DJERBA
VII
DJERBA
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, eyestrès 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 tristein 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.
Thenext 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, whosefantasiaI 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 thefondoukwhich 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.
I hadnever 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 youngtalebat 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.
I hadnot forgotten the hunting of the lotus, but it was now more clearly defined as a search for thejujubier, 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 ajujubierin 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 thejujubier. 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 thejujubier.
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.
Themarvellous 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
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, thefiertéof 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—theguerbas—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 anélanin 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 readyen 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.
Wewere 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-dozengaminsplayed 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, adiablerie. 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 anau 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 theprima 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.
A drivein 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.
Theconsul 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 consularcavassor 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 acoup 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 theentourageof 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-forgottenrosso spumanteand 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.
TheBritish 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 populaceen 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.
Itwas 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.