
desert imposes it as the habit of the soul that yields itself to
its influences. But it is more than this. The cerebral weight is
lifted and the physical life resumes its natural lethargies. It is
not really lethargic. It is a new kind of existence—the life,
unburdened by thought, that has moulded the fine physical nature
of this race abounding in energies. What a sense of freedom, of
nonchalance and timelessness! What a vigor as I draw in this pure
air! The world without a thought has a life of its own, a strange
vivacity; it is rich with fresh and unexpected pulses of being;
and this renewal and invigoration does not come whip-like, as in
the north, with a bracing winter stroke on the blood and nerves;
but like a caress, with a softness and a secrecy, a tenderness of
the solitude, something almost voluptuous.

These are the words of a desert lover and make no claim on
the credence of others; but no words can express the peace, the
liberty, the vitality I felt in my desert voyages. The symbol and
image of the mood and life I describe is to me the palm-tree. No
other tree has ever so influenced my spirit except the cypress in
a very different way. I would go out to the oued in the morning,
for I could not spare to the day the initial sense of largeness,
the tranquil desolation, the sea suggestion of the river bed, with
its lonely koubba; and, as the sun warmed, I wandered into the palm
gardens of the oasis, and sat on the rough soil, and, as it were,
adored the palms. I would lie there for hours, and the sun shone
above them. Occasionally Arab workmen would pass near, or a boy or a
guardian would come and sit beside me. Otherwise there was only the
solitude, the unbroken silence, the repose. The gardens are rude and
unkempt, with earth ditches and humps of ground, and an arid look,
except where the vivid green of some cereal here and there beneath
the palms, or the softer form and foliage of low fruit trees amid
their towering stems, give a brighter and more delicate touch to the
general scene. There is no luxury of turf or anything garden-like
in these precincts of earth and running waters and trees. There
is no effeminacy in the palm. Severity is the artistic trait of
everything in the desert. The long lines of the landscape here
are rigid, solemn, sombre; the naked rock of the mountain ranges
is stern, worn to the bone by wind and rain and sand; except for
the diaphanous and veiling effects of atmosphere and heat, and the
cloud and mist conditions that I have mentioned earlier, an austere
sublimity governs the horizons and vistas all around. Even in the
sands of the south about Tougourt, where every line the eye rests
on is a curve and softens on the eye and lulls it like a diapason of
great rhythms, this austerity is not lost from the desert scene. It
is the nude in landscape—not mere nakedness of earth, but landscape
sculptured and modelled in grand harmonies of line and color; and
however it may become fiery with light and heat and darken with the
violence of heaven, it always retains its look of bare and solitary
power. There is no softness in the race either. Their bodies are
cast in hard lines, but often with great physical beauty. There
faces are, indeed, seldom of the nobler type; but their fine brown
hands, their clear torsos and throats, the curve of strength and
elasticity in their firm backs and limbs, with the weathered and
sun-toned skin, their _fierté_, their perfection of repose, are
objects of delight to an eye that values bodily beauty. To me this
splendid vigor and careless abundance of the human beauty of life
is one of the elements of the land. They have muscles of steel
and lines of living bronze. It is daily art—art brought down
from the vague of fancy and out of the museum to live with. The
palm is like the land and the people; there is no softness in it;
it is the most virile of vegetable growths. Its trunk, its leaves,
its sway—but I will not trust myself to describe it. I am never
lonely with a palm to look at. I lie on the ground for hours and
gaze up at their massed green tops in the blue and the sun and the
warmth—“their feet in the water, their heads in the fire.” I
am never tired of looking. I do not notice the absence of thought. I
am quiet, content, and doing nothing am very much alive if vaguely
aware of my life. It is a new mode of living, this vital dreaming—a
_volupté_ without weakness, consciousness without meditation, vision
without thought. That is the human aspect of this life of nature;
and, in the world without, the palm over there symbolizes it for me.

The soldier-poet, Lieutenant Charles Lagarde, whose “Promenade dans
le Sahara” I have already mentioned as at once the most realistic
and best-portrayed book of the Sahara with which I am acquainted,
well describes the palm:

“A monumental tree, puissant, royal; it shares in perfection form,
majesty, elegance. Its isolated trunk fills a frame of five leagues
and peoples a solitude. Its lift toward heaven has a magnificent
simplicity, and it raises also the levels that surround it; it
enlarges by contrast the vast sheets of sand on which it elongates at
sunset its slender and unmeasured shadow. In groups it has attitudes
full of grace; among the tufted shoots rise the unequal and diverging
trunks which in turn depress and proudly hold up their plumes. The
wind in the palms has strange modulations. Its oscillations have I
know not what of the voluptuous; it is the sultana that sways, an
attentive slave. The tempest tests it without shaking it; it bends
like a bow and springs back with the strength of a sword-blade. All
in it breathes primordial energies, and chants the canticle of
the Orient.”


                                  VII

The crudities of the desert have a charm all their own. There is a
wild flavor not only in the life but in the nostrils. The strong
saltpetre smells, impregnating the air for leagues, the earthy
scents of the marsh-like and sodden soil, the odors of cattle,
are stimulants; they recall the whiff of salt marshes by the sea,
the tarred ropes of wharfs, the sharp fragrance of rolled seaweed
on the beaches, aromas of low tide, in days of long ago. They are
both prophecies and memories. They wake my boyhood blood and are
a renewal of long slumbering appetites. I want salt in my life,
an acrid savor. The desert dispenses with unnecessary refinements;
all pruderies cease; nature returns. Nature is clean; the wind and
the sun are great scavengers; even death is no longer a corruption,
but a negligible detail. The skeletons of the camels in the sands
have nothing _macabre_; they are there as the tamarisk and the drin
are there, objects of the sands, like floating spars at sea, wasting
away in the great deep; they show the way that life has gone. Even
the dogs, with their paws on the carcass, tearing the flesh, seem
ordinary; the brutality ceases in the primeval naturalness of the
act in the scene. It is the will of nature that rules there in
the wild, and is accepted almost without notice. It is the same,
too, with human life. Poverty, hardship, privation, lose half their
repugnancy; it is only when men dispense them that they revolt us;
humanity accepts necessary suffering with little appeal. The eye
hardens, the heart stiffens; the fibre of an older world forms
in us. It is a veritable return to nature. Old instincts awake;
old powers of endurance come back and bring with them old moods
of patience; old indifferences appear. Cruelties of man or nature
are incidents. A new resistance is unlocked in the body, in the
spirit. It is a strong life. It is the desert world.

It is under these lights that one contemplates the wretched human lot
in the wild glory of nature. The grandeur of the natural scene—the
miserable life of men—no eye can miss that contrast over all these
horizons. The splendid force of nature, visible in all its energies,
on a scale of sublimity, triumphant, the master of the world! But
life—it is _la misère_. Look at the crouching tent, irregularly
striped with brown and white, wool and camel skin, pitched under
the crest of the great yellow dunes or in some wrinkle of the rock
face of the waste. There are a few sacks of barley and dates,
a scanty provision for the future, heaped at the foot of the pole;
a wooden plate or two, cups, an earthen pot; ropes, a goatskin of
water, mats of alfa or other grass to sleep on. The wife, with a
babe on her back and others tumbling about, toils through the day,
draws water, boils the pot, weaves, bears the heavy burden. The
boys go with the herd, the man to his labor. The night is an
uneasy watch. The master sleeps, some weapon near by, his head
on the little sack that holds the women’s trinkets of coral or
silver, or other trifles of value to them; if there is money, it
is buried. The yellow dog with the pointed teeth growls, and howls,
and barks—a jackal, a thief. Such is the day and night of the tent,
the nomad life, moving from place to place with the seasons, subject
to all weathers, threatened by violent winds and sudden torrents,
and often flitting day by day and leaving no trace. When a stay
is more prolonged a hedge of fagots fends the tent from the wind,
and gives a slight protection against nocturnal attacks of other
wanderers. One sees the tent; it is a common object, and gives up
its bareness at a glance; but one cannot realize its life. It is
too near to the soil, to the deprivations and insecurity of animal
life. What humility in its joys and pains! What parsimony! What
a place for age, which comes rapidly here, and is isolated in its
uselessness! Death reaps in it as in a harvest. The weak, the old,
the stricken, in this life of continual contingency, go quickly away,
and are as quickly forgotten. It is the life. The infant mortality
is enormous, like the death-rate of creatures that spawn in order
that the race may survive.

The life of the tent is on the outer margin of observation, though it
is the nomadic life of the land. Where the natives gather together
in villages one sees them more nigh. In a Europeanized place
like Biskra, the native quarter of the town—not the village,
which lies in the oasis—takes on the look of a ghetto. There,
in the street, in the market, one sees the poverty of the Arabs,
the slender pittance of their days, wherever the humble wants and
lean provision of their life emerge to public view; and Biskra is
a place of great prosperity. There are many villages in the Rir
country, however, that are quite untouched by the European. They
have not the look of dilapidation and misery of the ksour of the
Sud-Oranais, scarce distinguishable from the soil, dark and fallen
warrens; but they are only a degree removed from that, and their
life must be analogous. Arab poverty you may see anywhere in the
land, but the full sense of it comes and sinks in only when one
has broken the blank wall of the secrecy of such a village, and
in some outlying place of their own, in the sand and the sun, gone
into their houses. When a poor Arab enters his house it is as when
some animal leaves the life of the forest for his hole in the ground.

One day I went up to El Kantara, the station at the mouth of the pass
above Biskra, whose superb view, so often described, first gives
to the traveller the measureless vision of the warm-toned, sterile
lands, an empire worthy of the sun, and unrolls before his eyes for
vague leagues the red and yellow earths, spotted by the black of the
oasis-green—the desert’s “panther skin,” in the old Roman’s
phrase. In the gorge below lies a great palmerai with three villages,
and there I wandered all one winter day. I entered one of them—the
first I had ever seen—and passed among the low houses through the
narrow lanes. They were made of sun-dried mud—a continuous blank
wall with rough-boarded entrances. It might have been a low line of
rude stables. There was hardly any one in the streets; occasionally
a figure came into view, and passed out of sight. There was intense
silence—the silence of night—broken perhaps by the sound of a
hammer, or a muffled voice in some interior. The streets were slimy
and foul. It was desolation—nothing. It was depressing. The bright
sun shone upon all; the cold, vivid green of the palmerai lifted
its eyebrow masses against the stone of the cliffs and the intense
blue of the sky; in the silence it might have been a dead village,
a ruin in some abandoned land, like Yucatan. The strange sadness
which is here so often felt and seems to exhale from the desert
landscape, which is independent of brilliancy or gloom, a feeling
so intimate as to be almost physical, like the languor of heat,
lay on everything. It was _la tristesse_, which is universal in the
desert, the pathos of “something far more deeply interfused”
and infinitely sad; it lurked in the air, the silence, the distance,
in the light—everywhere.

I went into some of the houses. They were obscure. The shadows, the
damp earth smells made them seem like caves in the ground. They were
bare, rude, humble beyond description. I would not have believed that
a man who had seen the sun could live in such a cellar-like abode. I
was not naturalized then, not subdued to the land; it was a shock to
my sensibilities; but later I would stand in such a place and, like
my soldier-poet, feel glad that it was not Paris or Marseilles. One
easily detaches himself from civilization if the desert talks to
him long. One room stamped itself upon my memory. It was a dark,
bare bedroom; the bed was made of rough timber, the unstripped bark
still on its four posts; there was little else in the room. But
on the walls there were three or four beautifully written Arab
texts—verses of the Koran.

  “So near is heaven to our earth,”

I thought, instinctively varying the line to the case; it was an
unconsciously bitter jest. It sometimes seems that devotion in races
is in proportion to the fewness of the blessings that the lord of
heaven and earth gives to his wandering creatures, and this was
in my mind. But that bare, earth-walled room with its texts is my
most vivid symbol of Arab piety. It is a believing race.

I remember when the reality of their belief first struck home to
me. I was driving on the high plains below the peaks of the range on
their northern side, returning from Timgad, that magnificent ruin of
a Roman city of high civilization which still lifts erect its vistas
of columns over the strewn ground of the abandoned plain, and in its
vacant desolation brings back to me more vividly than Pompeii, with
a greater nobility and dignity, with a finer imperialism, the great
Roman world. I had seen it diminish and sink in the low sunlight,
and drop behind. Night had long fallen over the uninhabited, long,
Colorado-like, starlit slopes where we drove. It was bitter cold,
and I had just drawn another sweater over the head of my Arab boy
beside me. Suddenly he said with quick and earnest tones: “_Le bon
Dieu_ will take care of you.” I was startled by the intensity of
the unexpected voice. “_Le bon Dieu_,” I said; “what do you
mean?” The boy gazed at me steadily. I could see the gleam of
his deep eyes in the starlight. “_Le bon Dieu_,” he said, and
nodded up to the sky. That nod was the most convincing act of faith
I ever saw. It was plain that he believed in God as he believed
in the reality of his own body. I fell silent, thinking in how
marvellous ways we are taught; for the boy taught me something. And
as the earthen room with its texts is a symbol to me of Arab piety,
the boy’s gesture is my symbol of Arab faith—_la foi_.

I emerged from the obscurity into the brilliant silence of the day;
but I could not shake off my oppression. The strange sadness,
whose nature I have hinted at, which belongs to the desert,
was beginning to make itself known to me. It does not come from
the land; it is exhaled from the human spirit in contact with its
mortal fate. It may be felt anywhere on the earth; but its home is
in the desert. It is sometimes more defined amid the ruins of old
cities, or where great tragic events of the race have left their
traces on the scene or in the memory—_sunt lacrimæ rerum_. Here
it is indefinable, a mood—_mentem mortalia tangunt_; something
that haunts the brilliancy before the rainless eyes of the race
of men who do not lament any particular catastrophe or weep an
unusual loss; a half-unconscious sense of the spirit penetrated
and impregnated with having lived, with a feeling of its common
lot, its universal fate. It marries with the monotony of things,
of life. What monotony of life must be here! Who could understand
such lives! I felt a darkness under all that I had seen of Arab
existence. There is another side, an underworld, beneath what
appears on the surface. Read the annals of Arab war, of Arab love,
of Arab rule. What cruelty, what baseness, what rapacity! What a
power of hate! No pen can tell the horrors of their warfare, their
lust for blood and pain, their delight in carnage and savagery. It
is the same with the story of their amours—violent, unmeasured,
remorseless—explosions of life. The natural happiness of the race
is in these things. So they paint the paradise before the French
came, when “the true believers divided their time between love,
hunting and war, and no one died without having known the drunkenness
that an adored mistress or a day of powder gives.” In the race
at large, what lower forms does this heritage of the wild take on!
One may read the books, hear living tales, share in actual scenes,
and so come to stand in the fringes of their experience and
temperament; but he does not penetrate into the Arab soul.

I wandered all day in the palmerai and along the river bank,
loitered and forded and climbed, and enjoyed sun and wind and
prospect; but the echo of the morning sadness did not leave me,
nor did it fade from the atmosphere. The desert life had laid its
hand upon me. Later, day after day, as I stood in its lights and
shadows, and began to understand, the desert moods grew at once
more precise and more commingled, and one among them all seemed to
absorb the others. It was the feeling of fatality in all things. It
is sympathetic with the drift of my own consciousness. In my common
days the sphere of our forethought and volition seems small. Our
freedom is no more than a child’s leash from the doorstep. We are
embedded in an infinite body of law and circumstance; not much is
trusted to ourselves alone. Within this narrow range human liberty
is a creation of civilization, a partial dethronement of the tyranny
of nature without, and of impulse within, a victory of knowledge,
invention, and conscience. Submission is written all over the desert
world, which is still in touch with the savage state. There man yet
remains in large measure the slave and sport of nature and of his own
unreasoned vital instincts. It is true that our diminished and shorn
personal liberty in the state is a tame wine to the rich vintage of
the freedom of the barbarian to kill, to rape, to rob—to eat up his
neighbor and all that is his. The barbarian is the true superman,
that monster of an all-devouring and irresponsible self-will. The
soul of the desert is not barbarous, but emerging from barbarism;
it is on the way to some command of nature and to self-rule, and
is rich in the ferment of life forces and in personal adventure;
but it knows the iron net of necessity in which it is enmeshed. How
extraordinary it is to observe that it is from the freedom of desert
life that fatalism emerges in its most rigid and thought-vacant form!
The first words of the struggling soul in its dim self-consciousness,
amid the throes of impotency and defeats of effort, world-wide are:
“It is written.” The will of nature, the will of Allah, the
will in which is our peace, however the formula be read, is the
deepest conviction and last resort of humanity in the stage which
it has not yet known, if it shall ever know, to transcend. Fatality
stares from the face of the desert, and drops from the lips of its
wandering race like leaves from the dying forest. It is the period
of all their prayers.

Moods of the desert, which are also scenes and visions! the infinity,
the solitude, the monotony; _la misère, la foi, la tristesse_;
fate, peace! They are not words, but things; not thoughts, but
experiences; not sentiments, but feelings. On the page they are
shadows; there they are realities.




                              ON THE MAT

                               * * * * *

                                  VI

                              ON THE MAT


                                   I

It was afternoon in a small oasis village of the Zibans. I was seated
on a straw mat in a little garden-space just outside the café,
and dreamily regarding the intense blue sky through the vine leaves
trellised overhead, which flecked me with their shadows. An old
Arab was praying just in front. Two groups, one on each side of me,
were placidly seated on clean, yellow mats—young men, whose dark,
sad faces, thin-featured and large-eyed, contrasted with their white
robes. They were smoking kif—a translucence of gold in their clear,
bronze skin, a languor of light in their immobile gaze, content. The
garden made off before me, topped with palmy distance; the silent
street, to one side, was out of sight, as if it were not. It was
a place of peace. I had finished my coffee and dates. I filled my
brier-wood. The May heat was great, intense; and I settled myself
to a long smoke, and fell into reverie and recollection.

How simple it all was! That praying Arab—what an immediacy
with God! What a nonchalance in the dreamy pleasures of those
delicate-featured youths! What a disburdenment was here! I had only
to lift my index-finger to heaven dying, to be one of the faithful;
and the fact was symbolic, exemplary, of the simplicity of Islam. It
makes the minimum demand on the intellect, on the whole nature
of man. I had but lately placed the faith in its true perspective,
historically. Mohammedanism, the Ishmael of religions, was the elder
brother of Protestantism, notwithstanding profound differences of
racial temperament between them. The occidental mind is absorbent,
conservative, antiseptic. It is not content, like the Mohammedan,
to let things lie where they fall, disintegrate, crumble, and sink
into oblivion. Western education fills the mind with the tangle-foot
of the past. Catholicism was of this racial strain. It had a genius
for absorption. It was the melting-pot of the religious past,
and what resulted after centuries was an amalgam, rich in dogma,
ritual, and institution, full of inheritance. The Reformation
was an attempt to simplify religion and disburden the soul of
this inheritance in so far as it contained obsolete, harmful, or
inessential elements; many things, such as saint’s worship, art,
celibacy, were excised. Mohammedanism, ages before and somewhat
differently placed, initiating rather than reforming a faith, was an
effort of the desert soul to adapt to itself by instinct the Semitic
tradition of God that had grown up in it, and to simplify what was
received from its neighbors. The founder of Islam was more absolute
and radical in exclusion than the reformers in elimination. Islam
had a genius for rejection. Mohammed, with the profound monotheistic
instinct that was racial in him, affirmed the unity of God with such
grandeur and decision that there was no room in the system for that
metaphysical scrutiny of the divine nature in which Catholic theology
found so great a career; on the other hand, with his positive sense
of human reality, which was also racial, he shut out asceticism,
in which Catholic conscience worked out its illustrious monastic
future. He had achieved a reconciliation between religion and human
nature in the sphere of conduct, and he had silenced controversial
dogma in its principal field in the sphere of theology.

A creed so single and elementary had no need of a priesthood to
preserve and expound it. There was no room for a clergy here,
and there was none. The Reformation diminished but did not end
the priest; Islam suppressed him; yet there remained much analogy
between Mohammedanism and Protestantism in the field of religious
phenomena in which the priest is embryonic. Protestantism is the
best example in human affairs of the actual working of anarchy;
and, in proportion as its sects recede from the authority and
organization of the Catholic Church, it presents in an increasing
degree, in its individuality of private judgment and freedom of
religious impulse, the anarchic ideal of personal life. Islam offers
in practice a similar anarchy. I was struck from the beginning with
an odd resemblance to my native New England in this regard. It,
too, has been a Marabout-breeding country, with its old revivals,
transcendentalists, new lights, Holy Ghosters, and venders of
Christian Science. Emerson was a great Marabout. The Mormons,
who went to Utah and made a paradise in the desert, were not so
very different from the Mzabites who planted an oasis-Eden in
the Saharan waste. The communities that from time to time have
sprung up and died away, or dragged on an unnoticed life in country
districts, are analogous, at least, to the zaouias scattered through
this world of mountain and sand. In many ways my first contacts
with the faith were sympathetic. The faith that had no need of an
intellectual subsidy, that placed no interdict on human nature, that
interposed no middlemen between the soul and God, woke intelligible
responses in my agnostic, pagan, and Puritan instincts; here, too,
was great freedom for the religious impulse and toleration of its
career; and I saw with novel interest in operation before my eyes
the religious instinct of man, simple in idea, direct in practice,
free in manifestation, and on the scale of a race. It was the desert
soul that was primarily interesting to me—its environment, its
comprehension of that, its responses thereto; and, examining it
thus, its religion seemed a thing _intime_ and scarcely separable
from its natural instincts and notions.

What is it that is borne in on the desert soul, when it wakes in
the great silence, the luminosity, the boundless surge of the sands
against the sky! Immensity—the feeling of the infinite—nature
taking on the cosmic forms of God. The desert is simple. It has few
features, but they are all elements of grandeur. It is the mood of
the Psalms. Awe is inbred in the desert dweller. There is, too,
a harmony between these few elements in their superb singleness
and his lowly mind; not much is required of him, and that little is
written large for his understanding; he takes things in wholes. His
mind is primary, intuitive, not analytical; he does not multiply
thought, he beholds; and this vision of the world he lives in,
a wonderfully grand and simple world, suffices for a religious
intuition as native to him as the palm to the water-source. The
palm is a monotheistic tree. Monotheism belongs to the desert. The
faith of the desert is a theism of pure nature, unenriched by any
theism of humanity, of the human heart in its self-deification; it
is a spiritualization of pure nature worship, whereas Christianity,
at least under some aspects, is the grafting of a human ideal on an
old cosmogony. The God of the desert is an out-of-doors god, like the
Great Spirit of the Indians, who had no temples. No mosque can hold
him; there is no altar there, no image. He cannot be cloistered;
he has no house, no shrine, where one can repair, and abide for a
time, and come away, and perhaps leave religion behind in a place
of its own. He is in the desert air; and the desert dweller, girt
with that immensity, wherever his eye falls can commune with him;
five times daily he bows down in prayer to him and has the intimate
sense of his being; he does not think about him—he believes.

The desert cradles, nurses, deepens, colors, and confirms this
belief. It is a land of monotony, full of solitude and silence. The
impression it thus made upon me was profound, and amounted to an
annihilation of the past. The freshness of the wilderness, as the
discoverer feels it, lay there; it abolished what was left behind;
the Old World had rolled down the other side of the mountains. Life
in its turmoil and news, its physical clamor and mental clatter,
life the distraction, had ceased. It was not that silence had
fallen upon it; but the soul had gone out from it and returned
to the silence of nature. There is no speech in that rosy ring
of mountain walls, in the implacable gold of the sands undulating
away to the blue ends of earth, in the immutable sky; they simply
are. In the passage of the winds there is stillness. It is not that
there are no sounds. The hush is of the soul. Monotonous? Yes.
That is its charm. Monotony belongs to the simple soul; and what
is monotone to the eyes of the desert dweller is monotone in the
ideas and emotions of his psychology. Repetition belongs to Islam;
its words and rites, its music and dances are stereotyped, something
completely intelligible, identically recurrent, like tales that
please children—the same stories in the same words. Prayer and
posture, formula and rhythm, endlessly renewing the same idea and
the same sensation—they imprint, they intensify; desert moulds,
they help the soul to retain its conscious form. The larger mind
that discriminates, analyzes, and explores, may tire of this; but
it also finds in such a solitude, full of silence and monotony,
a place where the soul collects itself, integrates, and has more
profoundly the sense of its own being.

The desert is not only the generator and fosterer of the desert
soul in its spiritual attitude, its practices and processes, by
the larger and universal elements in the environment, but in more
detailed ways it provides the atmosphere of life. It is strangely
sympathetic with the dweller upon its sands. He is a nomad; and the
desert is itself nomadic. The landscape is a shifting world. The
dunes travel. The scene dissolves and rebuilds. The sand-hills lift
a sculptured mountain edge upon the blue, swells like the bosom
of a wave, precipices and hollows like mountain defiles, outlooks,
and hiding-places in the valleys, and the surface shall be finely
mottled and delicately printed and patterned with lace-work as
far as the eye can see. The wind erases it in a night, hollows the
hills and fills the hollows; it is gone. The oases disappear; they
are like islands sinking in the sea of driving sands; you see their
half-sunken trees like ruins buried beneath the wave, still visible
in the depths. The face of the land is ephemeral; to leave the route
is to be lost. And after the wind, the light begins its play. The
lakes of salt and saltpetre, the lifeless lands, the irremediable
waste—ruins of some more ancient and primordial desolation, the
region cursed before its time with planetary death—change, glitter,
disclose placid reaches of palm-fringed water, island-paradises,
mirage beyond mirage in the far-reaching enchantment, strips
of fertility like lagoons on the mineral mud as when one sees a
valley-land through clouds. The heat gives witchcraft to the air;
size and distance are transformed; what is small seems gigantic,
what is far seems beside you; a flock of goats is a cavalcade, a bush
is a strange monster. To the nomad in those moving sands, in that
air of illusion and vision, in those imprecise horizons, the solid
earth might seem the stuff that dreams are made on. The desert is
a paradox; immutable, it presents the spectacle of continuous change.

Nowhere is the transitory so suggested, set forth, and embodied. Here
is the complete type of human existence, permeated with impermanence,
the illusory, and oblivion, yet immutable; the generations are
erased, but humanity abides with the same general aspects. The
land is a type, too, of the desert past—its tribes globing
into hosts and dispersed, its dynasties that crumble and leave
not a ruin behind, its inconsecutiveness in history, wars like
sand-storms, peace without fruition. It is on this life, and
issuing from its mortal senses, that there falls the impalpable
melancholy and intimate sadness of the desert. The formlessness of
the vague envelops all there; it is the path of the unfinished,
the illimitable; it is the bosom of the infinite where life
is a momentary foam. Mystery is continuous there, a perpetual
presence. Its human counterpart, its image in the soul, is _la
rêve_, the dream, reverie, as changeful, as illusory, that takes
no root, fades, and vanishes. It is not a merely contemplative
sadness; it is a physical melancholy. The oases are full of fever,
of the incredible languors of the heat—breath is a weight upon
the lungs, blood is weariness in the veins, life is an oppression
and an exhaustion. It revives, but it remembers. There is a swift
spring-time of life, a resilience, a jet, of the eternal force,
and age comes like night with a stride. Death is the striking of the
tent. It is quickly over. You shall see four men passing rapidly with
the bier, a wide frame on which the body lies, wrapped in white; in
the barren place of the dead they dig with haste a shallow hollow in
the sand; they stand a moment in the last prayer; they have covered
the grave swiftly and stuck three palm twigs in the loose sand,
and are gone. A change of day and night, of winter and summer, of
birth and death, and at the centre the wind-blown desert and the
frail nomad tent; and then, three palm twigs in the nameless sand.

The desert gives new values to life. It is a rejuvenation of the
senses, a perpetual renaissance. The fewness of objects and their
isolation on the great scene increase their worth to the eye, and in
the simple life all trifles gain in meaning through receiving more
attention; the pure and bracing air invigorates the whole body in
all its functions, and the light is, in particular, a stimulant to
the eye. The intensification of the pleasures of the senses is due
also to the austerities and hardships of life in the waste and the
change from suffering to ease. To the nomad, after the rigors of the
sands, heat and thirst and glare, all vegetation has the freshness
of spring-time; the oasis, welcoming his eyes, is, in truth, an
opening paradise. The toiling caravan, the French column, know what
it means. The long, black-green lines of the oasis over the sands is
like the breaking of light in the east; the sound of running water
is a music that reverberates in all their nerves; fruits hanging in
cool shadows, flowers, groves—it is _la vie_, the great miracle,
again dreaming the beautiful dream in the void. After the hamada,
the desert route, it is paradise. It is impossible to conceive
of the sensual intensity of this delight, of its merely bodily
effervescence. The Arabs are a sensual race, and the desert has
double charged their joys with health and hardship; their poverty
of thought is partly recompensed by fulness of sensation. The oases
are not gardens in the European sense; they are rude and arid groves
and orchards and fields, with a roughness of untamed nature in the
aspect of the soil; and the desert everywhere is savage in look,
with the uncared-for reality, the nakedness, and the wild glory of
primeval things. Yet I have never known habitually such delicacy and
poignancy of sensation. The wind does not merely blow, it caresses;
the landscape does not smile, it mirrors and gives back delight;
odors and flavors are penetrating; warmth and moisture bathe and
cool; there is something intimate in the touch of life. There is a
universal caress in nature, a drawing near—something soothing,
lulling, cadenced—felt in the blood and along the nerves,
a _volupté_ diffused and physical; for there is a flower of
the senses, as there is a flower of the mind, as refined in its
exhalation, in the peace of vague horizons, in wafted fragrances of
the night, in luminosities of the atmosphere, in floating vapors
of morning, in the dry bed of the oued under the moon, in the
pomegranate blossom, in the plume of the date-palm flower, in all
evanescence, the companionship of some little thing of charm, the
passing of a singing voice. The desert is rich in those mysteries
of sensation that remain in their own realm of touch and eye and
ear, reverie and dream. It is a garden of the senses; and the wild
flavor of the garden gives a strange poignancy to its delights.

This sensuality prolongs its life in the higher faculties; it
penetrates and impregnates the mental consciousness; memory and
imagination are strongly physical; the soul-life itself is deeply
sensuous. It is, in this primitive psychology, as if one should see
the coral insects building up beneath the wave the reef that should
emerge on a clear-skied world. The desert music reveals this most
clearly. Sensation, as has been often said, enters into the arts
in varying degrees. Literature is the most disembodied of the arts;
its images are most purely mental and free from physical incarnation;
then, in order, painting, sculpture, music include greater actuality
of sensation by virtue of which æsthetic pleasure, as it arises
from them, is more deeply drenched in physical reality. The senses
are preliminary to the intellect; that is why the arts precede the
sciences in human evolution. The desert dweller has no sciences,
and his only art is music, which itself is in a primitive stage,
being still characteristically joined with the dance in its original
prehistoric union. The Arabs sit, banked on their benches, apathetic,
gazing, listening, while the monotonous rhythm of the dance and
the instruments rises, sways, and terminates, and begins again
interminably. What is their state? It is an obsession, more or less
profound, of memory and imagination, retrospective or prospective
experience, felt with physical vagueness, defined, vivified, and
made momentarily present by the swaying dancer in the emotional
nimbus of the music. It is the audience at only one remove from
participation in the dance, contemplative but still physically
reminiscent of it. The dances are of two general types: that of the
negroes, a physical hysteria, full of violent gesture, leaping, and
loud cries, the barbaric paroxysm; the other that of Arab origin, a
voluptuous cadencing to a monotonously responsive accompaniment. The
desert dweller is a realist; his emotions, his desires have not
transcended the facts of life; his poetry, so far as it exists, and
there is a considerable amount of it, is one of simple and positive
images. Mysticism, in the intellectual sense, the transformation
of the senses into the spirit, does not exist for him; not nearer
than Persia is the mystic path which leads to the ecstasy of the
soul’s union with the divine, of the Bride with the Bridegroom;
the desert knows nothing of that Aryan dream. Sensation remains
here in its own realm; and its summary artistic form is music,
itself so physically penetrating in its method and appeal. The
music of the desert is to me very attractive; it engages me with
its simple and direct cling; snatches of carolled song, the humble
notes of its flutes, the insistence of its instruments fascinate
and excite me. It is the music of the senses.

The sensuality of the Arabs also found other climaxes, in love and
war. It is the intensity of their passion and of their fighting
which has charged their history, as a race, with its greatest
brilliancy; and at their points of highest achievement a luxurious
temperament has characterized them, which has made an Arabian
dream the synonym for all strange and soft delights. The desert
in its degree has this _mollesse_, physical languors, exhaustion;
but its home is in the oasis-villages. The true nomad contemns the
oasis-dwellers as a softened, debilitated, and corrupt race; the
life of the nomad is purer, hardier, manlier; he is the master; the
oasis pays him tribute. The life of the senses, however, in either
form, passes away; vitality ebbs the more swiftly because of its
rapid and intense play; pallor falls on the sensations, they fade,
and joy is gone. Melancholy from its deepest source supervenes;
in the desert—age in its abandonment, decay, and poverty; in
the oasis—life somnolent, effeminate, drugged. The wheel comes
full circle in the end for all. Meanwhile the vision of life is
whole, and goes ever on. Youth is always there in its beauty and
freshness. There is always love and fighting. Nature does not lose
her universal caress. The desert soul still adores the only God
in his singleness. There is great freedom. The route calls. It is
human life, brave, picturesque, mysterious—beset by the sands,
but before it always the infinite.

Yet, fascinated though I was, I was aware of some detachment. Sweet
was the renaissance of the senses—what brilliancy and joy in
their play—merely to look, to breathe, to be! To have come into
one of the titanic solitudes of nature, comparable only to ocean
wastes and amplitudes of the sky, and to dwell there, far from the
mechanic chaos, the unbridled egotism, the competitive din—what a
recovery of the soul was there, of human dignity, of true being! and
to find there a race still in a primitive simplicity, unburdened
by thought, not at warfare with its mortal nature, the two poles of
the spirit and the body married in one sphere—and to feel the rude
shepherding of nature round their nomad lives, inured to hardship,
but swiftly responsive with almost animal vitality to her rare
kindlier moods and touches—it was a discovery of the early world,
of ancestral, primeval ways. It was a refreshment, a disburdenment,
an enfranchisement; and it was a holiday delight. Yet over these
simplicities, austerities, and wild flavors there still hung a moral
distance, something Theocritean, the mood of the city-dweller before
pastoral charm. To sit in the café in the throng of Arabs with the
coffee and the dance, to muse and dream on the mat alone, to lie
apart in the garden and be content—it was a real participation;
but in the background behind, in the shadow of my heart, was the old
European though eluded. This life had the quality of escapade—to
see things lying crumbled and fallen with none to care, to be free
of the eternal salvage of dead shells of life and thought—a world
so little encumbered with the heritage of civilization! How many
years had I spent, as it were, in a museum of things artificially
preserved in books, like jars—in the laboratory of the intellectual
charnel-house! The scholar, accumulating the endless history of
human error, has no time to serve truth by advancing it in his
own age; he lives so much with what was that he cannot himself be;
his inheritance eats him up. The crown of Western culture is apt
to be an encyclopædia. There was no library in the desert. And
religion—how much of it comes to us moderns in a dead form! Surely
religion is a revelation _of_ the soul, not _to_ it. This is a
doctrine of immanence. If the divine be not immanent in the soul,
man can have no knowledge of it. Religion is an aura of the soul,
a materialization of spiritual consciousness, varying in intensity
of light and tones of color from race to race, from age to age,
and, indeed, from man to man; it is the soul’s consciousness made
visible. It is not to me interesting as scientific truth is, a thing
of worth in the realm of the abstract, but rather as artistic truth
is, a vital expression, something lived. What a reality it had here
in the desert soul—its effluence, almost its substance, giving back
the spiritual image of nature in humanity, a condensation of the
vast spaces, the vague horizons, the monotony, the mortal burden,
in a prayer! It is a new baptism into nature, if not unto God,
only to see this aura of the soul in the desert. The scene in all
its phases—landscape and men—was to me an evocation of the long
ago. But the soul does not return upon its track. The simple life
is only for the simple soul. The soul of the old European is not
simple. Yet if the leopard could change his spots, if one could lay
off the burden of thought, lay staff and scrip aside, and end the
eternal quest, nowhere else could he better make the great refusal
and set up an abiding-place as in this nomad world. Its last word
is resignation; peace is its last desire.

The desert world is a dying world. That is the sadly shadowing,
slowly mounting, fatally overwhelming impression that grows on the
mind and fills it. Death is the aspect of the scene; sterility,
blankness, indifference to life. Inhospitality is its universal
trait and feature. It is as hostile to animal and vegetable as
to human life—its skeleton lakes without fishes, its drifting
valleys without birds, its steppes without roving herds. Its oases
are provisioned with water and bastioned with ramparts against
the eternal siege of the sands; to preserve them is like holding
Holland against the sea. The mere presence of man, too—what
is human—shares in this aspect of death. I have mentioned the
cemeteries, mere plots of extinction, anonymous, without dates,
leaving nothing of degradation to be added to the sense of
hopelessness, futility, and oblivion. The dwelling-places of the
living are hardly more raised above the soil or distinguishable
from the earth they crumble into—typically seen in those ksour
of the south, cracked, with gap and rift, dissolving in ageless
decay and abandonment, mere heaps over the underground darkness
of passages and cells—or here embosomed in a great silence, full
of solitude and secrecy, the life of the palm garden, of the great
heats, of the frigid nights; always and everywhere with the sense
of an immense desolation, denudation, and deprivation. The life
of the tent is one of sunshine and vitality by comparison; humble
and rugged, it has no decadence in its look; in the villages the
decadence seems almost of the soil itself. One goes out into the
desert to escape the oppression of this universal mortal decay;
and there is no life there, only a passage of life, of which the
skeleton of the camel in the sands is the epitaph.

A dying world and a race submissive to its fate. In that nomad world,
where everything is passing away, there is nothing fixed but the
will of Allah. It is not strange to find fatality the last word of
Islam. In the desert world the will of nature appears with extreme
nakedness; the fortune of man is brief, scant, and unstable; the
struggle is against infinite odds, a meagre subsistence is gained,
if at all; and the blow of adversity is sudden and decisive. Patience
everywhere is the virtue of the poor, resignation the best philosophy
of the unfortunate, and defeat, as well as victory, and perhaps more
often, brings peace. These are great words of Islam, and nowhere
have they sunk deeper into life than in the desert-soul. They are
all forms of that fatality which the desert seems almost to embody
in nature, to exercise in the lives of its children, and to implant
in their bosoms as the fundamental fact of being. Fatality is in the
outer aspect of things and exhales from the inward course of life;
melancholy, impotence, immobility accumulate with the passage of
years; effortless waiting, indolence, prayer, contemplation—these
are the shadows in which is the end. This mood of the despair of
life has nowhere more lulling cadences of death. The desert is
a magnificent setting for the scene—its strong coloring, its
vast expanses, its unfathomable silences; its desolate grandeurs,
its sublime austerities, its wild glory—godlike indifference to
mankind; its salt chotts, immense as river valleys, tufts of the
sand-sunken palms—premonitions of the disappearance of life from
the earth, the final extinction of that vital spark which was the
wildfire of the planet, the thin frost work on the flaking rock, the
little momentary breath of love and war and prayer. Here life takes
on its true proportions at the end—all life; it is an incident,
a little thing in the great scene. A dying world, a dying race, a
dying civilization, truly; but the old European, the wise pessimist
in the shadow, has seen much death; to him it is but another notch
on the stick. To me, personally near to it and fascinated in my
senses still, it is _très humain_, exciting, engaging; and the
melancholy that penetrates it ever more deeply and mysteriously does
not interfere with its charm, its blend of delicacy and hardiness,
of spirit and sense, of freedom and fate. I have a touch of the heart
of the desert-born. “If love of country should perish from the
earth,” said my soldier-poet, “it would be found again in the
heart of the Bedouin.” No race is more attached to the soil, or
so consumed with home-sickness for it. The Bedouin loves the desert.


                                  II

A strange thing to me was the absence of any political state. There
has never been a political state, properly speaking, in the
desert. Such was the parcelling of the communities, so elementary the
governmental form, so feeble the impulse of political aggregation and
cohesion, that the general condition might seem to be an anarchy. In
the Kabyle villages of the mountains and among the Mzabites of the
Sahara the assemblies of the elders with the election and change
of head men present an aspect of such primitive simplicity and
independence that they might be thought freemen’s institutions of
an ideal purity; on the other hand, the absence of any political
centres of concentration forbade the formation of a nation. The
recognition of the tribal blood-tie conserved groups, smaller or
larger, with a greater or less sense of unity; but feud was the
natural condition of these units, extending to the smallest and
even into families, and in the larger world political history found
only hordes hastily massing for temporary ends and dissolving in
a night, or empires of facile conquest and loose tributary bonds,
of the nature of a primacy rather than a sovereignty, and without
long continuity of life. Public order, with its correlatives,
security and peace, was little realized, and, however ideal local
institutions might seem within the group, it was, viewed largely,
a barbaric world.

A very pure democracy in its primitive form prevailed. All men were
equal before Allah, and the condition of equality generally obtained
also between man and man. Inequality belongs to civilization; the
absence of that, and especially the lack of security for wealth
and its inheritance, of an official class of state functionaries
and a clerical hierarchy, and pre-eminently the lack of knowledge,
removed main sources of that differentiation which has stratified
modern society. There was a noblesse of the sword and also of
religion, grounded originally on descent from Mohammed or more
generally and powerfully here in the West from some Marabout,
but neither class was really separated from the people. The only
effective source of inequality was _virtù_—real ability. Tradition
made it the glory of the Arab noble to dissipate his patrimony in
gifts to his friends and to rely on the booty of his own hand for
himself. Ignorance, besides, is a great leveller, and poverty is the
best friend of fraternity; liberty was native to the soil. It was
a society where all men had substantially the same ideas, customs,
and desires, thought and acted, lived, in the same way. It was a
natural democracy, and inbred; and to-day this trait is one of the
most striking and refreshing that a sojourn among its people brings
to notice, for it is a real democracy, unconscious of itself, vital,
and admirable in its human results.

Race-consciousness found historic expression only in the religious
field. The spots where the faith first began on the soil, the
tombs of great leaders in the conquest, such as that of Sidi Okba
in the oasis not far away, the white domes of the Marabouts sown
like village spires through all this land, were places of sacred
memory, centres of race-consciousness, and here took the function of
integrating the common soul of the race, as, in other civilizations,
political memorials of great public events and famous men develop
national consciousness. In the desert patriotism and faith are
one emotion. The ideal Mohammedan state is a pure theocracy in
which the political and spiritual powers are one and inseparable;
where this condition prevails is the _dar el Islam_, the land of
Islam, the soil of the true faith; elsewhere, wherever the union
is imperfect or the faith must concede to the infidel, is the
_dar el harb_, or, as we should say, missionary countries. Neither
Turkey nor Egypt is _dar el Islam_; its narrow, though still vast,
realm is the Libyan sands, where it still refuges its people. It
is an arresting sight when religion goes into the desert to be
with God; the Pilgrims of the _Mayflower’s_ wake, the Mormons
of the sunflower trail fill the imagination with their willingness
to give up all, to go forth and plant a new state sacred to their
idea. It is always an heroic act. Such a coming out from among
the world, such a going forth into the inhospitable waste has been
characteristic of desert history. Solitude is the natural home of
orthodoxy, of the fanatic sect and the purist. Mohammedanism in
its primary stage was a particular religion of a desert people;
in its secondary stage, as a conquering faith, it had to develop
its capacity for internationalism, its powers of adaptation to
other breeds and of absorption of foreign moods and sentiments,
its fitness to become a world religion; in itself also there was
necessarily the play of human nature involving, as time went on,
a variation into sects, heresies, innovations; thus, for example,
it absorbed mysticism from the extreme East and whitened the West
with the worship of saints. The faith was purer and more rigid
in the desert, generally speaking, and was there more primitively
marked; there it was safest from contaminating contacts; and there
also Western civilization, closing round and penetrating its realm,
finds the most fanatic and obdurate resistance.

Race-resistance to the invasion of the modern world, naturally
following the lines of race-consciousness, notwithstanding the
aid it received in the beginning of the struggle from the old
feudality of the desert, had its stronghold in religion and
its organization; and, specifically, it found its practical
rallying-points and strongest alignment in the confraternities,
or secret orders, with their zaouias, analogous to mediæval abbeys
and monasteries, which had so great a development in North Africa in
the last century—some more enlightened in leadership and capable
of assimilating Western benefits in some degree, others stupidly
impervious to the new influences and events. These brotherhoods,
whose nomadic agents under the guise of every humble employment
course the land with great thoroughness, are ideal organizations
for agitation, collecting and disseminating news, preparing
insurrection, fomenting and perpetuating discontent and secret hope;
it is they and their machinations that are back of the Holy War,
as a race idea. They are all hearths of the faith; but some, such
as the Tidjaniya, recognizing both the fact of French power and
the reality of the benefits it confers, are committed to political
submission and peace; others are less placable, and nurse eternal
hate of the infidel, with a credulous hope of expelling him from
the land; and one, the most irreconcilable and the most powerful,
is an active foe. This fraternity is the Snoussiya, having its
seat at Djarbout, in the Libyan desert, where it has constituted
a veritable empire of the sands, a pure Mohammedan state; it has
divided with the neighboring empire of the Mahdi, and with that
of the Sultan of Morocco, the proud title of _dar el Islam_. Sidi
Snoussi, the founder, was a humble _taleb_ of Medjaher, in the
province of Oran. He preached the exodus, and led the recalcitrant
and irreconcilable into the Cyrenaica, and there by virtue of his
natural ability and enterprise built up a state, to which his sons
have succeeded, the eldest of them having been already designated
by his father as the promised Mahdi, the always expected Messiah
of Islam, who should restore its power as the true kingdom of God
on earth. It is this state which is the centre of Panislamism, the
hope of a reunion of the entire Mohammedan world after the fall of
the Sultan at Constantinople should be accomplished. The desert
round about owns its sovereignty from Egypt to Tunis, and it is
buttressed on the south by the negro states which it has joined in
proselytizing, converting them from their savage fetichism.

The spirit of proselytism has always been active in North Africa. The
story of its saints from early days contains a missionary element,
acting at first on the indigenous barbarism of the desert and
mountains and extending at a later period to the negro populations of
the Soudan. The Snoussiya, together with other Mohammedan agents,
has conducted a proselytism to the south which has been astonishing
in its success and has long arrested European attention. Islam is,
indeed, well adapted to convert inferior peoples, and adopts an
intelligent policy in practice. The simplicity of the faith, the
absence of any elaborate dogma or ritual, its slight demand on the
intellect, together with its avoidance of anything ascetic in its
rule of life, made it easily acceptable in itself; and its tolerant
advance, without pressure, on the imitative instincts, the ambitions
and interests of the savage populations with which it is in political
and commercial contact, secures its spread without irritation or
disturbance. It is the warrior race of the Foulbés in the Soudan
who have most carried forward this movement of mingled spiritual,
political, and commercial conquest; beside these, like the Jew by the
Arab, are the Haoussas, a black race, with a commercial instinct,
who established themselves under the protection of the Foulbés;
they, generally speaking, have the monopoly of instruction and are
the simple teachers of the region; the fetichistic tribes, coming
under the influence of these Moslem expansionists by conquest,
protectorate, marriage, in one and another way of the old and
universal methods of the transformation of a lower race by a higher,
are thus added to the domain of Islam. So important is this religious
change, and so striking is the event, that some Catholic bishops
have seen in it a providential preparation by an intermediate state
for a future evangelization. What is noteworthy is the active spread
of Mohammedanism contemporaneously in Central Africa and its close
connection with the power of the Snoussiya, the most energetic
and fanatic centre of Islam. The dream of the poor preacher of
Oran has come partly true: in leading the irreconcilable into the
Libyan desert and building a refuge for them in the most desolate
wastes of the eastern Sahara, in the _dar el Islam_, he established
a new centre for the faith in a region backed by populations where
its natural spread is great and its presence is likely to be long
continued, and he aroused through all the Mohammedan world the
spirit of Panislamism. It is in his work and the fruit of it that
race-resistance to the impact of the modern world on the old life
of the desert all along the African coasts of the Sahara finds its
climax, its centre, and its hope; elsewhere it has ebbed slowly away.

That retreat of the old faith into the desert out of whose immensity
it was born, to die if need were in its own cradling sands, far
from the pollutions of the modern and changed world, excites the
imagination and commands admiration. It might be the episode of an
epic, with its _mise en scène_, its protagonist, its atmosphere
of travel and assemblage, and the coloration of its auxiliary
tribes. It has classical poetic quality. But to the meditative mind
the fortunes of the _dar el harb_, the nearer land of the infidel,
is more profoundly impressive. It is a curious feeling that comes
over one at the thought that he is present at the death of a race
and has before his eyes the passing away of a civilization, and
that civilization a culture in its essential features once common to
the human family. That is the scene here—the passing of the early
world. It is like the passing of the Indian world of the wilderness
from America that our fathers saw, only in a more concentrated scene
and on a more impressive scale—the death of an ancient mode of life
in its home of centuries, full of memory going back to the dawn of
history. It is a solemn thing for the reflective mind to witness,
hard to realize adequately. Agriculture is gaining on the pastoral
state, supplanting it; the nomad is slowly becoming fixed to the
soil; the towns increase in number and population and in the variety
of their life; peace, order, security establish themselves; capital,
science arrive—companies, railways, telegraphs, communication,
and transportation—and the face of life is changed; in a few
years there will be no more caravans to Tougourt, to Tripoli,
to Ghadamès—they will be legends like the mule-trains and
prairie-schooners of the old emigrant West.

The economic change is most obvious, the inrush of the mechanical
and cosmopolitan, colonization and exploitation, public works and
private enterprise, securing and furnishing the territory for a
commercial tillage and use. Is it a dispossession of the native
from the soil or is it a means by which he may more justly enjoy
it? The people, in the old days, lived in a sort of serfage to
the nomads or the zaouias. The French régime put an end to desert
feudality, but treated the zaouias with more consideration, owing to
their religious character. The zaouias of Algeria, notwithstanding
some counter-currents among them, generally accepted French rule
and co-operated with it. The result, nevertheless, was largely a
lessening of the economic lordship of the religious families at the
head of these establishments and an enfranchisement of the people
from dependence upon them. The zaouias were sources of great communal
benefit; they practised especially the Moslem virtues of alms-giving
and hospitality; but they also took tithes and offerings. Their
social importance has diminished; and, in place of the old
half-patriarchal, half-feudal system, society takes on the modern
structure of economic individualism. The impersonal administrative
system, dealing with all in an individual way, shivered the primitive
economic collectivity of society at a stroke. The modern world
has come; capital, wages, earnings bring new arrangements and ways
of living; the economic career in a commercial world is open and
safe, wealth is its prize, competence is possible for those who can
maintain themselves in the way; the new dispensation—the future,
has begun. Life is more free, more just, fuller of opportunity,
and it is also more difficult; new desires, new temptations, and new
needs arise; the cost is greater. Civilization enforces the higher
standard of living even on the lowliest. This is the material fact
most powerful in transformation. It is a fact inherent in progress.

The change in manners is the superficial expression of economic
changes. There is an ingathering into the towns, and, as always, in
the first contacts of a comparatively primitive race with a luxurious
civilization the corruption of manners and morals is patent; the
weakening of the old fibre of life before the new fibre has time
to form occasions a moral displacement. This is most noticeable
in the cities of the coast, but in some degree is everywhere to be
seen. There is, as it were, a sifting of classes; the more advanced,
those who are most sensitive to the new and most free and bold,
begin an exodus from the _café Maure_ to the European restaurant;
they imitate the foreigner, ape his ways and take the mould of his
habits; the French _vie_ tends to establish itself as the ideal, to
a greater or less degree, among the forward spirits and the young;
old haunts and customs are left with the lower class in the _café
Maure_. The chief support of the general change, broadly speaking,
is the instruction in French schools throughout the provinces,
which reduces the old language to a country dialect and secures a
certain glamour for the new régime and naturalizes it as a _patrie_
familiar from childhood, protective, and opening the ways of life. A
vital point is the extent to which, in this change of manners and
ideals religion, the faith, is affected. It appears to be conceded
that the practice of the faith formally is weakened. It is a faith
in which the rite counts heavily; the doing of certain acts, as a
matter of observance, is a large part of its reality; but a default
in the practice of religion is never a sure index to a decline in
belief. Belief habitually outlives practice. It is certain that
no Christianizing takes place. The White Brothers, the Catholic
missionaries of the Sahara, have long confined their efforts to
works of humanity and simple helpfulness, abandoning attempts at
conversion. If the religion of Islam grows feebler in its hold,
it means that free thought, scepticism, and indifference come in
its place. Perhaps the fundamental fact is that the larger sphere
which existed for religion in the old days no longer exists. The
hermit is a holy man largely because he has nothing else to do
except to be holy; and religion fills the world of Islam partly, at
least, because of the absence of other elements in that primitive
monotonous life. The modern world has brought with it into the
desert a great variety of novel interests, a diversified life,
stimulating curiosity and attention and often absorbing practical
participation in the new movement on the part of the people in trade,
enterprise, amusement, information, news. It appears to be agreed
that in the parts of longest occupancy by the French there has been a
relaxation of religious practice and a softening of fanatic hatred,
concurrently with a corruption of morals and degeneracy of racial
vigor where European contact has been most close.

The final question is of the issue. The population has greatly
increased under French rule. The development of the country in a
material way goes on apace. The colonial empire of France in Africa
has a great commercial future. Will the native people in this new
economic civilization be able to hold fast and secure for its own
at least a share of the products of this great movement, or will
they be merely a servile race in the service of French proprietors
and over-lords, or in a condition of economic serfage to vast
accumulations of capital, analogous to that of industrial workers
in our capitalistic society? Will the moral decay, incident to the
change of civilizations, eat them up and destroy them, as has been
the luck of half-barbaric peoples elsewhere in their contact with
the modern world? In a word, is the Berber people, for that race
is here the general stock and stamina, capable of assimilating
this civilization and profiting by it? These are questions of a
far future. Meanwhile the best opinion is sharply divided upon
them. Historically, the Berber race has shown assimilative power
racially by its absorption of the foreign bloods that have crossed
it from the earliest days: the northern barbarians, the Arabs of
the great invasion, the negroes of the south have all mingled
with it freely; it has also shown power to take the impress of
foreign institutions from Roman and Christian days to the time
of its Islamization. Its resistant power, its vitality as a race,
is scarcely less noticeable. There are some who look to see real
assimilation, even to the extent of a miscegenation of the various
strains of foreign blood; there are others who expect at most only
a hegemony of civilization over a permanently inferior people;
and there are still others who hope for a true assimilation of
material civilization, with its blessings of science and order,
but see an impassable abyss between the old European and the soul of
the desert, inscrutable, mysterious, alien, which remains immutable
in the Berber race.


                                  III

The old life of the desert is passing away; the fact is written on
the landscape, on the faces of the people and in their hearts. It
was as full of miseries as of grandeurs; and its disappearance is
for good. What was admirable in it was the endurance of the human
heart in the sterile places, and the mysterious flowering from it,
amid this desolation, of a great faith. The death of a religion,
no more than the decay of other institutions, should perplex or
disturb; all these alike are the work of the soul, and when the soul
leaves them they perish; and as in the revolutions the daily life of
men goes on, so in the religious changes of organization and dogma
the spiritual life of the soul continues. The soul can no more be
without religion than the body without life. The sense of the mystery
of its own being abides in the soul, in however half-conscious or
imperfect forms, implanted in its vital and animating principle,
and shares with shaping power in its thoughts, emotions, and will,
and exhales the atmosphere in which it realizes its spiritual life;
it is here that religion, in the external sense of worship and
dogma, has its source. The desert soul may cast the old life like
a garment—faith and all; but under these old skies and in these
supreme horizons it cannot change its nature, which is, in a sense,
the human form of the desert. The flower of faith will grow here,
and blossom in the wild, in the future as in the past, for the
desert is a spiritual place; and in this austere and infinite air
faith will continue to be a religion of the desert truly, with the
least of the corporeal in its manifestation and idea, with the least
of the defined in creed and localized in place; for the spiritual,
the universal, the vague are the intuitions and language of the
desert; there religion is less a thought than a feeling, less a
prayer than a mood.

I closed my meditations in such thoughts as these, instinctively
seeking, amid so much that was mortal, the undying, in the decadent
the permanent, in the transitory the eternal.


                                  IV

The stars were coming out in the sky; the coolness of the night
was already in the air. The old Arab had long ago departed; the
kif-smoking youth were gone. I was alone under the vine trellis,
with the dark lines of the palm grove before me in the falling
night. The proprietor, a mild-faced and gentle-mannered old Arab,
came, as I rose to go, with a few pleasant words, and gave me a
small branch of orange-flowers and a spray of the white flower of
the palm. “_C’est le mâle_,” he said with a smile. And as
I rode home over the silent desert, and, crossing the bed of the
oued, looked back on the mountain wall and swept with my gaze the
great, dark waste under the stars, I found myself repeating his
words—“_C’est le mâle_.”




                                DJERBA

                               * * * * *

                                  VII

                                DJERBA


                                   I

It was a coast-line hardly raised above the sea. On that low horizon
only a few rare palms silhouetted the far verge above the surf. The
pale-blue flood of the sea, lifting measurelessly on and on in
the shining levels of fair weather; the thin, white, uneasy line
wrinkling down the league-long spits of sand; the slender jets of the
tufted palms etching the vacant azure vague—there was nothing more,
hour after hour. And “in the afternoon we came unto a land”—but
that would be to anticipate. As a matter of fact, we did not come
to any land at all. We hove to, some three or four miles out in the
offing, and a few weather-wise boats bobbed about like corks on the
rollers, with many a careening sweep hither and thither. I climbed
down into one of them, and when I had recovered my balance found
myself and my luggage in the possession of a Berber boatman and his
“sailor-lad”; but this was an entirely new edition of the sailor
lad, bound in an earth-brown burnoose—an earnest-faced small boy,
with an unfathomable seriousness, and devout in every motion, like
a young acolyte, a fresh and unique incarnation of Cupid in bonds,
naïve, with a sweet smile, eyes _très douce_, and such a mastery of
his tasks in years still short of the glorious teens! What a hand he
had for a rope! and how he got about with his clothes! The other was
a life-worn man, _très triste_ in the face and in motion. Father and
son, and of the old race of the sea they were, a strange new type,
and with I know not what added of life sadness, of dour reality.

We were soon under way, a leaning boat on broad-bosomed waters,
and with that palm-set orange strip of sky to lead us on. I had
not enjoyed for years such a glorious sail. Under a crisp west
wind we rode the ridged waves with spurts of spray; the sun was
sinking in the splendid reach and magnificent arch of that world
of the void; and we drove through the purple-black sea furrows shot
with dying lights. The steamer was already melting with the horizon
behind. I seemed to have dropped out of the world, as if I had been
marooned. I was free of it; it had all lapsed away; it had gone
down. The stretch of the sea was immense. The bracing wind was as
heady as wine. “Fresh fields and pastures new,” I bethought
myself, looking to the low rim of land that hardly divided sea
from sky, and wondered if I should find fields of the yellow lotus
there. That margin was still distant, and I lay back in the stern
half dreaming, enjoying the wet tingle of the spray on my face, as
we made landward by long tacks, and the worn old man and the demure
boy with their eyes on wind and wave sat silent. The boat grated
against the pier. After a short walk I was in a small hotel, with a
few rooms round an inner court, a veranda overlooking it from above,
climbing roses, a pleasant French hostess, and no other guests.

It was the isle of Djerba. I had been drawn here because tradition
places on the island the home of the lotus-eaters, of whom Ulysses
long ago told a sea tale. This voyage was to be a hunting of
the lotus. I have had an appetite for it since boyhood. It is my
predestined food; but destiny has a remarkable way of escaping
me. I have observed the fact on several occasions. No “branches
of that enchanted stem” had met me on the pier, nor was there any
“mild-eyed, melancholy” person about, whom the most fatuous
could ever mistake for a strayed reveller. Things often turn out
in an unexpected way; but I had to admit there was an uncommon
disparity between my youthful vision of the lotus land and what I
saw. Where were the “three mountain-peaks,” and the slender,
high cascades of “downward smoke,” and the “gleaming river,”
to say nothing of its Eden background? There was not a mountain
anywhere in sight, not a hill, not a rise of ground. “A land of
streams”—there was not a brook, let alone a river, not a single
stream of any sort on the whole island, which had the appearance of
a flat mainland. From the housetop I looked on an Arab town of no
great extent, with a French core, scantily embowered with straggling
trees, and the view was unbroken, landward or seaward, the horizon
round. I suspect I shall find that mistily draped Tennysonian valley,
with its long-drawn scene, in the Pyrenees some day, near a castle
in Spain. It was not here. My French hostess had never heard of
the lotus.


                                  II

The next morning was bright and fair, and I went out to explore
the land southward, a stretch of about twenty kilometres to the
strait which divides the island from the mainland. We were soon out
of the town and almost at once in the fields. The road, extremely
dry and sandy, wound over a very open country of scattered farms,
with lines and groups of palm and olive, besides other trees, on
slightly rolling, bosomy slopes with long and gradual variations of
level. It was a pleasant scene in the warm April air of sleepy peace
and solitary silence, unbroken country quiet. One characteristic of
the land was soon evident. The population, which is upward of forty
thousand for the whole island and is of the pure Berber stock for
the most part, has never gathered into towns and villages. The few
central points are mere market-places for distribution and supply;
the people live scattered on farms in their own demesnes. There are
singular farmsteads, built for defence, actually fortified; a wall,
enclosing a space large enough for cattle and whatever must be under
cover in case of attack, surrounds the whole, with towers at the
four corners. These farmsteads are near enough for mutual aid; and
with only this system of protection the inhabitants of the island
withstood the random nomad forays from the mainland and the pirate
descents from the sea for centuries.

The island is really the edge of the desert where it makes down
to the Mediterranean. It is, in effect, a farming oasis which has
been reclaimed from the sands by its own people through the use of
the underground waters. It is in a condition of varied cultivation
throughout, but is more fertile in some parts than in others;
for, if attention is relaxed, it reverts at once to the sterile,
sandy state. A peculiar people inhabits it. They are dissident
Mohammedans, and akin in their heresy to the Mzabites of the Sahara,
whose _fantasia_ I saw, and who have made the oases to the west
and southwest of Tougourt centres of prosperity, besides being
a vigorous nomad race of merchants through all North Africa. The
sect would be called Unitarians among us, because they carry their
insistence on “the only God” so far as to deny divine authority
to the prophets, including Mohammed. They have strange bits of
mosques, diminutive little things, with a square minaret topped
with a curious conical stone, and these are numerously scattered
here over the whole island. They are also the Puritans of the Moslem
world, strict in their manners, severe even, and very frugal. It is
to this folk that the island owes its state of culture; they have
created it as a habitable tract; nor do they confine their toil
to the land. They weave excellent white burnooses of their wool,
and bright, striped blankets, and mould pretty pottery; they engage
in the fisheries; and with their nomad instincts they often seek
occupation and trade abroad, like the Mzabites, who are credited
with a Quaker-like prosperity in worldly affairs. This community,
distributed broadly without towns in their own small domains, might
seem a dream of the primitive—a frugal folk on a sterile land, in
their rural Paradise of small economies and simple manners, leading
uneventful lives of humble industry, far from the great world.

It was a curious country to look at—not rich, no bottom-lands,
or waving acres, or luxury and exuberance of vegetation rushing
forth; the nakedness of the land showed through. But the face
of the country had lines of verdure and spots of spring-time and
greening reaches over the dry acclivities; the mild warmth of the
sun cheered everything to its brightest; there were plotted fields
here and there, and the palms gave beauty to the sky and the olives
gave character to the earth. There were some splendid olive-trees,
old, hoary trunks, knobbed with age and contorted by ocean gales;
massive columnar stems of incredible girth that lifted from near
the ground immense rounds of heavy foliage impenetrably dark; and
others, mere shells and ruins of time, that still shot green shoots
from their tops to the bright wave of the sun. It was the scene of
an old world; and there was something ancient and venerable to my
eyes in the landscape that had seen so little change for centuries
and yet had known human life, humble generations, for so long. Far
away, beyond sloping breadths of dark, rough herbage whose sparse
bunches hummocked the dry soil, glittered a low mass of white walls
that slowly defined itself as a farmstead with orchards about;
it had a rude, mediæval look in its exterior, and many offices,
apparently, suggesting somewhat an old manor. Cattle stood round it
lazily, and a couple of men were at work in the cluttered yard. On
another ridge was one of those strange mosques, but larger and more
important than usual, perhaps the memorial of some island saint. The
blue sky shone through the window of the cupola of the minaret, with
its conical stone at the top; on one side the olive-trees leaned
away from it by twos and threes, and on the other high palms lifted
their feathery tops, inclined at different angles, tall, slender,
drooping stems with very small tufts. It was a very lonely and
peaceful sight in that silent country, stretching far around. We
met hardly any one on the road except, in the vicinity of the rare
houses, groups who evidently belonged on the place. The houses were
not the least curious feature of the landscape. They were roofed
with little domes, as is usual on the island. This gave a certain
solemnity to the scene—the grave aspect of the East. So we went
on in the calm, warm day, mile after mile, undulating over the
country, but with no real change of level, with glimpses of the old
farms, the sharp-pinnacled, square minarets of the solemn mosques,
the white domes, feathery palms, and rolling olives, through the
monotony of a land where there was truly a great peace.

We reached Ajim, the southernmost point of the island, in the
light of a blazing noon that bit every line of black shadow with
a brilliant edge. Ajim was only a short, tumble-down street. The
one-story buildings of sun-dried mud on either side presented a low,
blank wall, continuous and irregular, broken by a succession of
high-arched or elongated oblong openings, closed by rough boards. I
think I never saw so poor a hamlet. There was a general look of
shabby dilapidation, but this was due to the original poverty of the
materials and the humbleness of the effort. There was no appearance
of abandonment. On the contrary, there was building going on and
the street was lively. I had much difficulty in keeping out of the
way of donkeys and camels and porters, as I walked to the upper end
and looked in at the _fondouk_ which was thronged with beasts and
men. It was a characteristic scene as I turned back, for the walk was
only of three or four minutes. The little vista was dominated at the
lower end by the rising buildings, and the poor street lay below,
half in the sunlight, with its sharp band of inky shadow on the
southern side. The people were scattered from end to end, mostly in
earth-brown, flowing garments, with here and there a snowy burnoose
of some more important citizen; and there were caps and turbans of
all sorts, and a dash of faded blue or green now and then showed
in the sunshine; but the scene was sober-hued, white and black and
brown for the most part, under the dazzling blue in the fresh sea
air. The open doors of the street, as I passed along, let a dim light
into the interior gloom of what seemed places for storage, cavernous
and dark; and further on there were a few shops and cafés, a smith,
a rope-maker. There were all kinds of ropes; and it gradually came on
me that this was really a fishing village and a place for sailormen,
a port. It was a little unlike anything I had elsewhere seen. I went
through the rope-maker’s shop; such places always call me with
their savor of the sea and its tasks. I had a good lunch at a café;
one can always get food in the most out-of-the-way places, if he has
any knack for travelling. I remember only the cup of coffee at the
end, with some of those strange-colored liquids, exotic drinks that
one finds at the ends of the world, bright, tonic, exhilarating;
and over one of these I sat watching the little life of the street,
a continual passing of men and boys and burdens, with dialogues and
incidents, and a not infrequent disposition to take the stranger
into confidence with looks and nods and smiles of intelligence. It
was a pleasant and picturesque hour in the foreign sun, and ended
happily; and I strolled down to the pier, which lies at a little
distance from the village beyond a broad, open ground.

It was a fine pier and made out very far into the shallow waters. The
mainland lay a mile or two away and was as desert a strand as I
ever looked on, flat, bleak, uninhabited. The level waters stretched
far away on either hand, blue and shining, and a fresh breeze sent
the lively waves to chafe angrily against the pier. The near scene
was quietly interesting. Small vessels were anchored at a little
distance, and a hull seemed to be building or undergoing repairs
near the shore, where there was a group with animals. Close to the
pier leaned a tangle of slanting masts and ropes, the Arab fleet
of sponge-fishers, not so numerous as the Greek fleet I had seen at
Sfax, but similar in character and making a pretty marine view. Not
far from it an Arab was sifting grain from a great heap by a moored
vessel on the other side, and a camel was unloading. There were
several walking figures on the pier, which was very long and narrow,
and if one of them stood still he looked, in the strict folds of his
Arab dress, like a statue on a bridge, relieved on the sky and the
sea with perfectly defined lines. There was one group, however,
that centred my attention—a true Bedouin scene. It was a family
that had come over on some sort of a ferry from the other side. The
man was unloading their belongings from the boat and piling them up
on the pier, where a donkey was waiting to be loaded with them. On
the heap sat two women, who looked like mother and daughter. The
elder arrested the eye at once by her splendid physique and her
dress. Her large figure sat in perfect repose on the coarse bagging,
and she was clad with desert luxury. Heavy robes drooped voluminous
folds about her, from which her dark-skinned head and shoulders,
deep golden brown, freely emerged. Her arms were bare, showing the
deep armpits and half the full breasts; her hair was raven-black,
the eyes large and solemn, the features prominent. She was covered
with desert ornaments; silver rings hooped her ears, strings of beads
hung over a wide brooch on her bosom, bracelets enclosed her arms;
but what most fascinated my eyes was two immense silver crescents,
almost moon-size, that hung by either breast. She was a splendid
figure there under the open sky by the edge of the desert—a true
mother of Ishmael. I shall never forget that unregarding pose—a
type of the ages. They told me she was a rich Bedouin woman. I
lingered awhile among the boats, and when I came away she was still
sitting there immovable.

We drove back, as the afternoon wore on, by a somewhat different
route, taking a branching and rougher road; but there was no real
change in the scene. It was a sterile land, much mixed with sand,
which the labor of man reclaimed with difficulty. The other side of
the island is said to be more fertile, and rich in gardens. It was
the same very open country all the way, and league after league we
left it behind us, rare farms and lonely mosques and dreamy domes
sparsely scattered over broad areas of slightly broken land, wells,
and little olive groves like apple orchards, fringes of palms on the
dying orange sky, tracts of loose sand, speared over with tufted
hummocks, until with the starlight we came back to the pleasant
hotel with the inner courtyard and the climbing yellow roses.


                                  III

I had never made a Jewish pilgrimage. The opportunities for one
are rare, for the Jews are not a pilgrim people. There is on the
island, however, a place which is described as a point of their pious
journeying for centuries, and thither I repaired. It is the synagogue
at Hara-Srira, a village of seven hundred inhabitants, which, with
a neighboring and larger village, concentrates the Jewish population
of the island in their segregated life. It was only a few kilometres
away, and I reached it by a more settled and suburban road than that
to Ajim. The little town was a picturesque sight, gathered none too
closely about the synagogue, which was the principal building. The
sexton and his son, grave persons in Arab costume, took charge of me
with polite attention, and after the boy had assisted me to take off
my shoes I was ushered into the little temple. It was divided into
a series of compartments, and although none of the rooms was large,
the general effect was impressive. I was struck by the richness
of the interior, and its look of cleanliness and finish, for my
eyes had been long unaccustomed to such a scene; the bright tiles,
the lights, the walls, all the furnishings seemed quite new and
modern, European in fact, as if I had stepped back at once into
the familiar world; there was nothing barren or austere, nothing
to suggest the neighborhood of the desert and its ways. It was the
shrine of an alien religion, and wore the aspect of civilization and
a better-provided world, a different economic type, not that of the
gray old mosques in lonely places on the sandy downs. The priest in
his vestments, a slight, middle-aged man, a sacred if not a stately
figure, came to welcome me, and pointing out various details led
the way through the half-darkness of the subdued light to a small
chapel-like room where were the treasures that I had come to see.

They were books of the old Law and ancient writings that had found an
asylum in the sands. I was glad to be where the object of pilgrimage
was a Book. These venerated copies of sacred writings, more than
libraries, symbolize to me the glory of letters; they are the founts
of civilizations. I have seldom seen a more beautiful antique
manuscript, or one so solemnly impressive, as the massive volume
he showed me, their chief treasure, which, I think, he said dated
from the eleventh century. It recalled lovely copies of the Koran
that I have sometimes found in the mosques of the Levant. I wished
he would read out of it to me, as the young _taleb_ at Kairouan had
read the Koran to me by the fading evening light in the dark-browed
court of the Mosque of the Barber, nigh the little stone cells of
the students, after I had seen, above, the banner-hung tomb of the
companion of the Prophet in its solemn desert state; the lean Arab
stood, holding the book in his hands, with his face lighted up,
intoning the verses, and a few others listening reverently made the
group. I shall never forget the music of that unknown tongue, like
the sound of winds in the forest or waves on the shore. But I did
not like to ask the priest to read. There were other manuscripts,
perhaps a score in all, and I spent a half-hour over them. It was
pleasant to be in touch with such things once more; for, excepting
the wide volume that I saw the seated Jew reading in the street of
Tougourt, I did not remember having seen a book in the desert. The
priest was proud of these treasures, and the boy also who stood
by watching as I turned the leaves; scriptures and learning of
long ago, that had survived in this remote niche, cared for and
venerated like the gospels of some inaccessible Coptic monastery,
they were worthy of a scholar’s pilgrimage and respect.

As I came out into the open I noticed two lines of figures coming
across country in opposite directions like people returning from
church. They were Mohammedans and Jews, each walking from their
respective cemeteries which lay not far away. I thought it was
a typical and happy scene of two religions dwelling together in
unity and peace. The general appearance of the people was much
the same, humbly prosperous and contented, and they were dressed
alike. The Jews here are completely Arabized, except in the point
of their religion, and it was interesting to observe how much
they had become assimilated to the soil. The women especially
looked to me like Bedouin women, and I was obliged to scrutinize
their features to detect their race; but no burnoose nor haik can
disguise the superior vitality and intelligence of the Jews. On my
return I stopped to stroll through the market, and there they were
much to be seen. It was an abundant market with the usual heaps
and collections on the ground—grains, vegetables, utensils,
and special quarters for wool, meat, and fish. It was a lively
and thronged scene. An auction of donkeys and camels was going
on in one place. My eyes were especially attracted by the piles
of sheepskins and wool, and the men and boys lying lazily on them
waiting for custom, their dark faces and bodies oddly relieved and
picturesque on the wool. There were heaps of black sponges, too;
and I noticed a curious white kilted costume which I had not seen
on these shores, lending a new element to the crowd. Here, too,
wandering about, I experienced the smallness of the world anew;
for I fell in with some travelling merchants who had come to buy
burnooses and blankets of Djerba, and who remembered me from Tunis;
they were plainly pleased to find me in such a remote corner of their
own country. I myself became sufficiently imbued with the spirit of
the place to buy a few dates and figs, and more particularly some
dried orange-blossoms, which were sold by the pound. I had never seen
such a thing in Italy, and it gave me a lively idea of the orange
gardens to the east of the island which were said to be so luxuriant.

As the day wore idly on, I explored the town, Houmt-Souk, for I
believe I have not yet named it, which has fine, broad, curving
streets and large, open places, a mosque with many domes and a high,
square minaret, a tall artesian well, and a public garden where the
French government experiments with plants and trees. The proprietor
of my hotel was the gardener, and took me about and told me stories
of his garden, but the spring was not far enough advanced for the
soil to tell the same tale of its luxuriance and rarity. I had to
content myself with seeing various shrubs and exotic trees. Then
I wandered down to the beach, like all ocean beaches, with heavy,
loose sand and a considerable tide, the broad view, sights of the
sea, and a ruined Spanish fortress; but I went especially to see the
spot where stood for centuries the great mound of Christian bones,
Skull Fort they called it, which the pirate Dragut raised after the
victory in which he broke the Spanish fleet in this offing, in 1560,
taking five thousand prisoners and massacring the garrison. I suppose
he massacred the prisoners, too; and here the ghastly memorial of
his victory stood nigh the beach, till in recent years the bones
were removed and buried in the Catholic cemetery. Before that,
Norman raiders and Sicilians, when they harried all these coasts,
had temporarily held possession in the Middle Ages; and all over
the island are Roman ruins, decayed causeways, baths, temples,
the subsoil of all the Mediterranean world. But nothing now stands
out in the historic memory of the old lotus land except Dragut’s
grim mound.


                                  IV

I had not forgotten the hunting of the lotus, but it was now more
clearly defined as a search for the _jujubier_, which is identified
with the ancient plant. Persistent inquiry revealed the probability
of a lonely specimen some five miles off in the country. We set off
by a new route to the southeast, and away from the more travelled
roads. The track was rough, and the horses toiled through heavy
sands. The farm we were seeking was not on the road, and we left
the carriage standing and tramped for about a mile or more across
ploughed fields, little ditches, and stretches of white sand
more than ankle-deep, till, asking our way of the rare people in
the fields, we finally found the house we sought. It was a simple
building of one story, with white walls about it, and the little dome
at one end; a rustic garden of humble cottage flowers was before
it, bright with spring blossoms, and here my guide introduced me
to the proprietor, a thin old man with a boyish figure, keen blue
eyes, and great alacrity in his motions. He led me in through
the courtyard, which was of considerable size, to the house,
which consisted of one very large room, with smaller apartments
at the further end under the dome. The room was a surprise to me;
it was a marine room, all the walls being loosely covered with
sailor objects. The old man had followed the sea all his life,
and served many years in the French navy; now, with his pension,
he had found his snug harbor in this remote peaceful island as
a colonist. It was an ideal place for a sailor’s retirement,
with its flowers at the door, its profound country peace, and its
relics of the sea. It had a Crusoe look, and so did the old man;
and I gathered heart, thinking that here at least was a mariner,
like the companions of Ulysses, who had found the port and elected
to remain in the land. There were bones of fishes on the walls,
implements from the South Sea islands, colored prints tacked all
about, the curious things that sailors make, African oddities,
a gun hung over the mantel, barbaric spears in corners; and the
little collection was displayed and arranged with that neatness
and order, almost pattern-like, which is a sailor instinct.

Yes, there was a _jujubier_ in the neighborhood. The old man, who
had an alert, breezy way about him and was full of vigor, seemed to
wonder that I had come to see it, but said nothing; he was for the
time more intent on rites of hospitality, and I went about examining
the curiosities. His wife and a little girl came in with a great
pitcher and tall glasses and set them down before us, and the old
man poured out generous draughts of bright-brown cider. I smiled to
think into what a vintage my dreamed-of juice of the “enchanted
stem” had resolved itself—a glass of russet cider! But I took
the blow of fortune, as I have taken others, and tried to find
its soft side, which is a good rule. It was excellent cider, and I
took a second tall tumbler. On inquiry I found it was not even of
the fruit of Djerba, but brewed from a preparation made at Paris,
somewhat as root beer is with us. Meanwhile we had tales of the
sea and old adventures on “the climbing wave,” pleasant talk,
till I brought the conversation round to the _jujubier_. It bore a
hard, brown fruit, I learned, sweetish, and a drink was made of it,
like lemonade; and, yes, it had a sleepy effect. My hopes sprang
up anew. No, it was not bottled. So, talking incidentally of many
things, my host showed me the rest of the house, the little bedroom
with his photograph of other days, and with a last health we went
out into the garden, where the little girl was waiting with a bunch
of the spring flowers, and we walked off to see the _jujubier_.

It was at the end wall of a small, shut-up Arab house near by,
against which it was trained. It was shoulder-high, and grew in
stout, hardy stocks. The blithe old man told me it must be more than
two hundred years old. I said it was very small for its age; but he
added that its growth was very slow, almost imperceptible. It was
just showing signs of leaving out; a naked, rough, shrub-like tree,
with neither leaf, nor flower, nor fruit; but it was alive, and I
still have hopes that in the case of a tree so long-lived I shall
some time find it in its season, and eat of it, and perhaps drink its
sleepy soul. I went back to the garden and said good-by to my kind
and gentle host, and I was really almost as glad to have had this
tranquil hospitality and Crusoe memory as if I had met with better
luck in my search. I walked back over the rough fields content;
and as we drove slowly through the sand in the wide prospect of
scattered palm and olive, with the little white domes, quiet in
the universal sun, I thought the lotus land was very good as it was.


                                   V

The marvellous boy was waiting at the pier; the sail was set; the
steamer, a distant film of gray smoke on the horizon, was sighted;
and we cast off. It was a pleasant sail but without the romance
of the landing. The boy, almost in my arms, sat steering the boat,
and conversed with me with glances of his brown eyes; the sad-faced
father amidships gazed vacantly over the sea. We laid a straight
course, and it was too soon finished. The embarkation was easy. The
old man gave me his benediction with humble eagerness and dignity,
and the boy followed me aboard with my things. In the saloon he
put his little hand in mine, then to his lips with head bowed, and
touched his heart, looked up, smiled, and ran off. I went on deck
in time to catch the last wave of his brown hand, and, leaning on
the rail, watched them sailing homeward to the palm-set strip of
pale orange sky on the long horizon rim.




                                TRIPOLI

                               * * * * *

                                 VIII

                                TRIPOLI


                                   I

Absalom England, a tall grizzled Arab and sea-pilot, saluted me
on the deck. The combination of names, race, and occupation might
have seemed peculiar to me once, but I was proof against any African
vagary. He was a land-pilot now, and took charge of me and mine. I
did not lose my liberty, but I had unknowingly parted with all
responsibility for myself; thereafter, except in consular guard or
barred in my hotel, I was under his incessant watch and ward. I even
began to have some value in my own eyes, seeing at what a price I
was rated, and could easily have fancied myself a disguised soldan
with an inseparable follower. He treated me as something between a
son and a sheik. But at the moment, to my unforeseeing eyes, he was
only a dark, respectful Arab, with a weather-worn and open-air look,
black with many summers, a strong type of a fine race, and with a
terrible cough that shook him.

We passed the Turkish officials and sank like a bubble in the
variety and vivacity of the land, always so noticeable when one comes
from the sea. It was pleasant to be in a city once more; there was
noise and movement and things to look at; and almost at once the
gray mass of a magnificent ruined arch, half buried in the street,
lifted its dark and heavy stones, bossed with obliterated faces and
grimy sculpture, among the paltry buildings; a grocery shop with
its bright fruits and lettered boxes seemed to have nested like
a swallow in its lower stories. It looked like a worn, old ocean
rock in that incongruous tide of people and trade—once the proud
arch of Marcus Aurelius. A few moments brought us to what elsewhere
would have been an obscure hotel but was here the chief hostelry—a
house with an interior court as usual, a few chambers opening on
dilapidated galleries in a double tier, and rude stairs leading
up. Seyd, a Fezzan negro boy, showed me to a tumbled room. It was an
unpromising outlook even for a brief sojourn. I went at once to the
French consul. The other powers have consuls, except that America
at that time had none; but owing to the old position of France as
the protector of all Catholics, her representative is pre-eminent in
the eyes of the Mohammedans—he is “the consul.” The Consulate
was a very fine old Arab house; a magnificent dragoman with negro
guards received me in the great silent court and led me up the
broad stone stairway to the large and beautiful rooms where I was
to feel myself so pleasantly at home. Then Absalom and I fared forth.

I found myself in a true African street with a new trait. It is
astonishing what originality crops out in the bare and simple things
of this land; one thinks he has seen all, and by some slight shift
of the lights something new emerges and is magically touched—the
real and common made mysterious, the daily and usual made visionary,
the familiar unfamiliar once more. It was a narrow street, vaulted
from side to side, and its fresh atmosphere was bathed in that
cool obscurity which in this land of fierce and burning rays is
like balm to the eyes; and, besides, this street was painted blue,
which was to add a caress to the softness of the light. This was
the slight and magical touch. A stream of passers went down and up
the centre of the blueness; the little shops on either side strung
along their bright and curious merchandise of the museum and the
fair; and the shadowy, azure-toned perspectives framed each figure
as it came near, with flowing robe or dark haik and burdens borne
on head and shoulder. The place had an atmosphere all its own, that
stays in the memory like perfume. I loved to loiter there afterward,
but then we had a goal; and we came at last by flights of steps to
the market on the great space near the sea. I had seen the people
by the beach from the steamer and wondered at their number; and
that was why I had come.

It was by far the greatest market I ever saw. It was truly
metropolitan. I went among the plotted squares of merchandise
and rows of goods spread out in great heaps and little piles,
and along by the small tents islanding their foreign treasures. To
tell and name it all would be to inventory a civilization: cloths
and finery and trinkets; grains in sacks, amid which I wandered
nibbling hard kernels of strange savors, trying unknown nuts and
dried fruits; utensils, strange-cornered knives with curves of
murder, straight, broad blades; slippers and caps; what seemed to
me droves of cows—it was so long since I had seen cows—camels
and donkeys; vegetables—bulbs, pods, and heads; things to eat,
bobbing in pots and kettles; leathers, hides, straws. It was an
improvised exposition—everything that the desert hand produces
or manufactures of the pastoral kind or that the desert heart has
learned to desire of migratory commerce brought from far away. The
grass market especially attracted me with its heaped-up bales of
alfa, where camels were unloading the unwieldy and enormous burdens
balanced across their backs; and so did the Soudanese corner,
with odd straw-work, deep-colored gourds, and skin bottles.

But the stage was the least part of the scene; in this play
the crowd was the thing. There were familiar traits, but in its
wholeness it was a new crowd. I scanned them as an explorer looks
at an unknown tribe from the hills. There was nothing here of
Tunisian softness, mild affability and elegance, not the simple
and peaceful countenances seen in the Zibans, nor the amiable
cheer and brusque energy of the Kabyles, nor the blond beauty of
the Chaouias, nor even the forbidding face of the Moor; here was
a different temper—the spirit of the horde, the _fierté_ of the
desert, the rudeness of nature, borne with an independence of mien,
a freedom of gait, unblenching eyes; true desert dwellers. I think I
never felt the full meaning and flavor of the word, autochthonous,
before. They were the soil made man. There was also, beyond the
tough fibre and wild grace of the free life, another impression,
which owed perhaps as much to the feeling of the stranger there
as to anything explicit in the crowd—a sense of something fierce
and hard, an instinct of hostility, of disdain, the egotism of an
alien faith master on its own fanatic soil.

This crowd, which fascinated me by its vitality and temper of life,
was clad in every variety of burnoose and haik and head-gear; here
and there was a crude outbreak of color, as if some one had spilt,
and soiled, aniline dyes at random, but the general effect was
sober—brown earth colors, mixed blacks and grays, dingy whites, a
work-a-day world. There were many negroes. I had already added much
to my knowledge of negro types, but here I annexed, as it were, new
kingdoms of physiognomy. These men were strange as the tropics: some
amazingly long-waisted, some Herculean in measure or extraordinarily
lean and bulbous in the shoulders—new species of human heads. Arabs
and Berbers, mingled with the mixed blood of half a continent,
made the bulk; and here and there stood some richer personages,
heavily robed, superbly turbaned, merchants from Ghadamès and from
further off, where the desert routes spread fanwise from the Soudan
to Timbuctoo, opening on the whole breadth of equatorial Africa,
Lake Tchad, and the Niger. For Tripoli has been for long centuries a
sea-metropolis—it is now the last sea-metropolis—of the native
desert world; hither still comes the raw wealth of Africa, with
all the old train and concomitants of caravan, traders, and robber
instincts; and here are most variously and numerously gathered the
representatives of the untamed tribes. It is the last Mediterranean
home of the predatory, migratory, old free desert life. This market,
I knew, was the direct descendant of one of the world’s oldest
trading-posts, for the early Phoenician merchants established a
commercial station here, as they coasted along exploring the unknown
world; it was on this beach they landed, no doubt; that was long
ago. This market was the child of that old trading-post. It was
a wonderful scene there, under the crumbling walls in the blazing
sun by the quiet sea.

Late in the afternoon I drove out into the oasis, which is a suburb
on the southeast of the city. We were soon in the midst of it and
passing along by the familiar scene of palm groves, with fruit
trees and vegetables and silent roads. It was a more open country
than usual, and there was an abundance of gardens with houses in
them; it had more the character of suburban villa life, a place of
retirement from the city, than any oasis I had seen. The soil had
much red in it, and this gave a strong ground-color over which the
greens rose darkly on the blue. The tall wells—the _guerbas_—were
a common feature in the gardens, for the oasis is watered in the
old way by means of a pulley arrangement between two high standards
over which runs a rope worked by a mule or camel or other beast of
all work, which tramped to and fro beneath as the goatskin bucket
rose and fell. I visited some of these gardens, picked oranges,
and wandered about and talked with the laborers. We came out on
the desert sharp as the line of a sea beach, cut by the palms;
there was a fort or two on the edge, and the hard, barren waste
swept away with the finality of an ocean toward the far distant
mountain range southward. Two Turkish officers rode up from the
route; they were fine figures, splendidly horsed, and looked very
real. On the way back we saw many Turkish soldiers, sturdy, capable
men, badly clothed but military in every way. I was more interested
in the groups and solitary figures returning from the market to
their homes, the Bedouins with sticks in their hands or over their
shoulders. How they walked! What an erectness in their heads! What
an _élan_ in their stride forward! Strangely enough, they reminded
me of the virgins of the Erechtheum, the caryatides. I have never
elsewhere seen such a pose. How like in color to earth, too, with
their browns and grays on the strong tones of the roads they walked
along! It was the clearness before twilight, and all the lines of
the landscape were lowered and strong in the level rays; the palmy
roads, the soldiers, the Bedouins made a picture fuller of life than
one usually sees in an oasis. One felt the neighborhood of the city.

When I went out at night the streets were dark; lamps here and
there gave a feeble light, stores were open, there were groups
about. The cafés I dropped into were not full, unless small, and
were all very quiet. There were long bubble pipes to be had, and
silent Arabs smoking them; but I contented myself with coffee. It
was not interesting, and I went to the Italian-Greek theatre. This
was a small hall, but of considerable size, and full of Sicilians
and Greeks. They were a hardy looking company, not to say rough. On
the stage a girl was being tied to a tree by some Turks; it was a
pantomime, and the plot went on and the daring rescue was effected
to the satisfaction of the audience. While the stage was being
prepared anew, there was the sound of a row at the door. Instantly
on either side of me there was a movement and thrust of those hard
faces and strong shoulders, like the lift of a dark wave at sea;
it reminded me of a mass-play at football, in the old game, only
it was bigger, darker, tense; it was fighting blood, always keyed
for sudden alarm and instantly ready _en masse_. The little crowd,
serried head over head, paused a moment, as an Arab came forward
and made a short speech, explaining the trouble. The men fell
back to their seats. The play was going on now—it was a variety
performance—with two girls singing songs, and the rescued maiden
of the pantomime came down to collect pennies. It was curious to see
the changing expression on the faces of those men and boys. They
had been hard faces, with Sicilian sombreness in repose, rugged
with life, with something dark and gloomy in them; now they broke
into smiles, their eyes shone and laughed, as she passed among
them, they were glad to have her speak to them—it was sunshine
breaking out over a rough and stormy sea. There was a dance now;
and so the scenes went on till I came away and Absalom piloted
me through the dark and deserted ways to the hotel. It was closed
of course, but I was not prepared for what followed. There was a
great undoing of bars and turning of locks, and I stepped in over
the body of a sleeping negro and waited till his companion did up
the fastenings. They seemed to me sufficient for a fortress; and,
not content with that, these two negroes slept all night on the
floor next the door. It was like a mediæval guard room.


                                  II

We were finishing our late nooning at the café which pleased me
best near the little park with the old Roman statues by the sea,
where the handful of resident Europeans liked to take the air at
evening. I was engaged in my favorite occupation of regarding the
street. The little room was crowded with natives seated close,
quietly gaming or doing nothing; Turkish officers rolled by in
carriages; there was continuous passing; a half-dozen _gamins_ played
in the street, the most eager-faced, the most lithe-motioned of boys,
the most snapping-eyed Jewish bootblacks, quite beyond the nimble
Biskris of Algiers reputed to be the kings of the profession in the
Mediterranean; on the other side of the street a flower seller was,
as always, binding up violets interminably in his lean hands. It
was a pleasant scene; but I lazily consented when Absalom suggested
that we drive out to the Jewish village. We crossed the street to
the cab-stand. I am not good at bargaining, and I am impatient at
the farce or tragedy, as the case may be, of a guide beating down
a cabman; but my feelings toward Absalom were different. I frankly
admired him as he stood in his plain dignity, perfectly motionless,
with a long-stemmed rose at his lips, a beautiful half-blown dark
bloom with the curves of a shell in its frail, firm petals; and
when the figure had dropped deftly and almost noiselessly from
fifteen francs to six, “it is just,” said Absalom, and seated
me in the carriage with the double harness.

We passed into the pleasant vistas of the oasis, rolling over the
red roads with the tumbled earth walls and by the deep-retired
houses and the orange gardens, and the air was full of the fresh
balm of spring. It was a smiling, green, and blossoming world, and
it was good to be alive. I knew it was just such a world that such
villages are in, and this one was native to the oasis and partook of
its qualities; but it seemed to take only the rudest and roughest
of them and to carry them down. It was a disheartening sight. I
had never seen so wretched a Jewish village. The houses, the people
were of the poorest; and not in an ordinary way. The village was a
fantasy of poverty, a _diablerie_. The faces and forms, attitudes,
occupations of the people, their mere aggregation, depressed me in
a sinister way. Some of them were sharpening sickles on old bones;
and others, women with earrings, were working at some primitive
industry with their toes, using them as if they were fingers. The
little place was thronged and busy as an ant-hill; but the signs
of wretched life were everywhere, and most in the bodies of these
poor creatures. I was glad to be again in the garden and grove of
the roadside, and amid the wholesomeness of nature, as we drove
off to the centre of the oasis.

There we found a great house, that seemed to be of some public
nature, built on the top of a high, bare hill. It belonged to a
pashaw, and its roof commanded the whole view of the oasis and
its surroundings. It was somewhat like a rambling summer hotel in
aspect. We were admitted as if there were nothing uncommon in our
visit, and I mounted to the roof and saw the wide prospect—the
white city and blue sea behind, the ring of the palmerai about,
the gray desert beyond—and on coming down was taken to a large
and rather empty room with a balcony. There Absalom told me that
the pashaw, who seemed to be the city governor, would be pleased
if I would lend him my carriage, as he had an unexpected call to
go to town. Shortly after the pashaw came in. It was evident that
Absalom regarded him as a very great man. He shook hands with me,
and was gravely courteous; but he understood very little French,
and real conversation was out of the question. He ordered coffee,
gave me cigarettes, and took me out on the balcony, pointing out
the desert mountain range, Djebel-Ghariane, of which there was
a fine view, and other features. We drank our coffee, and after
perhaps twenty minutes of polite entertainment he took my card,
shook hands in a friendly spirit, and bade me good-by with an _au
revoir_. I sat alone looking out from the balcony toward those
distant mountains over the great desert, smoking the cigarettes he
had left me, and thinking of that vast hinterland of fanatic Islam
before my eyes, so jealously guarded from exploration, where the
fires of hatred against the Christian nations are systematically fed,
while a victorious proselytism is sweeping through the central negro
tribes, reclaiming them from fetich worship to “the only God.”
The carriage was not gone long. We drove back at once, and I found
the flower seller by the cab-stand still twining those endless
bunches of violets, and jonquils and narcissi, in the sinking sun.

That evening we spent at the Turkish theatre. It was better
furnished than the Sicilian. Palms decorated one side of the stage,
and large flags draped the back. The centre was occupied by a group
of three women of whom the one in the middle was plainly the _prima
donna_. She was a striking figure, tall, and, in her dress, attitude,
and expression, of the music-hall Cleopatra type. A high, gilt crown
rested on her abundant black hair; her eyebrows were straight, the
eyes liquid, roving, and full of fire, the mouth and other features
large, the throat beautiful and firm; a white veil descended from
the crown on either side, ornaments were on her arms and feet,
she wore a flashing girdle, but the effect of her person was not
dissipated in jewels or color; her figure remained statuesque,
linear, and so much so that there seemed to me something almost
hieratic in her pose, as she stood there, with the crown and the
veil, motionless, the whole semi-barbaric form finely relieved
on the broad stripe of the beautiful flag behind. This was when
she was in repose; when she sang or danced the effect was quite
different. I was not her only admirer. There were a hundred or
more men in the hall—no Europeans. They were smoking, talking,
moving about in their seats freely, with an indolent café manner,
and the performance went on with long waits. The lady of the stage
was a favorite; men threw cigarettes to her and engaged her in
conversation from the floor, and she would fling back a sentence
to them. There was one admirer beyond all the rest. He sat in the
centre near the stage, a splendidly appointed youth from Alexandria,
garbed in the richest red, with a princely elegance and mien, a
gallant; cigarettes were not for him—he stood up and threw kisses
with both hands vociferously and numerously; he left no doubt as to
his sentiments. Once or twice he attempted to rush the stage, but
was restrained. He would go out, and come back loaded with flowers
for ammunition. He had a negro rival off to the left, also finely
apparelled, but no match in that regard for the Alexandrian red,
though he held his own in the attention of both the audience and the
queen of the stage. Meanwhile the numbers of the performance lazily
succeeded one another; there was music on the zithern and mandolin,
the tambour was heard—songs, dances, other girls. It was all
perfectly blameless; and, indeed, in my judgment, the Arabs have
a stronger sense of public decorum than the northern barbarians at
their play. I saw the entertainment out and went to my castle.


                                  III

A drive in the oasis was always worth having; the sky was the purest
blue, it was brisk desert air in the nostrils, and notwithstanding
my misadventure with the Jewish village I yielded to Absalom’s
programme and went to see how the negroes fared at their own
rendezvous. It was a lesson to me not to prejudge even a trifling
adventure in a new land. The sight was piquant. The village was
a little collection of conical roofed huts with brush fences round
each one; a few palms feathered the sky over it, and groves of them
made the horizon lines, except where the sparkling sea stretched
off beneath the bluff. The place was alive with women and children
in striped burnooses and nondescript folds, whose rough edges and
nutty colors seemed to belong to the complexions and stiff hair,
of all varieties of turn, that one saw on every side. They were
very poor people, of course, but their miserable state did not make
so harsh an impression as in the case of the Jewish village; there
was a happy light in their faces and a fitness in the environment
of hut and brush under the palms in the sun which made the scene
a part of nature. It was a bit of equatorial Africa transplanted
and set down here—a Soudanese village in its native aspect, even
to that touch of grimace, as of human nature laughing at itself,
which negroes have in their wild state. I had a flash of such an
experience at Gabès; in the oasis, just below the beautiful sweep
of the cascades, there suddenly sprang up before me in the bush a
young negress, as wonderfully clad as unclad. It was as if a picture
in my geography had come to life. I might have been in a jungle on
the banks of the Niger. It was the same here; the degrees of latitude
seemed to have got mixed; the scene belonged much further south under
a tropic sky, and I lingered about it with interest and curiosity.

Then I turned to the market close by—not a great market like that
of the city but the oasis market. It did not cover a large space, but
was prettily situated, and banked at one side by a fine palm grove,
which gave it character and country peace. There were two or three
hundred people there, scattered among the usual squares of goods and
vegetables, variegated with straw work, skin bottles, and Soudanese
helmets; but there was an uncommon number of animals—camels and
cows, sheep and goats. There was slaughtering going on near the palm
grove. It seemed that the purchaser picked out the particular sheep
he preferred, and it was made mutton before his eyes. It reminded me
of Greek Easter days. The scene, however, was by no means sanguinary;
it was a country fair amid the quiet palms asleep in the blue—the
life of the people in their own land in their ancestral ways.


                                  IV

The consul had made me his friend by incessant kindness. He had
at the start insisted on my taking my first meal in Tripoli with
him, and since then I had lived almost as much at his table as
at the hotel, which was a blessing, not to say a charity. He was
a scholarly gentleman, long resident in the Levant, and familiar
with the Moslem world, though his appointment to Tripoli was of
recent date. It was to this last fact, perhaps, that I owed the
rarest of my privileges, an invitation to visit the mosques in his
company. Tripoli is a stronghold of fanaticism, and the mosques are
jealously closed to the infidel; permission to visit them is seldom
given, and if formally granted is generally made nugatory in some
underhand way; for a person in my unofficial station such a visit
would be unexampled. The consul, however, had never himself seen
them, and he suggested that this would be an opportunity for me. His
application was at once honored, and the next morning the chief
of police called and we set out at once, preceded by the consular
_cavass_ or dragoman, himself no mean figure corporeally, brilliant
in his Algerian uniform and bearing before him the formidable and
highly ornamented staff of his office.

We went first to the Gurgy Mosque, which is considered the finest
of all. I wondered if the key would be lost, which is the usual
subterfuge; but the guardian was quickly found, and turned the
lock. My account of the mosques must be meagre; the occasion allowed
of only a _coup d’œil_, it was impossible to take notes on the
spot, and one could examine in detail only near objects in passing. I
can give only an impression, not a description. All mosques are much
alike in plan and arrangement. There is a plain, open hall with the
great vacant floorspace for prayer, the ornamented mihrab or niche
in the wall, showing the direction of Mecca toward which all turn,
with brazen candlesticks or hanging silver lamps, and by its side
and at a little distance the high pulpit with a steep stairway
for the preacher or leader; there may be also a closed box on the
floor, or sometimes elevated, for the Sultan or his representative,
and a latticed space for women. These are permanent features. The
mosques differ much, however, in size, ornamentation, and aspect,
and in the _entourage_ of the main room, its approaches, courts,
and dependencies. The interior of the Gurgy Mosque was square,
finely decorated, beautifully wrought. Intersecting arches,
resting on rows of columns, divided it into several naves with
many domes. The walls were tiled, and an unusual look of elaborate
finish was given to the general effect by the fact that all the
surfaces were entirely covered, nothing being left bare; to the
color tones of the tiles were added on all sides the lights of the
highly wrought stucco incrustation, cool marbles, and the dark,
rich contrasts of beautifully carved wood. The capitals of the
columns, done in stucco, were each different. Texts of the Koran,
illuminated in a fine script on a broad band at the base of the
domes, gave another element to the decoration. It was a beautiful
mosque, and I remember it as one of the few I have seen which were
perfectly finished; there was nothing ruinous or aged or bare about
it, and it was completed—a lovely interior in which the simple
elements of beauty employed in this art were admirably blended. We
especially admired the carved woodwork here. Our stay, however,
was but of a few moments’ duration, and we saw only this interior.

We passed on to the Mosque of Dragut, the pirate, the same who
built the mound of Christian skulls at Djerba by the seashore. It
was quite different, a plain old mosque with old columns, and
seemed to belong to old times. In a low chamber to one side was
Dragut’s tomb. It was covered with green cloth, and at the four
corners colored banners hung over it; other tombs stood about it in
the chapel, princes of Islam, and the usual maps of Mecca and the
tomb of the Prophet were on the walls, and some cherished objects
of historic or personal reverence were here and there; all about
were the great candles and the turban-topped small columns of the
dead. It was a place of profound peace. This impression was deepened
still more as we passed out into the adjoining courts with their
low, crypt-like columns, whitewashed, heavy, and sombre. Here the
commissary, or chief, who had us in charge, an amiable-faced Turk
with a gray, grizzled beard, pointed out the tomb of the English
captain, as it is known, a renegade lieutenant of Dragut, who sleeps
in a beautiful niche nigh his old commander. Further on beneath an
immense, broad old fig-tree in the court were other tombs, with the
turbaned end-slabs of different styles and heights—a little company
shut in this quiet close of death. A great silence and peacefulness
reigned there, alike about the ancient fig-tree without and in the
bannered chamber within. I could not help thinking what a place of
repose the great pirate had found out for himself and his companions
in his death. I went out touched more than commonly with that sense
of deep calm which a mosque always, half-mysteriously, awakes in me.

Of the third mosque, which I did not identify, but suppose to
have been that of Mahmat, we had barely a passing glimpse, looking
down from a gallery upon a large carpeted floor—there were many
carpets—but it seemed to offer nothing of special interest. The
fourth, however, El-Nakr, the Mosque of the Camel, was after my own
heart. It is the most ancient, as indeed one would expect from the
name, that of Dragut being next in age, and has the special sanctity
that attaches to a traditional religious spot. I suppose it was here
that the faith began on the soil. We entered first into one of those
low-columned, crypt-like courts; two tall palms were growing in it,
with a little patch of bright-green barley beneath. The artistic
effect of this simple scene of nature, framed in the seclusion of
the gray old walls, with its bit of sky above, the sunshine and
the unbroken peace, as it fell on my eyes, was indescribable; of a
thousand scenes it imprinted itself on my memory as a thing seen once
and seen forever—one of those pictures that are only painted by the
soul for itself. We passed within. It was an old plain mosque, with
low columns and an ancient look, all without elegance or ornament. It
was in the same spirit as that of Dragut, but with still more of
austerity and impressiveness. This was the stern old faith, which
could dispense with all but God. It touched the Puritan sentiment
in me to the quick. This was Islam in its spirituality. Here there
was the solitary desert soul in its true devotion, that sought only
room for God—the same room as on the desert sands or on mountain
tops. There was nothing else in the mosque—only the barley under
the palms by the crypt-like cloister, the low-columned austerity
within. I felt the harmony of the two—they were different chords,
but one music of the desert silence.

It was only when we came out from this sanctuary that I noticed any
resentment among the people. As we walked down by the row of men
standing about the entrance, scowling faces and fire-flashing eyes
were bent on us on all sides, but there was no other demonstration,
and we passed through the crowd in that silent glare of hate. It is
a curious sensation to feel oneself an object of hatred to a crowd,
and this was my first experience of it, though, of course, one
notices the hostile look of individuals in Mohammedan countries. It
was disagreeable; and I half blamed myself for having violated a
prejudice which was perfectly natural for these men. We were out
of the press in a few moments, and soon reached the last mosque
that it was thought worth while to visit, that of Ahmed Pashaw. It
was large, of the same decorated type as the first. There were
the same old marble columns, the beautifully ornamented mihrab,
the pulpit, the Sultan’s box, a brown latticed gallery; bright
mats lay on the floor, the blue and green tiles shone cool on the
walls, moulded stucco and carved wood filled the spaces, there being
one unusually fine ceiling in carved wood; and there were Koranic
texts. The crescent was abundantly used in the decoration. It was
all very beautiful and characteristic, full of restful tones, of
harmony and repose. As we passed toward an inner door leading to
the cemetery of the mosque, we noticed inscriptions to the dead on
the wall, and one was pointed out of a pious man who went straight
to Paradise. Outside beyond the tall minaret were the tombs of
the faithful who were buried here, with the turban-topped slabs
as usual. The guardian, who seemed a very old man, with true Arab
gentleness urged me repeatedly and cordially to climb the minaret,
but I refrained, disliking to detain my companions. We passed out
from this beautiful inner close into the street, and turned to the
Consulate where we talked over our morning’s walk.

It was no small part of my pleasure in Tripoli that I owed to
my friend’s hospitality, which gave me the graces and comfort
of civilization in so rude a place as the ordinary traveller
necessarily finds such a country. The boys of the oasis, in other
parts of Africa, had given me the wine of the date-palm fresh from
the tree; here I drank it a little fermented, an exotic drink
piquing the curiosity, and was the more glad to renew my memory
of a long-forgotten _rosso spumante_ and to make altogether new
acquaintance with pleasant wines of Touraine. What conversations
we had over these and on the quiet terrace by the garden, ranging
through French African territory and the Levant, touching on Persian
poets; and my host showed me many beautiful things. It is in this
atmosphere of scholarly talk and friendly kindness that I remember
the morning walk among the mosques of Tripoli.


                                   V

The British consul, who had also shown me attention, arranged for
me to visit the Turkish school of arts and crafts. Hassan Bey,
who seemed to be an aid of the Vali, waited on us one morning at
the Consulate, and we set out to walk to the school. Hassan Bey was
an exile from Daghestan, of a fine military figure, middle-aged,
thick-set, with a pleasant countenance; his gray whiskers became
his energetic face; he had a look of power and the grave authority
of character. He wore a sword; his sleeves and gold braid gave
distinction to his person; and he carried lightly, like a cane,
the short, twisted whip of stiff bull’s hide that one occasionally
sees on these coasts. I have seldom seen so manly a figure, rugged
and strong, and stamped by nature for rule; and his politeness was
complete and charming, with an accent of strength and breeding that
put it out of the category of mere grace of manners. He interested me
profoundly by his personality, an entirely new type in my experience,
and as the walk was somewhat long I had an opportunity to observe
him.

The director of the school received us cordially, gave us coffee and
cigarettes, and showed us through the buildings which were rather
extensive. The school is endowed with some lands, and its income is
supplemented by voluntary funds and a subsidy from the government. It
receives upward of one hundred and fifty pupils, from the age of
twelve years, and completely supports them during the course, which
is seven years in length. Some literary instruction is given, such
as geography and secondary branches; but the main end of the school
is technical training in the arts and crafts. There was a carpet
and silk-weaving department, a tailor-shop, a shoe-shop, carpentry,
a foundry and blacksmithing, a refectory and store-rooms. The shops
were rather empty, and the students whom I saw were few and of
all ages; the rest may have been at their books. The foundry and
the carpenter-shop were the busiest and most occupied; there were
many heavy pieces of machinery of modern make, and the department
seemed properly provided for and in competent management; work was
going on in both these rooms, which I watched with great interest. I
was told that the furniture of the Ottoman Bank was made here, and
apparently orders of various kinds, as, for example, for wheels,
were regularly received.

The foundation clearly enough was only a beginning, and the provision
inadequate to the scale; but it was a serious and admirable attempt
to plant the mechanical arts in the country in their modern form and
development, and to foster industry in the simple crafts. The idea
was there and in operation, however the means to realize it might
seem small in my American eyes, used to great industrial riches
in such things; and I was much impressed, not only by the facts
but by the spirit of the thing and those who had it in charge. The
products seemed excellent, so far as I could judge of the various
things shown me. I followed the example of the consul in buying a
small bolt of strong silk in a beautiful design of brilliant-colored
stripes, and I should have been glad to have taken more in other
varieties. I was rather surprised when at the end Hassan Bey
suggested my going into the girls’ carpet school. We entered,
paused a moment at the school-room door that some notice might be
given, and on going into the room I saw that all the girls, who were
young, were standing with their faces turned to the wall. We remained
only long enough to see the nature of the work and its arrangement,
and for a word with the teacher; but the scene, with the young
girlish profiles along the sides, was picturesque. There is one
other carpet school for girls in another city. We spent perhaps
two hours in this inspection and walked leisurely back to town,
where I parted with Hassan Bey with sincere admiration.

In the afternoon I went with Absalom to visit a school I had heard
of in the Jewish quarter, a pious foundation, the bequest of a
wealthy Jew, for the education of poor boys. There were about five
hundred of them there, bright-eyed, intelligent, intent, as Jewish
boys in their condition usually are. The buildings were excellent,
properly furnished, with the substantial and prosperous look of a
well-administered educational enterprise. I visited several rooms,
saw the boys at their desks and classes, heard some exercises,
and talked with the professor in charge. I noticed a tennis-court
on the ground. Altogether, I was more than favorably impressed by
what I saw, and the mere presence here of a well-organized charity
school on such a scale was an encouraging sign. It was surprising to
me to find this establishment and the technical school at Tripoli,
where I had certainly not anticipated seeing anything of the sort,
nor was this my only surprise. I had thought of Tripoli as a
semi-barbarous country almost detached from civilization, a focus
for Moslem fanaticism, a place for Turkish exiles, a last foothold
of the slave-trader, and such it truly was; but it did not present
the aspect of neglect and decay that I had imagined as concomitant
with this. The old gates of the city had recently been removed;
outside the walls there was a good deal of new building going on,
which was a sign of safer and more settled life as well as of a
kind of prosperity; the roads were excellent, and in a Turkish
dependency that is noticeable; in some places new pavements had
been laid. In other words, there was evidence of enterprise and
public works, of modern life and vitality; and this impression was
much strengthened by my experience of the two schools. It is true
that I never lost the sense of that strangely conglomerate crowd
that passed through the streets, that mixed and fanatic people. I
indulged no illusions with respect to the populace _en masse_. The
state of things, however, seemed to me by no means so bad, with
these stirrings of civilization, of betterment, of a modern spirit
in the city, and I was frankly surprised by it.

My surprise melted away some months later when, on opening my
morning paper in America to read of the Turkish revolution, I saw
that the Vali of Tripoli was among the first of the exiles to sail
for Constantinople; and I observed that, later, he had an active
part in the government of the Young Turks. He and Hassan Bey had
been doing in Tripoli what they had been exiled for wishing to do
on the Bosphorus. Then I understood.


                                  VI

It was night. Absalom and I were in the Arab quarter, on our
way to see some Soudanese dancing. There were few passers in the
deep-shadowed, silent, blind streets that grew darker and seemed
more mysterious as we penetrated deeper into the district. We
had gone a considerable distance. From time to time a man would
meet us, and then another. We seemed to be going from precinct to
precinct under some sort of escort. I noticed that Absalom had many
hesitations; once or twice he refused to go further, and there was
something resembling an altercation; then he stopped decisively,
and would not budge until some one whom he desired should come in
person. We stood, a group of four or five, waiting in the obscure
passageway for some ten minutes. At last the man came, a tall Arab,
with a look of rude strength and superiority. He was the chief, and
we walked on with him in that dark network of corners and alleys. I
was beginning to think it a long distance, when we turned under
a heavy gateway into a dark, open court, as large as a small city
square, with houses round it like tenements. A kerosene lamp in a
glass cage flared dimly on one side, and there were a few figures
round the court; but the scene soon took on a livelier aspect.

The chief began collecting his men in the centre, and numbers
of people emerged from the houses and sat on the edges near the
walls of the houses. They were a rough-looking crowd, evidently
very poor and badly clothed, and there were many that made a wild
appearance squatting there in the darkness. Two policemen, attracted
by the commotion, came in, and a street lamp was transferred into
the court. There was now quite a gathering in the centre, where a
fire had been built by which three men were seated; some sort of
incense was thrown into it, and a light smoke with a pungent odor
began to be lightly diffused through the court. There must have
been as many as seventy in the crowd round the fire, and at least a
couple of hundred spectators crouched about the sides; it was more
of an exhibition than I had expected, and from the corner where I
sat with Absalom and two or three attendants the scene began to be
weird. Then the drum beat in the middle; the men, all of whom had
clappers, lifted them in the air, falling into line, and immediately
one of those wild, savage chants shrilled forth, rising and rising
to an acute cry and falling monotonously down, increasing in volume
and mingling with the noise of the sharp clappers and the drum—an
infernal din. The chant of the Aïssaouas, that I had heard in the
desert, was “mellow music matched with this.” And, from the first
moment it never stopped; it was ear-piercing as it reverberated in
the closed court, and at first it was confusing.

The dance began with a procession in double file round the fire, with
the three men seated by the smoky flame. It was a slow walk timed to
the rhythm of the voices and the clappers, gradually increasing in
speed and becoming a jump, with violent gesticulation, twisting, and
long reaching of the arms and legs, while the human cry grew shriller
and more vibrant and rapid in the emotional crisis of the excitement.
Round and round they went, and from time to time the line would break
into parts as the men turned to the centre just before me. There
were three persons who seemed to be leaders: one, whom I named
the Hadji because he answered to my idea of that word, another
dervish-like, and a black man. The dervish interested me most. He
was the head of his group, and as he came between me and the fire,
standing well forward from his band and well in toward the fire, he
would whirl, and then reverse, whirling in the opposite direction;
and—he and the procession moving forward all the time—he would
fall limply forward toward his men almost to the ground, recover,
and fling himself backward, rising high with his clappers spread
far over his head. It was a diabolical posture; and, as he stood
so, his leaping followers bowed down to him, kneeling almost to the
ground but not touching it, and flinging themselves erect far back
with arms spread. I wondered how they kept their balance in that
dancing prostration. Then the group would pass on, and the next
come into play—the Hadji, the black man—with the same ceremony,
but without the whirling. Round and round they went interminably;
the chant rose and fell, the march slackened and quickened, and
every few moments there was this spasmodic rite of the salutation
and prostration at the height of the dance.

The ring of spectators, crouched and huddled round the court, sat
in the imperturbable silence and apathy of such audiences. The
edges of the scene were an obscure mass of serried, half-seen
forms under the house walls, filling the space rather closely;
the smoke of the incense, with which the fire was fed, hung in the
air, and Absalom said it was good for my eyes; the only light was
the blaze of the flame upon the dark, moving forms in the middle,
and the two street lamps over them, and the night-sky above. It was
an unearthly scene, with those strange figures and heavy shadows;
and the fearful din made it demonic. I do not know what the dance
was, its name or origin; but it seemed to me to be devil worship,
a relic of the old African forest, a rite of the primitive paganism
and savage cults of the early world. The three dark men by the fire
with the drum, the grotesque, fantastic ritual of the bowing and
kneeling procession, the atmosphere of physical hysteria and muscular
intoxication, the monotonous, shrill cry in which the emotional
excitement mounted—here were traits of the prehistoric horde,
of a savagery still alive and vibrant in these dancing figures. It
was as if I were assisting at a worship of the Evil One in a remote
and barbarous past.

After a while I began to take notice of particular individuals in
the dancing mass. I was specially attracted by three who seemed
uncommonly strong and tireless and made a group by themselves. They
were poorly but distinctively clad. One was in black, with loose
arm-sleeves showing his bare skin to the breast; one was in white,
with an over-haik of black divided down the back, which streamed out;
the third, who was very tall and lank, one of the tallest figures
there, was in blue, faded and worn; and, as they danced, of course
the folds of these garments spread out on the air, showing their bare
legs in free motion. Their heads were closely covered with white,
except the mouth and eyes—not merely covered, but wrapped. I
turned to Absalom, and said, “Touaregs.” He looked at them,
as I picked them out for him, and said, “_Sì, signor_,” for
he always spoke to me in Italian. I had wished much to see some
Touaregs, and, though I had seen men with covered faces, I had never
been quite sure. They are the finest race of the desert, first in
all manly savage traits, bandits of the sands, complete and natural
robbers, fierce fanatics, death-dealers—the most feared of all the
tribes. They cover their faces thus to protect them from the sand,
for they are pure desert men. I smiled to think that at my first
meeting with the terrible Touaregs I found three of them dancing for
my amusement; but I looked at them with the keenest interest. They
were certainly superb in muscular strength. At the end of an hour
they showed no weariness; and there was a vigor in their motions,
an elasticity and endurance that easily distinguished them from the
others. I watched them long. They were perfectly tireless, and the
dance called for constant violent muscular effort. I shall never
forget that group, whose garb itself, thin and open, had a riding
look, and especially the man in the blue garment, with long, gaunt
arms and legs, who fell forward and rebounded with a spring of iron.

There were some changes in the method and order of the motions,
but the dances for the most part were merely new arrangements of
the same jumping and kneeling performance. I sat in the awful din of
it for two hours, interested in many things, and rather pleased, I
confess, at being alone in such a company. One gets nearer to them so
in feeling; with a companion of the same race, even though unknown,
one stays with his race. I left the dance still in the full tide
of vehemence and glory of uproar, overhung by the light pungent
smoke and dissonance, with the obscurely crouching throng in the
low shadows, and as we lost the sound of it in the deep silence of
the dark lanes, where we met no one, I think the night of an Arab
city never seemed so still. A man with a lantern went ahead to light
the way which was black with darkness; Absalom and the headman went
with me, and a negro followed behind. They attended me to the door
of the hotel, and it was a striking night scene as I stood in the
hallway, the negro guards roused from their straw mats looking on,
and shook hands with the strong-faced, rough-garbed headman who
had had me in his protection that night.


                                  VII

I went out for a last drive with the British consul toward the oasis
of Gergarish, which lies westward of the city, a new direction for
me. He was familiar with the Mediterranean; and, the talk falling
on the classical background of North Africa, I told him of my search
for the lotus at Djerba. He avowed his belief that much of the Greek
mythic past had its local habitation on these coasts, and gave me
a striking and quite unexpected instance. I had supposed that Lethe
was an underground stream and approached only by the ghosts of the
dead. He assured me that it was situated not very far from Benghazi,
where he had been consul, and made an excellent table water. It is
a large fountain or underground lake in a cave; he had been on it
in a boat with a friend, and it was said that fumes from the water
would oppress the passenger with drowsiness. I heard this with great
interest, and like to remember that I can obtain a cup of Lethe,
should I desire it, this side the infernal world. My friend added
his belief that partial oblivion can be found comparatively widely
diffused in North Africa, not being dependent on either Lethe or
the lotus. This tradition of drowsiness which attaches to these
coasts in old days is to be attributed to the quality of the air,
which is soporific. Continued residence causes a loss of memory,
not that one forgets his early days, home, and children, like the
lotus-eaters, but one grows uncertain about recent events and the
mind becomes hazy as to whether one has or has not done this or that;
to such a degree is this true that my friend advised a return to
the north at least once in two years to allow the memory to recover
its normal force. With such talk, which was quite seriously said,
though it has its humorous side, and which faithfully reflects
the African atmosphere, we whiled away the time, conversing, too,
of the American excavations at Benghazi and the bells of Derna
that rang the Italian priest to his death—for the Arabs dislike
bells—and the thousand and one topics on which a traveller is
always prepared to receive information. I had been so long alone
that those talks at Tripoli were almost as much of a rarity as the
scenes; they are an essential part of my memory of the voyage.

Our destination was not the oasis, but some caverns on a height
above it. The day was brilliant and a noble desert view stretched
round us from the eminence. The blue sea sparkled not far away,
an horizon-stripe up and down the coast as far as one could see;
the splendid dark green mass of the oasis lay just below us in
the valley, and between us and it the desert plain undulated
with the long slopes of a rolling prairie, spotted with cattle
and a few Arab groups; inland the sands swept on to the line of
mountains low on the far horizon. The mass of rock above us was
picturesque and solitary. The gem of the view, however, was Tripoli
eastward. It was the first time I had truly seen the city from
outside—just such a Moslem city as one dreams of, a white city,
small and beautiful, snowy pure in the liquid air. I was surprised
at its beauty. We explored the cave. It was of a sort of stratified
pumice stone and partly filled up with sand. It had been at some
time a troglodyte dwelling, and chambers had been hollowed in it.
There are many troglodytes, or cave-dwellers, still living in this
primitive manner in rock-hewn chambers in North Africa. There are
villages of them in the mountains back of Biskra, and especially in
the southeastern corner of Tunisia opposite Djerba, and they are
found in the low range of the Djebel-Ghariane that I was looking
on in the distance. This cavern that we were exploring was one of
their prehistoric haunts, a natural fortress and place of refuge
for a small group of families in the wild waste.

The drive back was uncommonly beautiful, very African in color, and
increasing in atmospheric charm as we neared the city in the clarity
of the sunset light. The coast view was especially lovely. The
blue sea made the offing, along which a line of scattered palms,
continuous but thin enough to give its full value to each dark green
tuft in the blue air, and to many a single columnar stem beneath,
ran like a screen, not too far from the roadway; and the strong
foreground was that red-brown earth with the sunset light beginning
on it. The beautiful white city lay ahead of us. The quality of the
atmosphere was remarkable. The trees were very light, and seemed to
float in the sky, like goldfish in a globe; and as the sunset grew,
the diffused rose through the palms on the other side seemed almost
a new sky. It was my last evening in Tripoli.


                                 VIII

I had loitered for the last time in the street of the blueness and
lingered in the souks of the Djerba merchants and especially in the
little shop of a mild-mannered Soudanese dealer where I gathered up
the curious objects that had been slowly collecting there for me to
serve as mementos—things of gourd and hide, of skin and straw,
a few ostrich plumes. I had photographed the baker’s shop, and
stopped at the intersection of the four corners to look once more at
the ever-passing figures of the inscrutable and conglomerate crowd,
the float of the desert life. I had called on my friend and kind
adviser at the French Consulate, and my British host, to both of
whom I owed so much of the pleasure and variety of my traveller’s
sojourn. In one respect it was unique in my wanderings. I had never
seen so many strata of culture, so many diverse kinds and stages of
human life, in one place. I had had a last talk with Seyd, the boy
from Fezzan, and with the negro guards of the gate and the boys at
the door who were eager rivals for my morning favors. Now it was
over, and I stood on the deck with Absalom. I was sorry to part
with him. What a faithful watch he had kept! No matter at what hour
I stepped out into the street, he was there, seated by the wall;
wherever I left my consular friends, in some mysterious way he was
instantly there in the street at my side. He had tempted me to a
longer stay with lures of hunting in the desert where he calmly
explained he would watch with a gun while I slept, and then I would
watch, though there would be two others with us, but it would be
better if one or the other of us were always awake, for one did not
know what might be in the desert; and he had planned a voyage to
Lebda, the city of Septimius Severus—it might be a rough voyage
in a boat none too good, but was not he a pilot? He had brought
me one day all his pilot papers; there were hundreds of them, each
with the name of the craft and the signature of the captain whose
ways he had safely guided on this dangerous coast in the years gone
by. But my voyage in North Africa was finished; it was done; the
much that I had left unseen, and I realized how much that was—for
wherever one goes, new horizons are always rising with their magical
drawing of the unknown—all that was for “another time.” So,
knowing the end had come, he took both my hands in both his for our
warm addio, bent his head, and went slowly down the ship’s side.

I watched the scene as we drew away. The central mass of the fort
stood in shadow, and the sunset light streamed over the eastern side
of the city, the beach and bluffs; slender minarets islanded the sky;
the blue crescent of the bay lay broad beneath; the oasis rose over
the banked earth, and stretched inland, and the high horizon line
was plumed with tall single palms tufting the long sky. I watched
it long, till the beautiful city in the fair evening light lessened
and narrowed to a gleam, and at the end it was like the white crest
of a wave that sank and was seen no more.


                                  IX

I went on deck. It was a May night with a fresh, cold wind. There
was a bright star over the crescent moon which hung well down the
west, and all the heavens were bright, but not too bright. I leaned
on the rounds of a rope ladder of the rigging by the ship’s side
aft, and was alone; it was cold, and the passengers were few. I
noticed on the horizon a dark shadow half-risen from the waters
and mounting toward the moon; it rose rapidly, and grew black as it
neared the light above. It was like a high arch, or cascade of gloom,
broadening its skirts as it fell on the horizon. The moon was its
apex, and seemed about to enter it. The scene was fantastic in the
extreme, unearthly, a scene of Poe’s imagination; the moon hung
as if at the entrance of an unknown region into which it was about
to descend. But there was no further change. The moon crested the
arch; the single star burned brilliantly directly above and between
the horns of the crescent and at some distance aloft. I watched the
strange spectacle; the moon and the broad-skirted curtain of black
gloom, pouring from it on the waters just in the line of its bright
track over the sea, sank slowly down together. The moon reddened
as it neared the horizon line, and when the crescent at last rested
on the sea, and the shadow had been wholly absorbed in the moon’s
track, there was another Poesque effect; the horned moon was like a
ship of flame—not a ship on fire, but a ship of flame—sailing
on the horizon. That picture, though it could have been but for
a few moments, seemed to last long, and sank dying in a red glow
slowly. I remember recalling the lines:

  “The moon of Mahomet
   Arose, and it shall set.”

What followed was so singular that it may be best to record it
in nearly the exact words of my rough notes, made early the next
morning off Malta:

“The strange thing was that the star, still somewhat high in
the west, growing brighter, took the track of the moon. I mean the
moon’s path of light on the water became the star’s path, as
plain but whiter; one passed and the other was there imperceptibly;
one became the other. It reminded me of one faith changing into
another, from a higher heavenly source. I stayed because the star was
so beautiful—the most beautiful star I ever saw, except perhaps
the star off Cyprus. It grew larger and more radiant, with many,
many points, and became a bunch, as it were, of jackstraw rays,
one crossing another, all straight; and then, as I looked, a strange
thing happened.

“I saw what might have been spirits in the star, as in a
picture. The star lost shape, and became only the setting of these
forms of light, perfect human figures. At first there were two, one
older and one younger, like an angel with Tobias or Virgin with the
young St. John; then there were many others, not at the same time,
but successively. Some were constantly repeated; the Byzantine
throned figure hieratic, the highwinged angel tall, the young angel
seated and writing, the standing figure, prophetic, blessing, with
high hands. There were scenes as well as figures: desert scenes as
of Arabs—effects of the white and dark, like turbaned and robed
figures together; the Magian scene; mixed moving groups, sometimes
turned away from me. The figures often moved with regard to each
other, and trembled on my own eye singly. When the star approached
the horizon, there were figures that seemed to walk toward me on
the sea, all white and radiant—single figures always. There were
in all three sorts: Byzantine, with the crown or canopy above,
and the throne; Italian groups and lines; and Moslem. There was
nothing distinctively Greek except seated figures.

“This continued till the star set, perhaps an hour. I would look
off from the star to the other stars and to the sea; but as soon
as my eyes went back to the star, there were the changing figures
still to be seen. One did not see the star, but the figures; not
framed in a star or in a round orb, but on a shapeless background;
one saw only figures of light as if ‘the heavens were opened.’
And when the star set and was gone, another planet above, also
very bright, as I looked, opened in the same way, with similar
figures. There I saw a form with Michel-Angelo-like limbs, seated
on the orb with loose posture, like the spirit of the star, and
then a tall, throned figure with the crown over it. I did not at
any time see any features—only forms, very distinct in limbs and
modelling of figure, but too distant for features. It was an hour or
more, and I still saw them in the new star when I turned away to go
below. My eyes were tired. I was not at all excited—quite steady,
and observing and experimenting; for I had never known anything
similar to this. The visions were constant, without any interval,
though changing. It was like looking into a room through a window,
or out of a room upon a landscape.

“It was wonderfully _spiritual_ and beautiful. The figures were all
noble and beautiful, especially in line, and occupied with something,
like living forms. They were _white_, but not with white clothing,
except the Moslem figures, sometimes; but white as of some _substance
of light_—the faces sometimes dark, and there were shadows marking
relations of the figures, but not shadows thrown by the figures. I
made no effort to shape them; they came; they were of themselves.

“I thought this was what Blake saw; what the shepherds saw; what
all orientals saw when the heavens were ‘opened’—what Jacob
saw, perhaps. What struck me was that the star was no longer a
star, but shapeless, and only _a means of seeing_. It was a most
remarkable experience.”

Africa was always a land of magic; and it seemed to me that night
as if the spirit of the land were bidding me, who had so loved it,
farewell.