FIGUIG
III
FIGUIG
I WOKE, in the train, on the high plateaus. Dawn—soft green and pallid gold, luminous, then dying under a heavy cloud while faint pink brightened on the sides of the great horizon—opened the lofty plain, boundless and naked, thinly touched with tufts of vegetation; as far as one could see, only the elements—color, cold, swathing wild herbage on rugged soil; and far off, alone, the haze of an abrupt mountain range. It was the steppe beyond Khreider. The vast, salt chott of El-Chergui, that streaks the middle of the steppe with its waste and quicksands, lay behind; but its saline arms still clung to and discolored the surface, and whitened the view westward with dull crystalline deposits. This wide blanching of the gray and red soil striped and threw into relief the rigid scene—aridity, vacancy, solitude, from which emerged the still grandeur of inanimate things. It was the characteristic scene of the high plains—a vague monotony, colored with sterile features flowing on level horizons. As the train ascended nature seemed still to unclothe and uncover, to strip and peel the land; but not continuously. From time to time the steppe lapsed back to a thicker growth of tough-fibred alfa, whose home is on these plains, and bore other dry, sparse, darkish desert plants upon reddish hummocks; on this pasturage distant herds of camels browsed unattended, as on a cattle-range, in the wild spaces fenced by rolling sands; then the climbing train would soon pass again amid low dunes. Few stations, at long intervals; isolated, meagre, they seemed lost in the spreading areas, mere points of supply; the most important was but a village, with sickly trees; but they took on an original character. They were fortified; obviously built for defence, with sallies and retreats in their walls; guarded casemates obliquely commanding all avenues of approach and the walls themselves; doors that were meant to shut. It was a railway in arms, a line of military posts, or blockhouses, as it were, on an unsettled border. The sight gave a tang of war to the silence of the uninhabited country, and reminded one of unseen tribes and of the harsh frontier of Morocco over opposite, south and west. Slowly the mountains sprang up; one had already drifted behind, Djebel-Antar; and now the peaks of the Saharan Atlas, rising sheer from the plain a thousand metres, lay on either hand, bold crests and jutting ranges—Djebel-Aïssa on the left, the Sfissifa on the right in the southwestern sky, Djebel-Mektar straight ahead. We had passed the highest point of the line at an elevation of thirteen hundred metres, and were now on the incline and rapidly approaching the last barrier of the Sahara. We were soon at the foot of Mektar. It was Aïn-Sefra, an important military base.
But I did not think of war; to me Aïn-Sefra is a name of literature and has a touch of personal literarydevoir; for there in the barren Moslem cemetery, outside the decaying ksar, is buried the poor girl who taught me more about Africa than all other writers; she had the rare power of truth-telling, and lived the life she saw; her books are but remnants and relics of her genius, but she distilled her soul in them—one of the wandering souls of earth, Isabelle Eberhardt. She was only twenty-seven, but years are nothing—she had drunk the cup of life. Here she died in the oued, the torrent river whose bottom I was now skirting, a wide, dry watercourse, strewn with stones, and with roughly indented banks. It was dry now, but on these denuded uplands and surfaces, after a rainfall, which is usually torrential, it fills in a moment with a furious sweep and onset of waters; and thus a few years ago it rose in the October night and tore away the village below the high ground of the French encampment; and there she was drowned. The echo of her soul in mine, long ago at Tunis, was the lure that drew me here.
There, before my eyes, was the sight I had longed to see, just as she had described it. I knew it as one recognizes a lighthouse on a foreign coast, so single, so unique it was—the leap of the red dunes up the defile, fierce as a sword thrust of the far desert through the mountains. That was Africa—the untamed wild, the bastion of nature in her barbarity, the savage citadel of her splendid forces to which man is negligible and human things unknown. The dunes are golden-red, tossed like a stormy, billowing sea; they charge, they leap, they impend—petrified in air; an ocean surf of red sand, touched with golden lights, frozen in the act of the wild wind. They are magnificent in their lines of motion, in their angers of color; but the spirit of them is theirélan, their drive, flung forward as if to ram and overwhelm the pass with a wide sandy sea. The light on them is a menace; they threaten; nor is it a vain threat; they move with the sure fatality of all lifeless things, they will invade and conquer—a foe to be reckoned with; and to fend the valley against them, man takes a garden, trees, plantations, advancing a van of life against all that lifelessness. It is a superb picture there, among the mountains, a symbol of the struggle—the long battle of vegetable and mineral forces, clothing and desolating the planet; and it holds the rich glow of the African temperament, a spark of the soul of the land.
The train winds on in the bright morning air by a shining koubba, dark palm tufts, and the high, silent tricolor, and goes down the oued, turns the mountain, passes into the rocks, a strange scene of stormy forms and sterile colors, and makes from valley to valley by sharp curves, from oued to oued by deep cuts, piercing and grooving its passage to lower levels through the range of the ksour. Almost from the first it is unimaginable, that landscape. It is all rock in ruins, denuded and shivered, shelving down, disintegrating; fallen avalanches of rotten strata; every kind of fracture; whole hills in a state of breaking up into small pieces, pebbly masses, bitten, slivered. We traverse broken, burnt fields of it, all shingle; expanses of it so, beneath walls cracked and scarified; we curve by scattered bowlders of all sizes and positions, down valleys of stones; new hills open, sharp-edged, jagged—continuous rock. All outlooks are on the waste wilderness crumbling in its own abandonment; all contours are knife-edges; the perspectives are all of angles. In the near open tracts lie relics and remains, mounds, mountains, and hills that have melted away; steep lifts on all curves; and on the sky horizon, following and crossing one another, saw-toothed ranges, obliquely indented with sharp re-entries, or else acute cones and rounded mamelons: the whole changing landscape a ruin of mountains being crumbled and split and blown away. It is an elemental battle-field, where the rock is the victim—a suicide of nature. In this region of extreme temperatures with sudden changes—burning noons and frozen nights, torrid summers and winter snows, downpours of rainfall—the fire and frost, wind and cloudburst have done their secular work; they have stripped and pulverized the softer, outer rock shell, washed it down, blown it away, till the supporting granite and schist are bare to the bone. It is a skeletonized, worn land, all apex and débris; near objects have the form and aspect of ruins, the horizons are serried, the surfaces calcined. It is an upper world of the floored and pinnacled rock, an underworld shivered and strewn with its own fragments, a “gray annihilation”—of the color of cinders. I imagine that the landscapes of the moon look thus.
A mineral world, bedded, scintillant, flaked. It is dyed with color. All life has gone from it, and with the departure of life has come an intensification, an originality, an efflorescence of mineral being. The earlier stages of the ride—the red mountains striped beneath with black, beyond the middle ground of a prevailing reddish tint sparsely scattered with a vegetation of obscure greens and dull grays amid strong earth colors, once with the bluish-black of palm-trees blotting the distance—I remember now almost as fertility. Here there is not a leaf—nor even earth nor sand. It seems rock devastated by fire, like volcanic summits. A sombre magnificence, a fantastic grandeur! Blue-grays, browns, and ochres of every shade gleam on the slopes of the hillsides; reds splash the precipices and walls; innumerable, indescribable tones, too gloomy to be called iridescence, shimmer over the mid-distance and die out in twilights of color amid the manganese shadows, on the cold limestone heights, in the sandstone gullies. Where I can see the surfaces of the shivered stones, I notice their extraordinary smoothness. There are purples and black-greens and violets among them, but for the most part they are black, like soot; for amid this fantastic coloration, what gives its sombreness to the scene—the trouble of the unfamiliar—and grows most menacing, is the black. The land is oxidized—blackened; its shivered floor is strewn with black stones; black stripes streak its sides far and near; amid all that mineral bloom it is to black that the eye returns, fascinated, enthralled. It invades the spirits with its prolonged weirdness; it awes and saddens. And all at once we emerge from a deep ravine—oh,la belle vie!—a sea of dark verdure makes in from below, like a fiord, among the naked mountains round it—silent, mysterious, living, the green of the palm oasis; and swiftly, after that stop, we dip into the black gorges beyond Moghrar, more sombre, sinister—valleys of the color and aspect of some strange death, the incineration of nature in her own secular periods, the passing of a planet. Slowly vegetation begins—tufts amid the rock interstices, desert growths, thechaufleur saharienne, the drin, the thyme, plants of ashen-gray, stiff, sapless; trees now—betoums, feeble palms; a beaten track with a trio of Bedouin Arabs. It is the oued of the Zousfana; and we debouch on the far prospect—off to the right the oases of Figuig, oblong dark spots on the foot-hills of Morocco, and before us to the left the great horizons of the Sahara, thehamada. Five hours from Aïn-Sefra. It is Beni-Ounif.
I descended from the train amid groups of soldiers. I lose my prejudice against a uniform when it is French or Italian; and in North Africa the blue of the tirailleur, the red of the spahi, are a part of themise en scène. These were soldiers of the Foreign Legion. I had been familiar with their uniform, too, in the north at Oran, and particularly at Sidi-bel-Abbes, one of their rendezvous; and I saw it again with friendly eyes, for all that I had here—harborage, security, freedom to come and go—did I not owe it to them? The Sud-Oranais is their work, like so much else in Algeria. I trudged through the sand, a young Arab tugging at my baggage and guiding me, to the hotel, which occupied a corner of an extensive flat building of Moresque style, rather imposing with its towers though it was only of one story, on a street that seemed preternaturally wide because all the buildings were likewise of one story. The whole little town, a mere handful of low, fragile blocks, looked strangely desolate and lonesome, forsaken, isolated, dull. The host received me pleasantly—I was the only guest to arrive, and there was no sign of another occupant—and took me to my room in the single corridor; it was clean and sufficient—a bed, a basin, and a chair; a small, heavily barred window, at the height of my head, looked on a large, vacant court. So this was theterre perdue. I was “far away.” “The brutality of life—” I was “clean quit” of it, like a lark in the blue, like a gull on the gray sea. “Adieu, mes amis,” I thought. Where had I read it—“The man who is not a misanthrope has never loved his fellow men.”
There was a knock at my door: “Monsieur, some one to see you.” It came with a shock, for the solitude had begun to seize me. I went toward the office. A young soldier of the Legion approached me, full of French grace, with a look of expectancy on his fine face. “I heard there was an American here,” he said in English; “I did not believe it,” he added; “I came to see.” “Yes,” I said, “I am an American.” “There hasn’t been one here in two years—not since I came,” he spoke slowly—keen, soft tones. “South American?” he ventured. “No,” I said, melting. “Truly from the United States—where?” His look hung on my face. “I was born near Boston,” I replied, interested. “I was born in Boston.” I shall never forget the gladness of his voice, the light that swept his eyes. A quick, soldierly friending seized us—the warmth that does not wait, the trust that does not question. In ten minutes he was caring for me like a younger brother, introducing me with my letters at the Bureau Arab, doing everything till he went to his service. In the evening we met again, and so the lonely journey of the day ended in an African sunset, as it were, of gay and brilliant spirits, for I know of no greater joy than the making of friends. He was of French parentage, and the only American in the Legion; at least, he had never seen nor known of another. And I went to bed thinking of the strange irony of life, and how the first thing that theterre perduegave me was the last thing I expected in the wide world—a friend.
I wentby myself to visit the old ksar, the native village which had occupied this site before the coming of the French and the rise of the new town about the railway. It lay some little distance to the west of the track—a collection of palm-trees, with a village at the farther end, backed by a white koubba. My Arab boy, who had never lost sight of me, had me in charge, and led the way. We crossed into the strip of barren country and saw the ksar with its palmerai before us, like a rising shoal in the plain. Accustomed as my eyes are to large horizons, this country had an aspect of solitariness that was extraordinary. The sand-blown black rock, thehamada, lies all about; the mountains of the Ksour that back the scene to the northeast are reddish in color and severe in outline, and the mountains of Morocco, cut here by three passes, block it to the north and west with their heavy and wild masses, while other detached heights are seen far off to the south. From this broken ring of bare mountains, red and violet and gray, the rocky desert floor, blown with reddish sand, makes out into the open distance interminably to horizons like the sea. In the midst of this the little ksar with its trailing palm-trees, Beni-Ounif with its slender rail and station, its white redoubt and low buildings, with the Bureau Arab and its palms a little removed, seem insignificant human details, mere markings of animal life, in a prospect where nature, grandiose in form and without limit in distance, exalted by aridity, is visibly infinite, all-encompassing, supreme. The sun only, burning and solitary, seems to own the land. The moment one steps upon the windy plain it is as if he had put to sea; he is alone with nature, and the harshness of the land gives poignancy to his solitude.
We walked over rough ground awhile, and then crossed the dry bed of a oued, one of the channels that in time of flood lead the waters down to the Zousfana, whose shrunken stream flows in its wide rocky bottom some distance to the north of the ksar toward the mountains; and we climbed up on the farther side by crumbling footpaths that run on little uneven ridges of dry mud, twisting about in a rambling way, with small streams to cross, which groove the soil; and so we came into the gardens. The aspect, however, is not that of a garden; the background of the scene is all dry mud, whose moulded and undulating surface makes the soil, while the little plots are divided by mud walls, high enough at times to give some shade and meant to retain the irrigating waters. There are a few patches of barley, very fresh and green; but for the most part the plots are filled with trees—fig-trees, old and contorted, with their heavy limbs, the peach and almond with fragile grace and new tender green, the pomegranate and the apple, and rising above them the palms whose decorative forms frame in and dignify the little copses of the fruit-trees, and unite them; but the dry mud makes an odd contrast with the branching green of varied tints and gives a note of aridity to the whole under scene. The plots vary only in their planting, and were entirely deserted. We came through them to the ksar itself with its wall. It is built of dry mud, which is the only material used here for walls and houses alike. The rain soon gives them a new modelling at best, and this ksar is old and ruined, half abandoned now that the French town is near. The outer wall is much broken, with the meandering shapelessness of abandoned earthworks—scallops and indentations, the smooth moulding and mud sculpture of time on the golden soil; and off beyond it stretches the endless cemetery, with the pointed stones at the head and foot of the graves, a tract of miserable death, so simple, naked, and poverty-struck, and yet in such perfect harmony with the sterile and solitary scene, that it does not seem sad but only the natural and inevitable end. It belongs to the desert; it is its comment on the trivial worthlessness of human life, whose multitude of bones are heaped and left here like the potter’s shard. The sun beats down on the wide silence of that cemetery; the sand blows and accumulates about the rough stones that seem to lie at random; there is no distinction of persons there, no sepulchral apparelling of the mortal fact, no illusion, no deception; it is the grave—“whither thou goest.” And it is not sad—no more than the naked mountains of the Ksour, the dark Morocco heights, the silent sunlight; it is one with them—it is nature. On its edge toward the ksar rises the koubba of the saint, Sidi Slimanc bou-Semakha, the ancient patron of the country; it is the only spot of this old Moslem ground that no infidel foot has trod; there his body reposes in its wooden coffin, hung with faded silks within its carved rail in the white chamber, secluded and sacred, and the faithful sleep in the desert outside. It is a world that has passed away.
The ksar itself was like all others in this region. They are walled villages adjoining the palmerai that feeds them; the houses are built of sun-baked earth supported on small palm beams and lean serried one upon another in continuous lines and embankments; narrow alley ways and passages honeycomb them, often with a roofing of the same palm beams, so that one walks in underground obscurity; externally, owing to their old and weather-worn aspect, they have a general ruinous look. The walls on the street are blind; here and there in dark corners a seat for loungers is hollowed out in the side; there is somewhere a square for judgment where is the assembly of the elders, and by the mosque or koubba an open space. There is always a life outside the walls, a place for market, for caravans to stop, encampments of all sorts. All have a look of dilapidation. But this old ksar had more than that; it was obviously in a state of ruin and abandonment. Walls had fallen, exposing the wretched interiors, cave-like, mere cellarage. There was no one there. I passed through some of the covered ways—blank obscurity, with holes of naked sunlight. I did not see half a dozen living figures; they were unoccupied, listless, marooned. It was still—a stillness of death. I found the sources, the underground streams that supply the little oasis; there were three or four young negro girls standing in the water in discolored bright rags; they pointed out to me the blind fish in the water. “C’est défendu,” said my Arab boy when I asked him to catch one. Life seemeddéfendu. The air was moribund. It was a decadence of the very earth. I was glad to have the hot sun on my back again by the tall palms and green fruit-trees springing out of their dry-mud beds, and I sat down on a crumbling wall, amid the amber deliquescence of the rich-toned soil, and looked back on that landscape of decay, and sought to reconstruct in fancy the desert life of its silent years.
It was an old human lair. Its people, theksouriens, who lived here their half-underground life, sheltered from the burning blasts of the summer sun and the bitter winds of winter, were a settled townfolk, with their oasis agriculture and simple desert market. The ruling race were the descendants of some Marabout; for the Moslem saint was a patriarch, and one finds whole villages that claim to be originated from some one of them; these men were the proprietors of the gardens, which were tilled by native negroes or Soudanese slaves and their progeny, a servile breed; and there were Jews, who were compelled to live apart, a pariah caste. Outside were the Berber and Arabized nomad tribes, scattered and living in fractions, who went from place to place for the pasturage of their flocks; their chiefs and head men were desert raiders, who took toll by tribute or pillage of the caravans traversing their country, and made forays on their neighbors; the people of the ksar held a feudal relation to these desert lords. The most secure units of property in the land were the zaouias, or monasteries, bound to hospitality and charity, and ruled by Marabout stocks; their gardens and flocks had a protective character of sacredness, the goods of God. Society was in a primitive form of uncohering fragments, very independent, self-centred, uncontrolled; though it was of one faith, hostility pervaded it; feuds were its annals; it had pirate blood. A pastoral, marauding, sanguinary world, with elements of property and aristocracy, but democratic within itself, with slaves and outcast breeds; a world of simple wants but always half submerged in misery; a world of the strong arm. In such a world theksourienslived here by the mountain passes. They saw those old nomad tribes go by that mounted to Tlemcen and drank the bright cup of the Mediterranean for a season; but theksourienshad forgotten them; their passage was only a wrinkling of the desert sand. Caravans stopped by the brown walls; raiders rode by to the desert; the seven ksars of Figuig fought petty wars, one on another, on the hill opposite; mountain women pitched their striped tents by the cemetery wall; the Jews worked at little ornaments of silver and coral; there was a coming and going to the fountain, secret and ferocious love, the woe of poverty and hate—the Arab life of violence and ruse and silence, in the palm gardens, the underground passages, the darkened streets; a life of obscurity and somnolence; and theksouriensgrew pale like wax, with their black beards and corded turbans, and the old Arab vitality melted in their bones. The hours that no man counts rolled over the languid ksar, where white figures sat in the seats in the earthen wall along the covered streets in the silence; the unborn became the living and the stones multiplied in the cemetery; and there was no change. I could almost hear the bugle note yonder that brought a new world of men. And now the ksar was dead.
The moon, almost at the full, was growing bright in the eastern sky; the mountains of the Ksour, that still took the setting sun, glowed with naked rock, rose-colored; on the left the mountains of Figuig lay in black shadow, with the violet defiles between, clear-cut on the molten sky. As I stepped on the rise of Beni-Ounif it was already night; the brilliant white moon flooded the hard landscape with winter clarity; the unceasing wind blew cold. It was a solemn scene.
“Monsieur, le spahi.” I went out in the early morning air and found my escort for Figuig, a tall, dark Arab, almost black, his head capped with a huge turban wound with brown camel’s rope in two coils, and his form robed in a heavy white burnoose that showed his red trousers beneath; he held two horses, one tall and strong, for himself, the other, smaller and lighter, a mare, for me. My friend soon joined us with his mount, and, glancing at my mare as I also mounted, warned me not to rein her in straight with that bit, as it was thus that the Arabs trained their horses to rear and caper, and a strong pull might bring her up unexpectedly on her hind legs, and that, he said, was all I need be careful about. We trotted off easily enough down the street toward the railway, and in a few moments turned the last building and were on the route westward over the open plain. The old ksar lay far off to the left, the Zousfana to the north, and between was the unobstructed stretch of the rockyhamada, herbless and strewn with small and broken stones, to where we saw a line of straggling palms beneath the Morocco hillside. The air was brisk and cool—just the morning for a gallop. The temptation was too great for my mare, who showed no liking for her neighbors, and, after a few partly foiled attempts, struck boldly off the trail to the left. I minded my instructions and had no desire to see what she could do on her hind legs. I had neither whip nor spur. I gave her her head. I was likely to have a touch of the Arabfantasia, and I did. I settled myself hard in the saddle as she flew on; she was soon at the top of her speed; it was the gallop of my life. Her feet were as sure as they were fleet on the pathless, rocky plain; she avoided obstacles by instinct; and if she came to a dry, ditch-like channel now and then that cut the level, with a slight retardation for the spring she jumped it, as if that were the best of all. But it was a pace that would end. After a mile or so she breathed heavily, and I, seeing some Arab tents pitched not far away, turned her toward them, thinking she might regard it as a friendly place, and so brought her up quite blown and with heaving sides. Three or four Arabs, very friendly and curious, ran up, and I dismounted. “Méchante, méchante,” they kept saying; and I looked at the shallow glitter of the mare’s eyes, as she turned them on me to see the rider she had got the better of, and for my part I said “Furbo”—something that I learned in Italy. My friend came riding up after a little to know where I was going, and said he thought I was “having a little fun”; and the spahi rode in, and, dismounting, also with a “méchante” changed horses with me. I said good-by to the friendly Arabs, and we rode off straight north to the route from which I had involuntarily wandered; but it was a fine morning gallop.
We came without further incident to the line of scattered palms, amid a very broken country, where the ascent makes up to Figuig, enclosed in a double circle of walls. Figuig is the name of the whole district. It includes a lower level where is the ksar of Zenaga and its vast palmerai, and a higher level on which are scattered the other six ksars amid their gardens. All are built of sun-dried mud, as are also the two walls, the inner being furnished with round towers at frequent regular intervals. We went on amid a confusion of gardens—fruit-trees with vegetables under them, such as beans and onions, and plots of bright barley in the more open places, but mostly palms, with little else, all springing out of the dry mud; we were past the ruinous-looking stretches of the brown, sunbasking wall, and began to be lost in a narrow canyon, as it were, up which the rude way went between the enclosed gardens. There was hardly width for our horses as we rode in single file on the uneven, climbing path that seemed something like the bed of a torrent, and indeed every now and then water would break out from underground and pour down like a cascade or swift brook, with a delicious sound of running streams. On either side the garden walls rose a great height far over our heads, and above them brimmed branches of fruit-tree tops with the splendid free masses of palms hanging distinct and entire in the bit of blue. We seemed to be walled out of a thick, fertile, and beautiful grove; but they had only the same dry mud for their bed that was under our feet in the narrow, tortuous way. The sun had begun to be hot before we left the plain, and now, in spite of the shelter of the walls, the heat began to make itself felt; there was the dust of the country, too, which, slight as it was that day, is omnipresent; so, being both very thirsty, my friend and I dismounted at a place where the running water came fresh from the yellow ground, and we drank a very cooling draught of its brown stream. It is the scene that I remember best. It was like a defile in a narrow place; the way broadened here by a bend in the steep ascent; one saw the brimming gardens below, and the view was closed above by the turn of the walls; and there, in the hollow, my friend and I leaned over the cascading water and, turning, saw the spahi, as he tightened the girths of my saddle which had loosened, under those walls, brown in the shadow and an orange glow in the sun, with the spring green starred with white blossoms like a tender hedge above their yellow tops, and the leaning palms in the blue. It had a strange charm; and the water made music, and it was solitude, and everything there was of the earth, earthy—and beautiful.
We came out shortly at the top of the ascent in an open space before a round archway in a wall, and dismounted in a scene of Moors passing in and out, whom I photographed; and then we walked on through the low-browed little street, which offered nothing remarkable except its strangeness, and found ourselves at the other side on a high rocky floor, quite mountainous in look, stretching off and off nowhere, which is the neutral ground lying about all the ksars; it looked as if the sun and wind had worn it out, and it had a rugged grandeur; a distant horseman on it seemed uncommonly tall and as solitary as a ship at sea. I got a slim palm wand from a group of Arab boys to use as a switch; but my show of copper coin drew some beggars about me, very insistent, and when we mounted and rode off stones followed us. I have been stoned in various parts of the world and did not mind. The spahi, however, after the incident, took up his station behind. We soon reached another wall with a gate, on one side the inevitable cemetery, with its pointed stones, and on the other the Morocco army in the shape of a small squad of soldiers in soiled gorgeousness, lying about on the ground near their guard-house. They did not have a very military appearance, and paid no attention to us as we rode into the ksar and struck the narrow street, which was the main thoroughfare. It was quite animated, with many passers-by, whose oriental figures were sharply relieved on the walls in the sun or grew dark in the shadow. The houses were low, one against another, and their wall space was broken only by rude doors; here and there were higher buildings, often with little oblong windows aloft, with the effect of a ruined tower, or broken-arched façade, or square donjon; but these elements were rare, though at times they gave an architecturalensembleto little views against the sky with their fine shadows. Poor habitations they are, dilapidated and meagre they look, forlorn and melancholy to the mind, rubbishy, tumble-down, and ruinous to the eye; yet the air of ancientry everywhere dignifies the poor materials, and the sun seems to love them; human life, too, clothes them with its mysterious aura. The crude object partakes of the light it floats in, and every impression fluctuates momentarily through a whole gamut of sense and sensibility; for there is a touch of enchantment in all strangeness.
We dismounted in the middle of the street, half blocking the way with our horses, by a café, whose proprietor, a humble and life-worn old man, set himself to prepare us a cup of the peculiar Morocco tea that is flavored with mint. There were a few passers-by, and I busied myself with my camera. The café was a mere hole in the wall, of preternatural obscurity, considering its small size and shallow depth; the furnace and the teakettle seemed to leave hardly room for the old Arab to move about. I found a camp-stool and sat down opposite the low, dark opening, and, the tea being ready, was drinking it with much relish; it was truly delicious with its strong and fragrant aroma of mint, and was also uncommonly exhilarating. I was thus engaged when two particularly ill-favored Moors, each with a long gun over his shoulder, appeared, and planted themselves, one on either side behind my shoulders, as close as they could get without actually pressing against me, and gazed stolidly and fixedly down at me. I paid no attention to them, but drank my tea, and from time to time dusted my leather leggings with my little palm wand. It was a picturesque group: my friend in his shining white uniform, unarmed, leaning carelessly against the wall in the sun, the tall spahi opposite in the shade regarding us, the two Moors hanging over me motionless, and no one said a word. After a while they seemed to have had enough of it, and went away with a sullen look.
We said good-by to our host and walked on, the spahi following on horseback at a distance of several yards, well behind, and two boys leading our horses. We were soon in the covered ways, where it was often very dark; we met hardly any one—a negro boy or a woman; the doors were shut, and it was seldom that one left ajar gave a scant view of the interior; narrow alleys ran off in all directions, down which one looked into darkness; but if we stopped to peer into them, or showed curiosity, the metallic voice of the spahi would come from behind, “Marchez,” and at the frequent turnings of the way he called, in the same hard voice, “À droite, à gauche”; and so we made our progress through those shadowy vaults, silent, deserted, in the uncertain light. It was like a dead city, motionless, hypnotized, as if nothing would ever change there, with a sense of repose, of negligence of life, of calm, as if nothing would ever matter; occasionally there were figures in the recesses sunk in the wall, silent, motionless—dreamers; one white-bearded old man, seated thus under an archway in a dark corner, seemed as if he had been there from the beginning of time and would be found there on the judgment-day. It was weird. We turned a corner in the darkness and came on a large group—perhaps a score—of young children at play in the middle of the street. I never saw such terror. They fled, screaming, in all directions, swift as wild animals; it was a panic of such instant and undiluted fear as I had never imagined. I cannot forget their awful cry, their distorted faces, their flight, as if for life, the moment they caught sight of us; it was a revelation.
A few minutes later we came out on a crowded square, full of shops, men working at their trades, others lying full length on the ground; it was a small but busy place—not that much was being done there, but there were people, and occupations, and human affairs. It was the gathering seat of the assembly of the elders, before whom the affairs of the ksar are brought for judgment. No one paid us the slightest attention; and after looking at the little stocks of leather and grains and odds and ends, and glancing at the reclining forms that gave color and gravity to the ordinary scene of an Arab square, we entered again on the darkness and somnolence of the winding streets, where there was no sun nor life nor sound, but rather a retreat from all these things, from everything violent in sensation or effort or existence; places of quiet, of cessation, of the melancholy of things. We emerged by a mosque, and near it a cemetery on the edge of the ksar—such a cemetery as they all are, blind, dishevelled heaps of human ruins marked by rough, naked common stones, the desert’s epitaph on life, inexpressibly ignominious there in the bright, bare sunlight. We mounted and rode down through gardens, as at first, on a ridge that commanded now one, now another view of the palm and orchard interiors with their dry beds, a strange mixture of barrenness below and fertility above, a rough but pleasant way; and all at once we saw the great palmerai stretching out below us in the plain, like a lake bathing the cliff, a splendidness of dark verdure; black-green and blue-black lights and darks filled it like a sea—cool to the eye, majestic, immense, magnificent in the flood of the unbounded sunlight, a glory of nature. It was a noble climax to the strange scenes of that morning journey; and soon after we dismounted to make the steep descent on the gray-brown rock of the cliff. The two boys, who had rejoined us, brought down our horses, and we left the half-fallen towers and crumbling walls in their yellow ruin behind us, with the young Arabs still looking, and rode through the hot desert to Beni-Ounif.
This was the mysterious Figuig of old travellers. I had seen it, but it still seemed to me unrealized, though not unreal. A vision of palm-topped garden walls on crumbling mountain paths; of a wind-blown, sunburnt high plateau; of a sun-drenched gully of a street with a strange-windowed, lonely ruin looking down on horses that hang their heads; a maze of darkened passages with a sense of lurking in the shadows, of decay in the silence, of apparition in the rare figures; a closed city of hidden streams and muffled noises, walled orchards and shut houses, sunless ways, yet held in the sun’s embrace, the high blue sky, the girdling mountains, the open desert; and with its stern and rocky gardens of the dead, too; a soil and a people made in the image of Islam, impregnated with it, decrepit with it, full of lassitude and melancholy and doom, mouldering away; yet set amid living fountains, lighted by placid reservoirs where the tall palms sun themselves in the silent waters as in another sky; queen, too, of that dark-green sea of the palmerai, a marvel of nature; and last a vision of long-drawn walls and dismantled towers crumbling in the red sun. It is so I remember it; and it seems rather a mirage of the desert imagination than a reality, a memory.
Beni-Ounifwas dull. There was nothing interesting there except themise en scène. It was pleasant to be dining with officers, for they were the principal patrons of the hotel, with whom stars and crosses were as common as watch-guards in New York; and it was stimulating to see the ensigns of the Legion of Honor where they were something more than the international compliment of a ribbon twisted in a black buttonhole and had their heroic meaning, a decoration on an officer’s breast. The crosses I saw stood for acts of bravery on the field of battle. There were a few other guests who came and went, a French hunter, a Belgian professor who told me of the prehistoric cabinets he had seen farther south, an officer’s remarkable collection, and explained to me the geology of the Sahara in brief and interesting lectures. The town itself never lost for me the vacant and makeshift frontier look that it had at first sight; one could walk from end to end of it in a few minutes and come out on the desert, which was monotony petrified. Nothing happened except the arrival and departure of the daily train. Once I met on the edge of the desert thegoum, a compact small body of native Arab cavalry attached to the French arms, a splendid squad of fighting men; rather heavy and broad-shouldered they looked, wrapped in burnoose and turban, mature men whose life was war, black-bearded, large-eyed, grim—predatory faces; and they were in their proper place, with the naked mountains round and the desert under their horses’ feet—a martial scene of the old raiding race. I should not like to see them at work, I thought; their trade is blood, and they looked it—strong, hard, fierce—pitiless men. But usually there was nothing uncommon to my eyes. Once in the café, where we sat over our long glasses of the fortified liquors and tonic drinks of which there is so great a variety in desert towns, some one brought in a beautiful great dead eagle. It was as if he had been killed in his eyrie to see him there on the desert among the soldiers. We returned to our glasses and our talk: tales of Paris, tales of Odessa in the Revolution, tales of long Algerian rides, encounters, anecdotes of the road—what tales! And other men’s tales, too—Anatole France, Pierre Loti, Maurice Le Blanc, Claude Farrère, Pierre Louÿs—all my favorites, for my friend knew them better than I did, and made me new acquaintances “in the realm of gold” that I like best to travel. What happy talk! and the time went by. I went out alone to see the full moon rise over the solemn desert by the reddish hills in the chill air, and fill the great sky with that white flood of radiance that seemed every night more ethereal, more remote from mankind, more an eternal thing; and at the hotel we would meet again to dine late, for my friend being a private soldier, we waited till the officers were gone; and then again the tales and the happy talk, and good night. That was life at Beni-Ounif.
“Would I like to go to the theatre?” I repeated, for it was an unexpected invitation. “You might not think so, but there is a theatre at Beni-Ounif,” said my friend. So it appeared that the Legion, among the multitude of things it did, occasionally gave a performance of private theatricals for its own amusement, and my friend himself was to play that night. It was a beautiful evening with a cold wind. I made my way through the burly military group wrapped in heavy blue cloaks, with here and there a burnoosed spahi or tall tirailleur, and entering the small hall was given a seat in the front row among a few ladies and very young children, two or three civilians, my Belgian acquaintance being one, and half a dozen officers with their swords and crosses. “The tricolor goes well with the palm,” I said to myself, as I turned to look at the prettily decorated, not overlighted room, where trophies of the colors alternated with panels of palm-leaves on either side and at the rear, giving to the scene a simple, artistic effect of lightness and gayety with a touch of beauty, especially in the palms. It was characteristically French in refinement, simple elegance, and color; there was nothing elaborate, but it was a charming border to the eye, and no framework could have been so fit for that compact mass of soldiers as was this lightly woven canopy of French flags and the desert palm on the bare walls of that rude hall. But it was the men who held my eyes. The room was packed with soldiers of the Legion; a few spahis and tirailleurs stood in the rear or at the sides; there was no place left to stand even; and I looked full on their serried faces. My first thought was that I had never seen soldiers before. I never saw such faces—mature, grave, settled, with the look of habitual self-possession of men who command and obey; resolute mouths, immobile features; there was great sadness in their eyes that seemed to look from some point far back, heavy and weary; they had endured much—it was in their pose and bearing and on their countenances; they had ceased to think of life and death—one felt that; but no detail can give the human depth of the impression I felt at the sight—faces into which life had fused all its iron. And there was, too, in the whole mass the sense of physical life, of hardship and hardihood, and of bodily power to do and bear and withstand—the fruit of the desert air, long marches, terrible campaigns in the sands. It was a sight I shall always remember as, humanly, one of the most remarkable I ever looked on.
The Foreign Legion is commonly believed to be made up of broken men who have in some way found themselves eliminated from society, thrown out or left out or gone out of their own will, whether by misfortune, error, disappointment, or any of the various chances of life, and who have joined the Legion to lose themselves, or because they did not know what else to do with their lives. They come from all European nations and are a cosmopolitan body; and, no doubt, here and there among them is a brilliant talent or a fine quality of daring gone astray; but I imagine a very large proportion of them are simply friendless men who at some moment of abandonment find themselves without resources and without a career, and see in the Legion a last resource. I believe there are great numbers of such friendless men in our civilization. Among the thousands of the Legion there must be, of course, every color of the human past; the losers in life fail for many reasons, and in their defeat become, it may be, incidentally or temporarily, antisocial, or even habitually so, as fate hardens round them with years; but in a great number of cases, I believe, society has defaulted in its moral obligations to them before they defaulted in their moral obligations to their neighbors; and, holding such views, it was perhaps natural that, so far from finding the Legion a band of outcast adventurers and derelicts, I found them very human. I did not read romance or virtue into them. I know the hard conditions of their lives. If there be an inch of hero in a man, he is hero enough for me. The story of the French occupation of Algeria is largely the story of the Legion. For almost a century it has been one of the most effective units of the French army all over the world; and here in Algeria it has been not only a fighting force of the first order, but also a pioneer force of civilization. The legionaries have built the roads, established the military and civil stations, accomplished the first public works, drained and planted; they have laid the material foundations of the new order; they have not only conquered, but civilized in the material sense, and the labor in that land and climate has been an enormous toil. The reclamation of Africa is a great work, sure to be looked on hereafter as one of the glories of France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and I thought, as I turned and the band began the overture, what a comment it was on society that in this great work of the reclamation of Africa from barbarism and blood and sodden misery so large a share was borne by this body of friendless men for whom our civilization could find no use and cared not for their fate. What a salvage of human power and capacity, turned to great uses, was there here! and from moment to moment I looked back on that body of much-enduring men with a keen recurring sense of the infinite patience of mankind under the hard fates of life, of the infinite honor and the infinite pity of it all.
To-night all was light gayety and pleasant jollity. The Legion has one characteristic of a volunteer regiment—its men can do everything, so various are the careers from which it is recruited. Its music is famous, and the orchestra played excellently; and as the first little play began, “Mentons Bleus,” the players showed themselves good amateurs. The audience responded quickly to the situations and the dialogue; there were brightened spirits and much laughter, easy, quiet enjoyment and applause. The second part was a series of songs, done by one performer after another, each doing his stunt with verve and the comedy of the variety stage; there was a full dozen of these light-hearted parts. In the intermissions the men stayed in their seats, though about the doorway there would be a little movement and changeful regrouping, but it was an audience that sat in their places ready for more; there was no smoking. The last number of the programme—a small, pretty double sheet, like note-paper, done by some copying process in pale blue, with a sword, rifle, and cap on the ground before two palms lightly sketched in the lower corner of the title leaf—was another one-act play, “Cher Maître,” and was received with a spirit that seemed only to have been whetted by the previous amusement; and when it was over the evening ended in a round of generous applause and a smiling breaking up of the company after their three hours’ enjoyment. It was pleasant to have been with the Legion on such a night, and to have shared in its little villagefesta, and I stood by the doorway and watched the men go by as they passed out, till all were gone.
It was midnight. The radiant moon poured down that marvellous white flood on the hollow of the desert where the little town lay low and gleaming, very silent. But I could not rid my mind of the soldiers’ lives. I thought of the torrid summer heats here in garrison, of the burning marches yonder in the south, of the days in sterile sands that make the sight of palm and garden a thing of paradise—incredible fatigues, mortal exhaustion, monotony. One cannot know the soldiers’ desert life without some experience; but some impression of it may be gained from soldiers’ books, such as one that is a favorite companion of mine, “Une Promenade dans le Sahara,” by Charles Lagarde, a lieutenant in the Chasseurs d’Afrique, a thoughtful book, full of artistic feeling, and written with literary grace, the memorial of a soldier with the heart of a poet, who served in South Algeria. In such books one gets the environment, but not the life; one touch with the Legion is worth them all. I fell to sleep for my last slumber at Beni-Ounif, thinking of soldiers’ lives, friendless men—