|The Arab|
He drove a little cart—a light cart with two wheels. His horse was of such a sort as you may buy any day in Africa for ten pounds, that is, it was gentle, strong, swift, and small, and looked in the half-light as though it did not weigh upon the earth but as though it were accustomed to running over the tops of the sea. I said to the Arab: “Will you not give me a lift?” He answered: “If it is the will of God.” Hearing so excellent an answer, and finding myself apart of universal fate, I leapt into his cart and he drove along through the gloaming, and as he went he sang a little song which had but three notes in it, and each of these notes was divided from the next by only a quarter of a note. So he sang, and so I sat by his side.
At last he saw that it was only right to break into talk, if for no other reason than that I was his guest; so he said quite suddenly, looking straight before him:
“I am very rich.”
“I,” said I, “am moderately poor.”
At this he shook his head and said: “I am more fortunate than you; I am very, very rich.” He then wagged his head again slowly from side to side and was silent for a good minute or more.
He next said slyly, with a mixture of curiosity and politeness: “My Lord, when you say you are poor you mean poor after the manner of the Romans, that is, with nomoney in your pocket but always the power to obtain it.”
“No,” said I, “I have no land, and not even the power of which you speak. I am really, though moderately, poor. All that I get I earn by talking in public places in the cold weather, and in spring time and summer by writing and by other tricks.” He looked solemn for a moment, and then said: “Have you, indeed, no land?” I said “No” again; for at that moment I had none. Then he replied: “I have sixteen hundred acres of land.”
When he had said this he tossed back his head in that lion-like way they have, for they are as theatrical as children or animals, and he went on: “Yes, and of these one-fourth is in good fruit-trees ... they bear ... they bear ... I cannot contain myself for well-being.” “God give you increase,” said I. “A good word,” said he, “and I would say the same to you but that you have nothingto increase with. However, it is the will of God. ‘To one man it comes, from another it goes,’ said the Berber, and again it is said, ‘Which of you can be certain?’”
These last phrases he rattled off like a lesson with no sort of unction: it was evidently a form. He then continued:
“I have little rivulets running by my trees. He-from-whom-I-bought had let them go dry; I nurtured them till they sparkled. They feed the roots of my orchard. I am very rich. Some let their walls fall down; I prop them up; nay, sometimes I rebuild. All my roofs are tiled with tiles from Marseilles.... I am very rich.” Then I took up the psalm in my turn, and I said:
“What is it to be rich if you are not also famous? Can you sing or dance or make men laugh or cry by your recitals? I will not ask if you can draw or sculpture, for your religion forbids it, but do you playthe instrument or the flute? Can you put together wise phrases which are repeated by others?”
To this he answered quite readily: “I have not yet attempted to do any of these things you mention: doubtless were I to try them I should succeed, for I have become very rich, and a man who is rich in money from his own labour could have made himself rich in any other thing.”
When he said this I appreciated from whence such a doctrine had invaded England. It had come from the Orientals. I listened to him as he went on: “But it is no matter; my farm is enough for me. If there were no men with farms, who would pay for the flute and the instrument and the wise beggar and the rest? Ah! who would feed them?”
“None,” said I, “you are quite right.” So we went quickly forward for a long time under the darkness, saying nothing moreuntil a thought moved him. “My father was rich,” he said, “but I am far richer than my father.”
It was cold, and I remembered what a terrible way I had to go that night—twenty miles or more through this empty land of Africa. So I was shivering as I answered: “Your father did well in his day, and through him you are rich. It says, ‘Revere your father: God is not more to you.’” He answered: “You speak sensibly; I have sons.” Then for some time more we rode along upon the high wheels.
But in a few minutes the lights of a low steading appeared far off under poplar-trees, and as he waved his hand towards it he said: “That is my farm.” “Blessed be your farm,” said I, “and all who dwell in it.” To this he made the astonishing reply: “God will give it to you; I have none.” “What is that you say?” I asked him in amazement. He repeated the phrase, and then I saw that itwas a form, and that it was of no importance whether I understood it or not. But I understood the next thing which he said as he stopped at his gates, which was: “Here, then, you get out.” I asked him what I should pay for the service, and he replied: “What you will. Nothing at all.” So I gave him a franc, which was all I had in silver. He took it with a magnificent salutation, saying as he did so: “I can accept nothing from you,” which, I take it, was again a form. Then the night swallowed him up, and I shall never see him again till that Great Day in which we both believed but of which neither of us could know anything at all.
We were born, I cannot tell how many leagues apart, in different climates and for different destinies, but we were two men together in the night, and, for a short time, we were very near each other compared withthe distance of the stars, or with the distance that separates any two philosophers.
|The Goat-Story Again|
Many who read this will say they know the Mohammedan better than I. They will be right: then let them explain the story of the goats, for I cannot. I will repeat it to save them the trouble of turning back.
A young man of Ain-Yagout, hearing that the Government had carefully planted little cedars on a distant hill, drove his goats fifteen miles to browse upon the same. “Better,” said he, “that I should flourish than the Government, and that my goats should give milk than that these silly little trees should fatten.”
They caught him and brought him before the magistrate, where he confessed what he had done, and even that he had lifted the goats laboriously, one by one, over a high wall to get at the Government trees. But when they asked him what good reason he could give for his conduct, he replied:
“R’aho!It was the will of God.Mektoub, it was written.”
Or words to that effect.
I will admit that when the full lips, the long uncertain eye and the tall forehead of the true Arab met me in these short travels I was always half silenced and half moved to question and to learn. But I saw such Oriental features rarely, for, in spite of the turban and the bernous, they are very rare.
|The Moor|
Indeed, of all the men I came across in this country, only two were of the purely Oriental kind the books make out to be so common. One was a fierce Moor of gigantic stature and incredible girth. He was dressed in bright green, and drank the cordial calledcrême de menthein a little bower. The other was a poor Arab and old, who sold fruits upon a stall in Setif. In his face there was a deep contempt of Christendom.
|The Little Old Semite|
The snow fell all around him swiftly, mixed with sleet and sharp needles of coldrain. It was evening and the people were passing down the street hurriedly to find their homes: so passed I, when I saw him standing like a little stunted ghost in the rain. He knew me at once for some one to whom Africa was strange, and therefore might have hoped to make me stop even upon such a night to buy of him. Yet he did not say a word, but only looked at me as much as to say: “Fool! will you buy?” And I looked back at him as I passed, and put my answer into my eyes as much as to say: “No! Barbarian, I will not buy.” In this way we met and parted, and we shall never see each other again till that Great Day....
Remembering him and this last one who had given me a ride, I went on through the night towards Timgad.
It was a very lonely road.
|The Lonely Night March|
Loneliness, when it is absolute, is very difficult to depict, for it is a negation and lacks quality, and therefore words fail it. But one may express the loneliness of that valley best by saying that it felt, not as though men had deserted it, but as though men had perpetually tried to return to it and, as perpetually, had despaired and left the sullen earth. The impression was false. The Romans had once thoroughly possessed and tilled this land: the scrub had once been forests, the shifting soil ordered and bounded fields; but the Mohammedan sterility had sunk in so deeply that one could not believe that our people had ever been here. Even the sharp and recent memory of those ruins of Lamboesis faded in the stillness. Europe came back into my mind. The full rivers and the fields which are to us a natural landscape are but a made garden and are due to continuous tradition, and I wondered whether,if that tradition were finally lost, our sons would come to see, in England as I saw here in the night in Africa, vague hills without trees and drifts of mould and sand through which the rain-bursts would dig deep channels at random.
There was a moon risen by this time, but it lay behind a level flow of clouds. All along the way, to my right, made smaller by the darkness, lay Aurès—one could still just discern the snow upon his summits. The road went on—French, exact, and, if I may say so, alien—bridging this barbaric void which already smelt of the desert where it lay beyond those mountains down under the southern wall of Atlas. For the desert, when I had seen Timgad, I determined to strike.
|The Columns of Timgad|
So the road went on, and I with it till I came to the thirty-second stone, and recognised its number by holding a match close by. Then I knew that I had covered twenty miles and was close to Timgad. A branch roadopened out on the right, and there was a sign-post pointing along it. I followed the new road across a careful girder bridge such as might cross a brook in Normandy. I saw a light up on the rise of the foot-hills, and beyond it, suddenly and yet dimly, a very mob of columns. They stood up against the vague glimmer of the sky of every size and in thousands, as though they were marching. A little rift in the clouds let in the moon upon them palely. Her light was soon extinguished, but in that moment I had seen a large city, unroofed and dead, in the middle of this wasted land.
|The Old Soldier|
However men may act who see a vision but see it in extreme fatigue, so did I. I suffered the violent impression of that ghost, but my curiosity was no longer of the body. I took no step to see the wonder which this gleam had hinted at, but I turned and struck at the door of the house which was now quite near me, and which was still lit within. Anold man, small, bent, and full of energy, opened the door to me. He was that soldier of whom they had told me at Lambèse.
“I was expecting you,” he said.
I remembered that the driver had promised to warn him, and I was grateful.
“I have prepared you a meal,” he went on. Then, after a little hesitation, “It is mutton: it is neither hot nor cold.”
A man who has been on guard as often as had this old sergeant need not mind awakening in the small hours, and a man who has marched twenty miles and more in the dark must eat what he is given, though it be sheep and tepid. So I sat down. He brought me their very rough African wine and a loaf, and sat down opposite me, looking at me fixedly under the candle. Then he said:
“To-morrow you will see Timgad, which is the most wonderful town in the world.”
“Certainly not to-night,” I answered; to which he said, “No!”
|The Strange Food|
I took a bite of the food, and he at once continued rapidly: “Timgad is a marvel. We call it ‘the marvel.’ I had thought of calling this house ‘Timgad the Marvel,’ or, again, ‘Timgad the——’”
“Is this sheep?” I said.
“Certainly,” he answered. “What else could it be but sheep?”
“Good Lord!” I said, “it might be anything. There is no lack of beasts on God’s earth.” I took another bite and found it horrible.
“I desire you to tell me frankly,” said I, “whether this is goat. There are many Italians in Africa, and I shall not blame any man for giving me goat’s flesh. The Hebrew prophets ate it and the Romans; only tell me the truth, for goat is bad for me.”
He said it was not goat. Indeed, I believed him, for it was of a large and terrible sort, as though it had roamed the hills and towered above all goats and sheep. I thoughtof lions, but remembered that their value would forbid their being killed for the table. I again attempted the meal, and he again began:
“Timgad is a place——”
At this moment a god inspired me, and I shouted, “Camel!” He did not turn a hair. I put down my knife and fork, and pushed the plate away. I said:
“You are not to be blamed for giving me the food of the country, but for passing it under another name.”
He was a good host, and did not answer. He went out, and came back with cheese. Then he said, as he put it down before me:
“I do assure you it is sheep,” and we discussed the point no more.
|Timgad|
But in the hour that followed we spoke of many things—of the army (which he remembered), of active service (which he regretted, for he had lost half a hand), of money (which he loved), and of the Church—which he hated. He was good to the bottomof his soul. His face was sad. He had most evidently helped the poor, he had fought hard and gained his independence, and there he was under Aurès, in a neglected place a thousand miles away from his own people, talking French talk of disestablishment and of the equality of all opinion before the law. So we talked till the camel (or sheep) was stiff in its plate and cold, and the first glimmer of dawn had begun to sadden the bare room and to oppress the yellow light of the candle. Then he took me to a room, and as I went I saw from a window, beyond a garden he had planted, the awful sight of Timgad, utterly silent and ruined, stretching a mile under the dull morning; and with that sight still controlling me I fell heavily asleep.
When the morning came I looked out again from my window and I saw the last of the storm still hurrying overhead, and beneath and before me, of one even grey colour and quite silent, the city of Timgad. Therewas no one in it alive. There were no roofs and no criers. It was all ruins standing up everywhere: broken walls and broken columns absolutely still, except in one place where some pious care had led the water back to its old channels. There a little fountain ran from an urn that a Cupid held.
I passed at once through the gates and walked for perhaps an hour, noting curiously a hundred things: the shop-stalls and the lines of pedestals; the flag-stones of the Forum and the courses of brick—even, small, Roman and abandoned. I walked so, gazingsometimes beyond the distant limits of the city to the distant slopes of Atlas, till I came to a high place where the Theatre had once stood, dug out of a hillside and built in with rows of stone seats. Here I sat down to draw the stretch of silence before me, and then I recognised for the first time that I was very tired.
I said to myself: “This comes of my long march through the night”; but when I had finished my drawing and had got up to walk again (for one might walk in Timgad for many days, or for a lifetime if one chose) I found a better reason for my fatigue, which was this: that, try as I would I could not walk firmly and strongly upon those deserted streets or across the flags of that Forum, but I was compelled by something in the town to tread uncertainly and gently. When I recollected myself I would force my feet to a natural and ready step; but in a moment, as my thoughts were taken by some newaspect of the place, I found myself walking again with strain and care, noiselessly, as one does in shrines, or in the room of a sleeper or of the dead. It was not I that did it, but the town.
I saw, some hundred yards away, a man going to his field along a street of Timgad: he showed plainly for the houses had sunk to rubble upon either side of his way. This was the first life I had seen under that stormy mountain morning, and in that lonely place which had been lonely for so very long. He also walked doubtfully and with careful feet; he looked downward and made no sound.
I went up and down Timgad all that morning. The sun was not high before I felt that by long wandering between the columns and peering round many corners and finding nothing, one at last became free of the city. An ease and a familiarity, a sort of friendship with abandoned butonce human walls, took the traveller as he grew used to the silence; but whether in such companionship he did not suffer some evil influence, I cannot say.
I came to one place and to another and to another, each quite without men, and each casting such an increasing spell upon the mind as is cast by voices heard in the night, when one does not know whether they are of the world, or not of the world.
I came to a triumphal arch which had once guarded the main entry to the city from Lamboesis and the west. It was ornate, four-sided, built, one would think, in the centuries of the decline. Beyond it, the suburbs into which the city expanded just before it fell stretched far out into the plain. Not far from it a very careful inscription recalled a man who has thus survived as he wished to survive; the sacred tablet testified to the spirit which unites the religion of antiquity with our own—for it was chiselled infulfilment of a vow. In another place was the statue of the gods’ mother, crowned with a wall and towers. This also was of the decline, but still full of that serenity which faces wore before the Barbarian march and the sack of cities.
There is a crossing of the streets in Timgad where one may sit a long time and consider her desolation upon every side. The seclusion is absolute, and the presence of so many made things with none to use them gradually invades the mind. The sun gives life to you as you look down this Decumanian way, and see the runnelswhere the wheels ran once noisily to the market; it warms you but it nourishes for you no companions. The town stares at you and is blind.
Against the sky, upon a little mound, standtwo tall columns, much taller than the rest. They shine under the low winter sun from every part of Timgad and are white over the plain of grey stones. They may have been raised for the Temple of Capitoline Jove.
These will detain the traveller for as long as he may choose to regard them, so violently do they impress him with the negation of time. It is said that in certain abnormal moods things infinitely great and infinitely little are present together in the mind: that vast spaces of the imagination and minute contacts of the finger-tips are each figured in the brain, the one not driving out the other. In such moods (it is said) proportion and reality grow faint, and the unity and poise of our limited human powers are in peril. Into such a mood is a man thrown by Timgad, and especially by these two pillars of white stone. They proceed so plainly from the high conceptions of man: so much were their sculptors what we are in everywestern character: so fully do they satisfy us: so recent and clean is the mark of the tool upon them that they fill a man with society and leave him ready to meet at once a living city full of his fellows. It only needs a spoken word or the clack of a sandal to be back into the moment when all these things were alive. And meanwhile, with that impression overpowering one’s sense, there, physically present, is a desolation so complete that measure fails it. No oxen moving: no smoke: no roof among the rare trees of the horizon: no gleam of water and no sound. It is as though not certain centuries but an incalculable space of days coexisted with the present, and as though, for one eternal moment, a vision of the absolute in which time is not were permitted—for no good—to the yet embodied soul.
|The Stranger|
I do not know what was the hour in which I turned and left this sight, and leaving by the southern gate made for the mountainrange of Aurès. But it was yet early afternoon, and the track had risen but little into the hills when I saw, some little way off, seated upon a great squared stone which had lain there since the departure of our people, a man of a kind I had not met in Africa before.
By his dress he was rather a colonist than a native, for he wore no turban—indeed his head was bare; but his long cloak was cut in an unusual shape, covering him almost entirely; it was dark and made of some stuff that had certainly not been woven in a modern loom. He saluted me as I came.
When I approached him and saluted him in return, his face could be seen inspired with a peculiar power, which, at a distance, his attitude alone had discovered. It was not easy to be sure whether its lines were drawn from Italy or from those rare exceptions wherein the east seems sometimes to surpass our own race in force and dignity. Hisforehead was low and very broad, his hair short, crisp, strong, and of the colour of steel; his lips, which were thin and controlled, had in their firm outline something of a high sadness, and his whole features recalled those which tradition gives to the makers and destroyers of religions. But it was his eyes that gave him so singular and (as I can still believe though the adventure is now long past) so magical an influence. These were in colour like the sea in March, grey-green and full of light, or like some mountain stones which when they are polished show the same translucent and natural hue, shining from within with vivid changes; but, much more than their luminous colour, their expression arrested me, for it had in it an experience of immense horizons, and resembled that which may sometimes be caught in the eyes of birds who have seen the earth from the heights of the sky.
I first spoke and asked him whether Iwas well upon the path that would lead me under Aurès, through the pass, to the sandstone hills from whose summits one could see the desert for which I was bound.
Whether Timgad had disturbed me, or his speech had in it that something which at the time I feared, I cannot tell; but the very short dialogue we had together influenced me in my loneliness for a whole day, as a vivid dream will do. I will therefore write it down.
He rose and answered me that I was on a good path all the way, and that there was plenty of lodging: that the road was safe, and that my map would be an ample guide.
“From the other side of Aurès,” he said, “you will see one ridge of red rocks beyond another. Even the furthest has some scrub upon it upon this side, but from its summit you will see the desert, and on this side it is easy to climb.”
Myself: “And how is the southern side towards the Sahara?”
He: “It is all precipice, but from the northern side you can cast about and find a path which creeps down the end of the ridge to an oasis of palm-trees. These are very numerous and evident from the height. When you reach them you will find a large river flowing towards the desert, a great road and a railway. It is easy to return.”
All this I knew already from my reading, and from my map, but I listened to him for the sake of the tones of his voice: these had a sort of laugh in them when he added that I should be glad to get back to water, to trees and to men.
Myself: “But there is, as you say and know, no danger on this road from the tribes or from beasts.”
He: “No. Very little.”
Myself: “What other danger can there be?”
He answered that many who saw the desert learnt more than they desired to learn.
I knew very well what he meant for I had heard many men maintain that what was eternal must be changeless, and that what was changeless must be dead. And I had noted how men who had travelled widely were more simple in the Faith if they had chiefly known the sea; but if they had chiefly known the desert, more subtle and often emptied of the Faith at last: the Faith dried up out of them as the dews are dried up out of the sand on the edges of the Sahara in the brazen mornings. But these men, speaking in Christendom, had affected me little; here, so near the waste places where men cannot live, alone with such a companion, I felt afraid.
We walked along together slowly for a few paces; his sentences were shorter than my replies, and were spoken low, and full of what he and his call wisdom, but I, despair.We discussed together in these brief moments the chief business of mankind. It was a power much greater than his words that put my mind into a turmoil, though his words were careful and heavy.... He told me that the day was better than the night. The daylight was a curtain and a cheat, but when it was gone you could see the dreadful hollow.
Myself: “In Sussex, which is my home, if a man were asked which was the more beneficent, he would say ‘the night.’”
“In Sussex,” he answered gently (as though he knew the Downs) “mists and kind airs continue the veil of the day.” He said that in the desert the stars were terrible to man, and as he spoke of the endless distances I remembered the old knowledge (but this time alive with conviction) how great nations, as they advance with unbroken records and heap up experience, and test life by their own past, and grow to judge exactly the enlarging actions of men, see at last thatthere is no Person in destiny, and that purpose is only in themselves. Their Faiths turn to legend, and at last they enter that shrine whose God has departed and whose Idol is quite blind.
We had not talked thus for twenty minutes when we stopped at the edge of a little wood, and, as his way was not mine, he made to return. We both turned back to look at the plain below us, and the salt dull valley and the dead town: the broken columns and the long streets of Timgad, made small by the distance and all in one group together. I looked at him as he stood there and the fantastic thought half took me that he had known the city while it was yet loud with men. When he had left me the oppression of his awful intensity and of his fixed unnatural reason began to fade. I saw him go into a secchia; I saw him again upon the further side swinging powerfully down the slope. He crossed another fold of land,he showed upon the crest beyond, and after that I did not see him again.
|The Walk to the Desert|
Then I turned and went up into Atlas, and as I went I was in two minds, but at last tradition conquered and I was safe in my own steadfast instincts, settling back as settles back with shorter and shorter oscillations some balanced rock which violence has disturbed. The vast shoulder of Aurès seemed worthy indeed of awe, but not of terror. I made a companion of the snow, and I was glad to remember how many living things moved under the forest trees.
So I continued for three days seeing many things, and drawing them till I came to the south side where the streams go down to be lost at last in the sand, and till I saw before me the sandstone ridge red and bare, and from its summit looked out upon a changing landscape, which dried and flattened and became the true desert where miles and miles away a line quite hard and level marked theextreme horizon. On this summit I lay in the shelter of a rock (for it was bitterly cold and a violent wind blew off the snows of Aurès) and looked a long time southward upon the country which is the prison-wall of our race.
|The Sight of the Desert|
The man near Timgad had said truly that the end of the Empire, the division and the boundary, was abrupt.
A precipice falls sharply right against the midday sun; it is built up of those red rocks whose colour adds so much to the evil silence of the Sahara, and the ridge-top of this precipice is here a sharp dividing-line between living and desert land. Africa the province, the Maghreb full of towns and men, ends in a coast, as it were, against this blinding ocean of sand. You look down from its cliffs over a vast space much more inhuman than the sea. Behind the traveller stretches all the tableland he has traversed, bare indeed and strange to a northerner, but very habitableand sown with large cities, living and dead. There are behind him trees, many animals and rain: all the diversity of a true climate and a long-cultivated soil. Before him are sharp reefs of stone, unweathered, without moss, and with harsh unrounded corners split by the furnace-days and the dreadful frosts of the desert. The rocks emphasise the wild desert as reefs do the wild of the sea: they rise out of sand that blows and shifts under the wind.
|The View of the Desert|
On this day, as I took my first long look at the Sahara, Aurès and the plateau beyond were all piled up with dark clouds, and one could see showers sweeping like shadowy curtains over the distant forests to the northward; but southward over the desert there was a sky like a cup of blue steel, and a dazzling sunlight that made more desperate the desperate iciness of the gale. When I could tolerate the cold no longer I began to pick my way carefully downward.
|The Oasis|
I could not find any path such as the man at Timgad had told me of, and such as my map showed, but what I had to do was clear, for down in the plain below me a long line of palms marked an oasis and the passage of that clear river which, as I knew, comes tumbling down from the Atlas to be lost at last in the Sahara. No feature in the unusual view below me was more characteristic than this: that green leaves were thus bunched together, rare, isolated and exceptional, as with us are waste rocks or heaths, while the wide sweep of the land, which with us is all fields and trees and boundaries, here is abandoned altogether. It was not the least part of my wonder in this new place to find myself walking as I chose over an earth that was quite barren, with no history, no obstacles, and no owner, towards a patch of human land whose grove looked as an island looks from the sea. As I neared those palms I found first the railway, and then thestrong high road which the astonishing French have driven right out here into nothingness.
|The Arab Riding|
I did not turn to enter the native village. I had no appetite to see more of the desert than I had seen in my view from the hill. I had then seen a limit beyond which men of my sort cannot go, and I was content to leave it to those others who will remain for ever the enemies of our Europe. I saw one on the road: a true Arab, what the French call “An Arab of the Great Tent,” not what we and the Algerians are, but a rider of that race which makes one family from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic. He was on a horse going up before me into the hills, with the snow of Aurès above him, and between us a tall palm. As I watched him and admired his stately riding, I said to myself: “This is how it will end: they shall leave us to our vineyards, our statues, and our harbour-towns, and we will leave them to their deserthere beyond the hills, for it is their native place....|The Ksar|Then we shall have reached our goal, for we shall be back where the Romanswere, and the empire will be fully restored. For all things return at last to their origins, and Europe must return to hers. They must forget our cities which they ruined, and which we are so painfully rebuilding, and we will not covet their little glaringksourswhich they build upon crags above the desert, and which are quite white in the sun.... This is how it will end.”
When I came to that curious cleft or gorge through which the river, the road and the railway all make their way together, one above the other, from the plateau down into the desert plain, I saw a Christian house afterso many miles and days. I went in at once, drank wine, and asked the hour of the train, for I was tired of this land. I was hurrying to get back to reasonable shrines, and to smell the sea.
|The Return|
“Very soon,” I said to myself, “I shall come back to the coast-harbours, and I shall see again all the business of the shipping and the waves; and I shall see, rounding the pier-heads, those happy boats which seemto be part of the mist and of the very early morning.” So it was; for I came at the close of a bright day through the hills of the Tell to the sea: here was the Mediterranean, and here were all the sails. I saw again the little harbour by which I had entered Africa, and I was glad to find such a choice of ships at the quays, ready, as it seemed, to go to all parts of the world. So I chose one that was a Spaniard, bound for Palma in Majorca and I drove a bargain by which I was to go for next to nothing, provided I stayed on deck, and ate none of their food.
|The Last Bargain|
When I had driven this bargain, I bought wine, bread and meat ashore, and came back and took a place right up in the bows fromwhich to watch the sea. It was the afternoon when we cast off and left the harbour, and before it was quite dark we had lost the land. I lay there for many hours in the bows, and thought about my home. And as I went across the sea I recalled those roofs built for true winters, and those great fireplaces of my own land. I also thought of the thick, damp woods which begin by Tay and go on to Roncesvalles, but which north or south of these are never seen; I remembered Europe well. There were women there (to whom I was sailing) whose eyes were clear and simple, and whose foreheads low; I remembered that all their gestures were easy. I remembered that in the harbours men would meet me kindly; I was to meet my own people again, and their ritual would not seem to be ritual because it would be my own, and the air would be full of bells. The ship also, going eagerly onwards dead north under the stars; she carried me towardsmy native things, herself reaching her own country, for nothing alien to Europe could make or preserve the science that had constructed such engines and such a hull.
|The Memory of Europe And her Toast|
“In Europe, in the river-valleys,” I thought, “I will rest and look back, as upon an adventure, towards my journey in this African land. I shall be free of travel. I shall be back home. I shall come again to inns and little towns. I shall see railways (of which I am very fond), and I shall hear and see nothing that the Latin Order has not made.” I thought about all these things as the ship drove on.
Europe filled me as I looked out over the bows, and I saluted her though she could not see me nor I her. I considered how she had made us all, how she was our mother and our author, and how in that authority of hers and of her religion a man was free. On this account, although I had no wine (for I had drunk it long before and thrownthe bottle overboard), I drank in my soul to her destiny. I had just come back from the land which Europe had reconquered, and which, please God, she shall continually hold, and I said to myself, “Remain for ever.”
“We pass. There is nothing in ourselves that remains. But do you remain for ever. What happens to this life of ours, which we had from you,Salvâ Fide, I cannot tell: save that it changes and is not taken away. They say that nations perish and that at last the race itself shall decline; it is better for us of the faith to believe that you are preserved, and that your preservation is the standing grace of this world.”
It was in this watch of the early morning that I called out to her “Esto perpetua!” which means in her undying language: “You shall not die”; and remembering this I have determined to give my rambling book that title.
|It Dawns|
In a little while it began to be dawn; but as yet I saw no land. I saw before me a boundary of waters tumbling all about, but I did not feel alone upon that sea. I felt rather as a man feels on some lake inland, knowing well that there is governed country upon every side.
This is the way in which a man leaves Africa and comes back to the shore which Christendom has never lost.
But all the while as he goes from Africa northwards, steering for the Balearics and the harbours of Spain, he remembers that other iron boundary of the Sahara which shuts us in, and the barrier against which his journey struck and turned. The silence permits him to recall most vividly the last of the oases under Atlas upon the edge of the wild.
|The End|
There, where the fresh torrent that has nourished the grove is already sinking, stagnantand brackish, to its end, a little palm-tree lives all alone and cherishes its life. Beyond it there is nothing whatsoever but the line of the sand.
FINIS
FINIS
FINIS
Printed byBallantyne & Co., LimitedTavistock Street, London
Printed byBallantyne & Co., LimitedTavistock Street, London
Printed byBallantyne & Co., Limited
Tavistock Street, London
Transcriber’s Notes
Transcriber’s Notes
Transcriber’s Notes