“So near is heaven to our earth,”
“So near is heaven to our earth,”
“So near is heaven to our earth,”
“So near is heaven to our earth,”
I thought, instinctively varying the line to the case; it was an unconsciously bitter jest. It sometimes seems that devotion in races is in proportion to the fewness of the blessings that the lord of heaven and earth gives to his wandering creatures, and this was in my mind. But that bare, earth-walled room with its texts is my most vivid symbol of Arab piety. It is a believing race.
I remember when the reality of their belief first struck home to me. I was driving on the high plains below the peaks of the range on their northern side, returning from Timgad, that magnificent ruin of a Roman city of high civilization which still lifts erect its vistas of columns over the strewn ground of the abandoned plain, and in its vacant desolation brings back to me more vividly than Pompeii, with a greater nobility and dignity, with a finer imperialism, the great Roman world. I had seen it diminish and sink in the low sunlight, and drop behind. Night had long fallen over the uninhabited, long, Colorado-like, starlit slopes where we drove. It was bitter cold, and I had just drawn another sweater over the head of my Arab boy beside me. Suddenly he said with quick and earnest tones: “Le bon Dieuwill take care of you.” I was startled by the intensity of the unexpected voice. “Le bon Dieu,” I said; “what do you mean?” The boy gazed at me steadily. I could see the gleam of his deep eyes in the starlight. “Le bon Dieu,” he said, and nodded up to the sky. That nod was the most convincing act of faith I ever saw. It was plain that he believed in God as he believed in the reality of his own body. I fell silent, thinking in how marvellous ways we are taught; for the boy taught me something. And as the earthen room with its texts is a symbol to me of Arab piety, the boy’s gesture is my symbol of Arab faith—la foi.
I emerged from the obscurity into the brilliant silence of the day; but I could not shake off my oppression. The strange sadness, whose nature I have hinted at, which belongs to the desert, was beginning to make itself known to me. It does not come from the land; it is exhaled from the human spirit in contact with its mortal fate. It may be felt anywhere on the earth; but its home is in the desert. It is sometimes more defined amid the ruins of old cities, or where great tragic events of the race have left their traces on the scene or in the memory—sunt lacrimæ rerum. Here it is indefinable, a mood—mentem mortalia tangunt; something that haunts the brilliancy before the rainless eyes of the race of men who do not lament any particular catastrophe or weep an unusual loss; a half-unconscious sense of the spirit penetrated and impregnated with having lived, with a feeling of its common lot, its universal fate. It marries with the monotony of things, of life. What monotony of life must be here! Who could understand such lives! I felt a darkness under all that I had seen of Arab existence. There is another side, an underworld, beneath what appears on the surface. Read the annals of Arab war, of Arab love, of Arab rule. What cruelty, what baseness, what rapacity! What a power of hate! No pen can tell the horrors of their warfare, their lust for blood and pain, their delight in carnage and savagery. It is the same with the story of their amours—violent, unmeasured, remorseless—explosions of life. The natural happiness of the race is in these things. So they paint the paradise before the French came, when “the true believers divided their time between love, hunting and war, and no one died without having known the drunkenness that an adored mistress or a day of powder gives.” In the race at large, what lower forms does this heritage of the wild take on! One may read the books, hear living tales, share in actual scenes, and so come to stand in the fringes of their experience and temperament; but he does not penetrate into the Arab soul.
I wandered all day in the palmerai and along the river bank, loitered and forded and climbed, and enjoyed sun and wind and prospect; but the echo of the morning sadness did not leave me, nor did it fade from the atmosphere. The desert life had laid its hand upon me. Later, day after day, as I stood in its lights and shadows, and began to understand, the desert moods grew at once more precise and more commingled, and one among them all seemed to absorb the others. It was the feeling of fatality in all things. It is sympathetic with the drift of my own consciousness. In my common days the sphere of our forethought and volition seems small. Our freedom is no more than a child’s leash from the doorstep. We are embedded in an infinite body of law and circumstance; not much is trusted to ourselves alone. Within this narrow range human liberty is a creation of civilization, a partial dethronement of the tyranny of nature without, and of impulse within, a victory of knowledge, invention, and conscience. Submission is written all over the desert world, which is still in touch with the savage state. There man yet remains in large measure the slave and sport of nature and of his own unreasoned vital instincts. It is true that our diminished and shorn personal liberty in the state is a tame wine to the rich vintage of the freedom of the barbarian to kill, to rape, to rob—to eat up his neighbor and all that is his. The barbarian is the true superman, that monster of an all-devouring and irresponsible self-will. The soul of the desert is not barbarous, but emerging from barbarism; it is on the way to some command of nature and to self-rule, and is rich in the ferment of life forces and in personal adventure; but it knows the iron net of necessity in which it is enmeshed. How extraordinary it is to observe that it is from the freedom of desert life that fatalism emerges in its most rigid and thought-vacant form! The first words of the struggling soul in its dim self-consciousness, amid the throes of impotency and defeats of effort, world-wide are: “It is written.” The will of nature, the will of Allah, the will in which is our peace, however the formula be read, is the deepest conviction and last resort of humanity in the stage which it has not yet known, if it shall ever know, to transcend. Fatality stares from the face of the desert, and drops from the lips of its wandering race like leaves from the dying forest. It is the period of all their prayers.
Moods of the desert, which are also scenes and visions! the infinity, the solitude, the monotony;la misère, la foi, la tristesse; fate, peace! They are not words, but things; not thoughts, but experiences; not sentiments, but feelings. On the page they are shadows; there they are realities.
ON THE MAT
VI
ON THE MAT
IT was afternoon in a small oasis village of the Zibans. I was seated on a straw mat in a little garden-space just outside the café, and dreamily regarding the intense blue sky through the vine leaves trellised overhead, which flecked me with their shadows. An old Arab was praying just in front. Two groups, one on each side of me, were placidly seated on clean, yellow mats—young men, whose dark, sad faces, thin-featured and large-eyed, contrasted with their white robes. They were smoking kif—a translucence of gold in their clear, bronze skin, a languor of light in their immobile gaze, content. The garden made off before me, topped with palmy distance; the silent street, to one side, was out of sight, as if it were not. It was a place of peace. I had finished my coffee and dates. I filled my brier-wood. The May heat was great, intense; and I settled myself to a long smoke, and fell into reverie and recollection.
How simple it all was! That praying Arab—what an immediacy with God! What a nonchalance in the dreamy pleasures of those delicate-featured youths! What a disburdenment was here! I had only to lift my index-finger to heaven dying, to be one of the faithful; and the fact was symbolic, exemplary, of the simplicity of Islam. It makes the minimum demand on the intellect, on the whole nature of man. I had but lately placed the faith in its true perspective, historically. Mohammedanism, the Ishmael of religions, was the elder brother of Protestantism, notwithstanding profound differences of racial temperament between them. The occidental mind is absorbent, conservative, antiseptic. It is not content, like the Mohammedan, to let things lie where they fall, disintegrate, crumble, and sink into oblivion. Western education fills the mind with the tangle-foot of the past. Catholicism was of this racial strain. It had a genius for absorption. It was the melting-pot of the religious past, and what resulted after centuries was an amalgam, rich in dogma, ritual, and institution, full of inheritance. The Reformation was an attempt to simplify religion and disburden the soul of this inheritance in so far as it contained obsolete, harmful, or inessential elements; many things, such as saint’s worship, art, celibacy, were excised. Mohammedanism, ages before and somewhat differently placed, initiating rather than reforming a faith, was an effort of the desert soul to adapt to itself by instinct the Semitic tradition of God that had grown up in it, and to simplify what was received from its neighbors. The founder of Islam was more absolute and radical in exclusion than the reformers in elimination. Islam had a genius for rejection. Mohammed, with the profound monotheistic instinct that was racial in him, affirmed the unity of God with such grandeur and decision that there was no room in the system for that metaphysical scrutiny of the divine nature in which Catholic theology found so great a career; on the other hand, with his positive sense of human reality, which was also racial, he shut out asceticism, in which Catholic conscience worked out its illustrious monastic future. He had achieved a reconciliation between religion and human nature in the sphere of conduct, and he had silenced controversial dogma in its principal field in the sphere of theology.
A creed so single and elementary had no need of a priesthood to preserve and expound it. There was no room for a clergy here, and there was none. The Reformation diminished but did not end the priest; Islam suppressed him; yet there remained much analogy between Mohammedanism and Protestantism in the field of religious phenomena in which the priest is embryonic. Protestantism is the best example in human affairs of the actual working of anarchy; and, in proportion as its sects recede from the authority and organization of the Catholic Church, it presents in an increasing degree, in its individuality of private judgment and freedom of religious impulse, the anarchic ideal of personal life. Islam offers in practice a similar anarchy. I was struck from the beginning with an odd resemblance to my native New England in this regard. It, too, has been a Marabout-breeding country, with its old revivals, transcendentalists, new lights, Holy Ghosters, and venders of Christian Science. Emerson was a great Marabout. The Mormons, who went to Utah and made a paradise in the desert, were not so very different from the Mzabites who planted an oasis-Eden in the Saharan waste. The communities that from time to time have sprung up and died away, or dragged on an unnoticed life in country districts, are analogous, at least, to the zaouias scattered through this world of mountain and sand. In many ways my first contacts with the faith were sympathetic. The faith that had no need of an intellectual subsidy, that placed no interdict on human nature, that interposed no middlemen between the soul and God, woke intelligible responses in my agnostic, pagan, and Puritan instincts; here, too, was great freedom for the religious impulse and toleration of its career; and I saw with novel interest in operation before my eyes the religious instinct of man, simple in idea, direct in practice, free in manifestation, and on the scale of a race. It was the desert soul that was primarily interesting to me—its environment, its comprehension of that, its responses thereto; and, examining it thus, its religion seemed a thingintimeand scarcely separable from its natural instincts and notions.
What is it that is borne in on the desert soul, when it wakes in the great silence, the luminosity, the boundless surge of the sands against the sky! Immensity—the feeling of the infinite—nature taking on the cosmic forms of God. The desert is simple. It has few features, but they are all elements of grandeur. It is the mood of the Psalms. Awe is inbred in the desert dweller. There is, too, a harmony between these few elements in their superb singleness and his lowly mind; not much is required of him, and that little is written large for his understanding; he takes things in wholes. His mind is primary, intuitive, not analytical; he does not multiply thought, he beholds; and this vision of the world he lives in, a wonderfully grand and simple world, suffices for a religious intuition as native to him as the palm to the water-source. The palm is a monotheistic tree. Monotheism belongs to the desert. The faith of the desert is a theism of pure nature, unenriched by any theism of humanity, of the human heart in its self-deification; it is a spiritualization of pure nature worship, whereas Christianity, at least under some aspects, is the grafting of a human ideal on an old cosmogony. The God of the desert is an out-of-doors god, like the Great Spirit of the Indians, who had no temples. No mosque can hold him; there is no altar there, no image. He cannot be cloistered; he has no house, no shrine, where one can repair, and abide for a time, and come away, and perhaps leave religion behind in a place of its own. He is in the desert air; and the desert dweller, girt with that immensity, wherever his eye falls can commune with him; five times daily he bows down in prayer to him and has the intimate sense of his being; he does not think about him—he believes.
The desert cradles, nurses, deepens, colors, and confirms this belief. It is a land of monotony, full of solitude and silence. The impression it thus made upon me was profound, and amounted to an annihilation of the past. The freshness of the wilderness, as the discoverer feels it, lay there; it abolished what was left behind; the Old World had rolled down the other side of the mountains. Life in its turmoil and news, its physical clamor and mental clatter, life the distraction, had ceased. It was not that silence had fallen upon it; but the soul had gone out from it and returned to the silence of nature. There is no speech in that rosy ring of mountain walls, in the implacable gold of the sands undulating away to the blue ends of earth, in the immutable sky; they simply are. In the passage of the winds there is stillness. It is not that there are no sounds. The hush is of the soul. Monotonous? Yes. That is its charm. Monotony belongs to the simple soul; and what is monotone to the eyes of the desert dweller is monotone in the ideas and emotions of his psychology. Repetition belongs to Islam; its words and rites, its music and dances are stereotyped, something completely intelligible, identically recurrent, like tales that please children—the same stories in the same words. Prayer and posture, formula and rhythm, endlessly renewing the same idea and the same sensation—they imprint, they intensify; desert moulds, they help the soul to retain its conscious form. The larger mind that discriminates, analyzes, and explores, may tire of this; but it also finds in such a solitude, full of silence and monotony, a place where the soul collects itself, integrates, and has more profoundly the sense of its own being.
The desert is not only the generator and fosterer of the desert soul in its spiritual attitude, its practices and processes, by the larger and universal elements in the environment, but in more detailed ways it provides the atmosphere of life. It is strangely sympathetic with the dweller upon its sands. He is a nomad; and the desert is itself nomadic. The landscape is a shifting world. The dunes travel. The scene dissolves and rebuilds. The sand-hills lift a sculptured mountain edge upon the blue, swells like the bosom of a wave, precipices and hollows like mountain defiles, outlooks, and hiding-places in the valleys, and the surface shall be finely mottled and delicately printed and patterned with lace-work as far as the eye can see. The wind erases it in a night, hollows the hills and fills the hollows; it is gone. The oases disappear; they are like islands sinking in the sea of driving sands; you see their half-sunken trees like ruins buried beneath the wave, still visible in the depths. The face of the land is ephemeral; to leave the route is to be lost. And after the wind, the light begins its play. The lakes of salt and saltpetre, the lifeless lands, the irremediable waste—ruins of some more ancient and primordial desolation, the region cursed before its time with planetary death—change, glitter, disclose placid reaches of palm-fringed water, island-paradises, mirage beyond mirage in the far-reaching enchantment, strips of fertility like lagoons on the mineral mud as when one sees a valley-land through clouds. The heat gives witchcraft to the air; size and distance are transformed; what is small seems gigantic, what is far seems beside you; a flock of goats is a cavalcade, a bush is a strange monster. To the nomad in those moving sands, in that air of illusion and vision, in those imprecise horizons, the solid earth might seem the stuff that dreams are made on. The desert is a paradox; immutable, it presents the spectacle of continuous change.
Nowhere is the transitory so suggested, set forth, and embodied. Here is the complete type of human existence, permeated with impermanence, the illusory, and oblivion, yet immutable; the generations are erased, but humanity abides with the same general aspects. The land is a type, too, of the desert past—its tribes globing into hosts and dispersed, its dynasties that crumble and leave not a ruin behind, its inconsecutiveness in history, wars like sand-storms, peace without fruition. It is on this life, and issuing from its mortal senses, that there falls the impalpable melancholy and intimate sadness of the desert. The formlessness of the vague envelops all there; it is the path of the unfinished, the illimitable; it is the bosom of the infinite where life is a momentary foam. Mystery is continuous there, a perpetual presence. Its human counterpart, its image in the soul, isla rêve, the dream, reverie, as changeful, as illusory, that takes no root, fades, and vanishes. It is not a merely contemplative sadness; it is a physical melancholy. The oases are full of fever, of the incredible languors of the heat—breath is a weight upon the lungs, blood is weariness in the veins, life is an oppression and an exhaustion. It revives, but it remembers. There is a swift spring-time of life, a resilience, a jet, of the eternal force, and age comes like night with a stride. Death is the striking of the tent. It is quickly over. You shall see four men passing rapidly with the bier, a wide frame on which the body lies, wrapped in white; in the barren place of the dead they dig with haste a shallow hollow in the sand; they stand a moment in the last prayer; they have covered the grave swiftly and stuck three palm twigs in the loose sand, and are gone. A change of day and night, of winter and summer, of birth and death, and at the centre the wind-blown desert and the frail nomad tent; and then, three palm twigs in the nameless sand.
The desert gives new values to life. It is a rejuvenation of the senses, a perpetual renaissance. The fewness of objects and their isolation on the great scene increase their worth to the eye, and in the simple life all trifles gain in meaning through receiving more attention; the pure and bracing air invigorates the whole body in all its functions, and the light is, in particular, a stimulant to the eye. The intensification of the pleasures of the senses is due also to the austerities and hardships of life in the waste and the change from suffering to ease. To the nomad, after the rigors of the sands, heat and thirst and glare, all vegetation has the freshness of spring-time; the oasis, welcoming his eyes, is, in truth, an opening paradise. The toiling caravan, the French column, know what it means. The long, black-green lines of the oasis over the sands is like the breaking of light in the east; the sound of running water is a music that reverberates in all their nerves; fruits hanging in cool shadows, flowers, groves—it isla vie, the great miracle, again dreaming the beautiful dream in the void. After the hamada, the desert route, it is paradise. It is impossible to conceive of the sensual intensity of this delight, of its merely bodily effervescence. The Arabs are a sensual race, and the desert has double charged their joys with health and hardship; their poverty of thought is partly recompensed by fulness of sensation. The oases are not gardens in the European sense; they are rude and arid groves and orchards and fields, with a roughness of untamed nature in the aspect of the soil; and the desert everywhere is savage in look, with the uncared-for reality, the nakedness, and the wild glory of primeval things. Yet I have never known habitually such delicacy and poignancy of sensation. The wind does not merely blow, it caresses; the landscape does not smile, it mirrors and gives back delight; odors and flavors are penetrating; warmth and moisture bathe and cool; there is something intimate in the touch of life. There is a universal caress in nature, a drawing near—something soothing, lulling, cadenced—felt in the blood and along the nerves, avoluptédiffused and physical; for there is a flower of the senses, as there is a flower of the mind, as refined in its exhalation, in the peace of vague horizons, in wafted fragrances of the night, in luminosities of the atmosphere, in floating vapors of morning, in the dry bed of the oued under the moon, in the pomegranate blossom, in the plume of the date-palm flower, in all evanescence, the companionship of some little thing of charm, the passing of a singing voice. The desert is rich in those mysteries of sensation that remain in their own realm of touch and eye and ear, reverie and dream. It is a garden of the senses; and the wild flavor of the garden gives a strange poignancy to its delights.
This sensuality prolongs its life in the higher faculties; it penetrates and impregnates the mental consciousness; memory and imagination are strongly physical; the soul-life itself is deeply sensuous. It is, in this primitive psychology, as if one should see the coral insects building up beneath the wave the reef that should emerge on a clear-skied world. The desert music reveals this most clearly. Sensation, as has been often said, enters into the arts in varying degrees. Literature is the most disembodied of the arts; its images are most purely mental and free from physical incarnation; then, in order, painting, sculpture, music include greater actuality of sensation by virtue of which æsthetic pleasure, as it arises from them, is more deeply drenched in physical reality. The senses are preliminary to the intellect; that is why the arts precede the sciences in human evolution. The desert dweller has no sciences, and his only art is music, which itself is in a primitive stage, being still characteristically joined with the dance in its original prehistoric union. The Arabs sit, banked on their benches, apathetic, gazing, listening, while the monotonous rhythm of the dance and the instruments rises, sways, and terminates, and begins again interminably. What is their state? It is an obsession, more or less profound, of memory and imagination, retrospective or prospective experience, felt with physical vagueness, defined, vivified, and made momentarily present by the swaying dancer in the emotional nimbus of the music. It is the audience at only one remove from participation in the dance, contemplative but still physically reminiscent of it. The dances are of two general types: that of the negroes, a physical hysteria, full of violent gesture, leaping, and loud cries, the barbaric paroxysm; the other that of Arab origin, a voluptuous cadencing to a monotonously responsive accompaniment. The desert dweller is a realist; his emotions, his desires have not transcended the facts of life; his poetry, so far as it exists, and there is a considerable amount of it, is one of simple and positive images. Mysticism, in the intellectual sense, the transformation of the senses into the spirit, does not exist for him; not nearer than Persia is the mystic path which leads to the ecstasy of the soul’s union with the divine, of the Bride with the Bridegroom; the desert knows nothing of that Aryan dream. Sensation remains here in its own realm; and its summary artistic form is music, itself so physically penetrating in its method and appeal. The music of the desert is to me very attractive; it engages me with its simple and direct cling; snatches of carolled song, the humble notes of its flutes, the insistence of its instruments fascinate and excite me. It is the music of the senses.
The sensuality of the Arabs also found other climaxes, in love and war. It is the intensity of their passion and of their fighting which has charged their history, as a race, with its greatest brilliancy; and at their points of highest achievement a luxurious temperament has characterized them, which has made an Arabian dream the synonym for all strange and soft delights. The desert in its degree has thismollesse, physical languors, exhaustion; but its home is in the oasis-villages. The true nomad contemns the oasis-dwellers as a softened, debilitated, and corrupt race; the life of the nomad is purer, hardier, manlier; he is the master; the oasis pays him tribute. The life of the senses, however, in either form, passes away; vitality ebbs the more swiftly because of its rapid and intense play; pallor falls on the sensations, they fade, and joy is gone. Melancholy from its deepest source supervenes; in the desert—age in its abandonment, decay, and poverty; in the oasis—life somnolent, effeminate, drugged. The wheel comes full circle in the end for all. Meanwhile the vision of life is whole, and goes ever on. Youth is always there in its beauty and freshness. There is always love and fighting. Nature does not lose her universal caress. The desert soul still adores the only God in his singleness. There is great freedom. The route calls. It is human life, brave, picturesque, mysterious—beset by the sands, but before it always the infinite.
Yet, fascinated though I was, I was aware of some detachment. Sweet was the renaissance of the senses—what brilliancy and joy in their play—merely to look, to breathe, to be! To have come into one of the titanic solitudes of nature, comparable only to ocean wastes and amplitudes of the sky, and to dwell there, far from the mechanic chaos, the unbridled egotism, the competitive din—what a recovery of the soul was there, of human dignity, of true being! and to find there a race still in a primitive simplicity, unburdened by thought, not at warfare with its mortal nature, the two poles of the spirit and the body married in one sphere—and to feel the rude shepherding of nature round their nomad lives, inured to hardship, but swiftly responsive with almost animal vitality to her rare kindlier moods and touches—it was a discovery of the early world, of ancestral, primeval ways. It was a refreshment, a disburdenment, an enfranchisement; and it was a holiday delight. Yet over these simplicities, austerities, and wild flavors there still hung a moral distance, something Theocritean, the mood of the city-dweller before pastoral charm. To sit in the café in the throng of Arabs with the coffee and the dance, to muse and dream on the mat alone, to lie apart in the garden and be content—it was a real participation; but in the background behind, in the shadow of my heart, was the old European though eluded. This life had the quality of escapade—to see things lying crumbled and fallen with none to care, to be free of the eternal salvage of dead shells of life and thought—a world so little encumbered with the heritage of civilization! How many years had I spent, as it were, in a museum of things artificially preserved in books, like jars—in the laboratory of the intellectual charnel-house! The scholar, accumulating the endless history of human error, has no time to serve truth by advancing it in his own age; he lives so much with what was that he cannot himself be; his inheritance eats him up. The crown of Western culture is apt to be an encyclopædia. There was no library in the desert. And religion—how much of it comes to us moderns in a dead form! Surely religion is a revelationofthe soul, nottoit. This is a doctrine of immanence. If the divine be not immanent in the soul, man can have no knowledge of it. Religion is an aura of the soul, a materialization of spiritual consciousness, varying in intensity of light and tones of color from race to race, from age to age, and, indeed, from man to man; it is the soul’s consciousness made visible. It is not to me interesting as scientific truth is, a thing of worth in the realm of the abstract, but rather as artistic truth is, a vital expression, something lived. What a reality it had here in the desert soul—its effluence, almost its substance, giving back the spiritual image of nature in humanity, a condensation of the vast spaces, the vague horizons, the monotony, the mortal burden, in a prayer! It is a new baptism into nature, if not unto God, only to see this aura of the soul in the desert. The scene in all its phases—landscape and men—was to me an evocation of the long ago. But the soul does not return upon its track. The simple life is only for the simple soul. The soul of the old European is not simple. Yet if the leopard could change his spots, if one could lay off the burden of thought, lay staff and scrip aside, and end the eternal quest, nowhere else could he better make the great refusal and set up an abiding-place as in this nomad world. Its last word is resignation; peace is its last desire.
The desert world is a dying world. That is the sadly shadowing, slowly mounting, fatally overwhelming impression that grows on the mind and fills it. Death is the aspect of the scene; sterility, blankness, indifference to life. Inhospitality is its universal trait and feature. It is as hostile to animal and vegetable as to human life—its skeleton lakes without fishes, its drifting valleys without birds, its steppes without roving herds. Its oases are provisioned with water and bastioned with ramparts against the eternal siege of the sands; to preserve them is like holding Holland against the sea. The mere presence of man, too—what is human—shares in this aspect of death. I have mentioned the cemeteries, mere plots of extinction, anonymous, without dates, leaving nothing of degradation to be added to the sense of hopelessness, futility, and oblivion. The dwelling-places of the living are hardly more raised above the soil or distinguishable from the earth they crumble into—typically seen in those ksour of the south, cracked, with gap and rift, dissolving in ageless decay and abandonment, mere heaps over the underground darkness of passages and cells—or here embosomed in a great silence, full of solitude and secrecy, the life of the palm garden, of the great heats, of the frigid nights; always and everywhere with the sense of an immense desolation, denudation, and deprivation. The life of the tent is one of sunshine and vitality by comparison; humble and rugged, it has no decadence in its look; in the villages the decadence seems almost of the soil itself. One goes out into the desert to escape the oppression of this universal mortal decay; and there is no life there, only a passage of life, of which the skeleton of the camel in the sands is the epitaph.
A dying world and a race submissive to its fate. In that nomad world, where everything is passing away, there is nothing fixed but the will of Allah. It is not strange to find fatality the last word of Islam. In the desert world the will of nature appears with extreme nakedness; the fortune of man is brief, scant, and unstable; the struggle is against infinite odds, a meagre subsistence is gained, if at all; and the blow of adversity is sudden and decisive. Patience everywhere is the virtue of the poor, resignation the best philosophy of the unfortunate, and defeat, as well as victory, and perhaps more often, brings peace. These are great words of Islam, and nowhere have they sunk deeper into life than in the desert-soul. They are all forms of that fatality which the desert seems almost to embody in nature, to exercise in the lives of its children, and to implant in their bosoms as the fundamental fact of being. Fatality is in the outer aspect of things and exhales from the inward course of life; melancholy, impotence, immobility accumulate with the passage of years; effortless waiting, indolence, prayer, contemplation—these are the shadows in which is the end. This mood of the despair of life has nowhere more lulling cadences of death. The desert is a magnificent setting for the scene—its strong coloring, its vast expanses, its unfathomable silences; its desolate grandeurs, its sublime austerities, its wild glory—godlike indifference to mankind; its salt chotts, immense as river valleys, tufts of the sand-sunken palms—premonitions of the disappearance of life from the earth, the final extinction of that vital spark which was the wildfire of the planet, the thin frost work on the flaking rock, the little momentary breath of love and war and prayer. Here life takes on its true proportions at the end—all life; it is an incident, a little thing in the great scene. A dying world, a dying race, a dying civilization, truly; but the old European, the wise pessimist in the shadow, has seen much death; to him it is but another notch on the stick. To me, personally near to it and fascinated in my senses still, it istrès humain, exciting, engaging; and the melancholy that penetrates it ever more deeply and mysteriously does not interfere with its charm, its blend of delicacy and hardiness, of spirit and sense, of freedom and fate. I have a touch of the heart of the desert-born. “If love of country should perish from the earth,” said my soldier-poet, “it would be found again in the heart of the Bedouin.” No race is more attached to the soil, or so consumed with home-sickness for it. The Bedouin loves the desert.
A strangething to me was the absence of any political state. There has never been a political state, properly speaking, in the desert. Such was the parcelling of the communities, so elementary the governmental form, so feeble the impulse of political aggregation and cohesion, that the general condition might seem to be an anarchy. In the Kabyle villages of the mountains and among the Mzabites of the Sahara the assemblies of the elders with the election and change of head men present an aspect of such primitive simplicity and independence that they might be thought freemen’s institutions of an ideal purity; on the other hand, the absence of any political centres of concentration forbade the formation of a nation. The recognition of the tribal blood-tie conserved groups, smaller or larger, with a greater or less sense of unity; but feud was the natural condition of these units, extending to the smallest and even into families, and in the larger world political history found only hordes hastily massing for temporary ends and dissolving in a night, or empires of facile conquest and loose tributary bonds, of the nature of a primacy rather than a sovereignty, and without long continuity of life. Public order, with its correlatives, security and peace, was little realized, and, however ideal local institutions might seem within the group, it was, viewed largely, a barbaric world.
A very pure democracy in its primitive form prevailed. All men were equal before Allah, and the condition of equality generally obtained also between man and man. Inequality belongs to civilization; the absence of that, and especially the lack of security for wealth and its inheritance, of an official class of state functionaries and a clerical hierarchy, and pre-eminently the lack of knowledge, removed main sources of that differentiation which has stratified modern society. There was a noblesse of the sword and also of religion, grounded originally on descent from Mohammed or more generally and powerfully here in the West from some Marabout, but neither class was really separated from the people. The only effective source of inequality wasvirtù—real ability. Tradition made it the glory of the Arab noble to dissipate his patrimony in gifts to his friends and to rely on the booty of his own hand for himself. Ignorance, besides, is a great leveller, and poverty is the best friend of fraternity; liberty was native to the soil. It was a society where all men had substantially the same ideas, customs, and desires, thought and acted, lived, in the same way. It was a natural democracy, and inbred; and to-day this trait is one of the most striking and refreshing that a sojourn among its people brings to notice, for it is a real democracy, unconscious of itself, vital, and admirable in its human results.
Race-consciousness found historic expression only in the religious field. The spots where the faith first began on the soil, the tombs of great leaders in the conquest, such as that of Sidi Okba in the oasis not far away, the white domes of the Marabouts sown like village spires through all this land, were places of sacred memory, centres of race-consciousness, and here took the function of integrating the common soul of the race, as, in other civilizations, political memorials of great public events and famous men develop national consciousness. In the desert patriotism and faith are one emotion. The ideal Mohammedan state is a pure theocracy in which the political and spiritual powers are one and inseparable; where this condition prevails is thedar el Islam, the land of Islam, the soil of the true faith; elsewhere, wherever the union is imperfect or the faith must concede to the infidel, is thedar el harb, or, as we should say, missionary countries. Neither Turkey nor Egypt isdar el Islam; its narrow, though still vast, realm is the Libyan sands, where it still refuges its people. It is an arresting sight when religion goes into the desert to be with God; the Pilgrims of theMayflower’swake, the Mormons of the sunflower trail fill the imagination with their willingness to give up all, to go forth and plant a new state sacred to their idea. It is always an heroic act. Such a coming out from among the world, such a going forth into the inhospitable waste has been characteristic of desert history. Solitude is the natural home of orthodoxy, of the fanatic sect and the purist. Mohammedanism in its primary stage was a particular religion of a desert people; in its secondary stage, as a conquering faith, it had to develop its capacity for internationalism, its powers of adaptation to other breeds and of absorption of foreign moods and sentiments, its fitness to become a world religion; in itself also there was necessarily the play of human nature involving, as time went on, a variation into sects, heresies, innovations; thus, for example, it absorbed mysticism from the extreme East and whitened the West with the worship of saints. The faith was purer and more rigid in the desert, generally speaking, and was there more primitively marked; there it was safest from contaminating contacts; and there also Western civilization, closing round and penetrating its realm, finds the most fanatic and obdurate resistance.
Race-resistance to the invasion of the modern world, naturally following the lines of race-consciousness, notwithstanding the aid it received in the beginning of the struggle from the old feudality of the desert, had its stronghold in religion and its organization; and, specifically, it found its practical rallying-points and strongest alignment in the confraternities, or secret orders, with their zaouias, analogous to mediæval abbeys and monasteries, which had so great a development in North Africa in the last century—some more enlightened in leadership and capable of assimilating Western benefits in some degree, others stupidly impervious to the new influences and events. These brotherhoods, whose nomadic agents under the guise of every humble employment course the land with great thoroughness, are ideal organizations for agitation, collecting and disseminating news, preparing insurrection, fomenting and perpetuating discontent and secret hope; it is they and their machinations that are back of the Holy War, as a race idea. They are all hearths of the faith; but some, such as the Tidjaniya, recognizing both the fact of French power and the reality of the benefits it confers, are committed to political submission and peace; others are less placable, and nurse eternal hate of the infidel, with a credulous hope of expelling him from the land; and one, the most irreconcilable and the most powerful, is an active foe. This fraternity is the Snoussiya, having its seat at Djarbout, in the Libyan desert, where it has constituted a veritable empire of the sands, a pure Mohammedan state; it has divided with the neighboring empire of the Mahdi, and with that of the Sultan of Morocco, the proud title ofdar el Islam. Sidi Snoussi, the founder, was a humbletalebof Medjaher, in the province of Oran. He preached the exodus, and led the recalcitrant and irreconcilable into the Cyrenaica, and there by virtue of his natural ability and enterprise built up a state, to which his sons have succeeded, the eldest of them having been already designated by his father as the promised Mahdi, the always expected Messiah of Islam, who should restore its power as the true kingdom of God on earth. It is this state which is the centre of Panislamism, the hope of a reunion of the entire Mohammedan world after the fall of the Sultan at Constantinople should be accomplished. The desert round about owns its sovereignty from Egypt to Tunis, and it is buttressed on the south by the negro states which it has joined in proselytizing, converting them from their savage fetichism.
The spirit of proselytism has always been active in North Africa. The story of its saints from early days contains a missionary element, acting at first on the indigenous barbarism of the desert and mountains and extending at a later period to the negro populations of the Soudan. The Snoussiya, together with other Mohammedan agents, has conducted a proselytism to the south which has been astonishing in its success and has long arrested European attention. Islam is, indeed, well adapted to convert inferior peoples, and adopts an intelligent policy in practice. The simplicity of the faith, the absence of any elaborate dogma or ritual, its slight demand on the intellect, together with its avoidance of anything ascetic in its rule of life, made it easily acceptable in itself; and its tolerant advance, without pressure, on the imitative instincts, the ambitions and interests of the savage populations with which it is in political and commercial contact, secures its spread without irritation or disturbance. It is the warrior race of the Foulbés in the Soudan who have most carried forward this movement of mingled spiritual, political, and commercial conquest; beside these, like the Jew by the Arab, are the Haoussas, a black race, with a commercial instinct, who established themselves under the protection of the Foulbés; they, generally speaking, have the monopoly of instruction and are the simple teachers of the region; the fetichistic tribes, coming under the influence of these Moslem expansionists by conquest, protectorate, marriage, in one and another way of the old and universal methods of the transformation of a lower race by a higher, are thus added to the domain of Islam. So important is this religious change, and so striking is the event, that some Catholic bishops have seen in it a providential preparation by an intermediate state for a future evangelization. What is noteworthy is the active spread of Mohammedanism contemporaneously in Central Africa and its close connection with the power of the Snoussiya, the most energetic and fanatic centre of Islam. The dream of the poor preacher of Oran has come partly true: in leading the irreconcilable into the Libyan desert and building a refuge for them in the most desolate wastes of the eastern Sahara, in thedar el Islam, he established a new centre for the faith in a region backed by populations where its natural spread is great and its presence is likely to be long continued, and he aroused through all the Mohammedan world the spirit of Panislamism. It is in his work and the fruit of it that race-resistance to the impact of the modern world on the old life of the desert all along the African coasts of the Sahara finds its climax, its centre, and its hope; elsewhere it has ebbed slowly away.
That retreat of the old faith into the desert out of whose immensity it was born, to die if need were in its own cradling sands, far from the pollutions of the modern and changed world, excites the imagination and commands admiration. It might be the episode of an epic, with itsmise en scène, its protagonist, its atmosphere of travel and assemblage, and the coloration of its auxiliary tribes. It has classical poetic quality. But to the meditative mind the fortunes of thedar el harb, the nearer land of the infidel, is more profoundly impressive. It is a curious feeling that comes over one at the thought that he is present at the death of a race and has before his eyes the passing away of a civilization, and that civilization a culture in its essential features once common to the human family. That is the scene here—the passing of the early world. It is like the passing of the Indian world of the wilderness from America that our fathers saw, only in a more concentrated scene and on a more impressive scale—the death of an ancient mode of life in its home of centuries, full of memory going back to the dawn of history. It is a solemn thing for the reflective mind to witness, hard to realize adequately. Agriculture is gaining on the pastoral state, supplanting it; the nomad is slowly becoming fixed to the soil; the towns increase in number and population and in the variety of their life; peace, order, security establish themselves; capital, science arrive—companies, railways, telegraphs, communication, and transportation—and the face of life is changed; in a few years there will be no more caravans to Tougourt, to Tripoli, to Ghadamès—they will be legends like the mule-trains and prairie-schooners of the old emigrant West.
The economic change is most obvious, the inrush of the mechanical and cosmopolitan, colonization and exploitation, public works and private enterprise, securing and furnishing the territory for a commercial tillage and use. Is it a dispossession of the native from the soil or is it a means by which he may more justly enjoy it? The people, in the old days, lived in a sort of serfage to the nomads or the zaouias. The French régime put an end to desert feudality, but treated the zaouias with more consideration, owing to their religious character. The zaouias of Algeria, notwithstanding some counter-currents among them, generally accepted French rule and co-operated with it. The result, nevertheless, was largely a lessening of the economic lordship of the religious families at the head of these establishments and an enfranchisement of the people from dependence upon them. The zaouias were sources of great communal benefit; they practised especially the Moslem virtues of alms-giving and hospitality; but they also took tithes and offerings. Their social importance has diminished; and, in place of the old half-patriarchal, half-feudal system, society takes on the modern structure of economic individualism. The impersonal administrative system, dealing with all in an individual way, shivered the primitive economic collectivity of society at a stroke. The modern world has come; capital, wages, earnings bring new arrangements and ways of living; the economic career in a commercial world is open and safe, wealth is its prize, competence is possible for those who can maintain themselves in the way; the new dispensation—the future, has begun. Life is more free, more just, fuller of opportunity, and it is also more difficult; new desires, new temptations, and new needs arise; the cost is greater. Civilization enforces the higher standard of living even on the lowliest. This is the material fact most powerful in transformation. It is a fact inherent in progress.
The change in manners is the superficial expression of economic changes. There is an ingathering into the towns, and, as always, in the first contacts of a comparatively primitive race with a luxurious civilization the corruption of manners and morals is patent; the weakening of the old fibre of life before the new fibre has time to form occasions a moral displacement. This is most noticeable in the cities of the coast, but in some degree is everywhere to be seen. There is, as it were, a sifting of classes; the more advanced, those who are most sensitive to the new and most free and bold, begin an exodus from thecafé Maureto the European restaurant; they imitate the foreigner, ape his ways and take the mould of his habits; the Frenchvietends to establish itself as the ideal, to a greater or less degree, among the forward spirits and the young; old haunts and customs are left with the lower class in thecafé Maure. The chief support of the general change, broadly speaking, is the instruction in French schools throughout the provinces, which reduces the old language to a country dialect and secures a certain glamour for the new régime and naturalizes it as apatriefamiliar from childhood, protective, and opening the ways of life. A vital point is the extent to which, in this change of manners and ideals religion, the faith, is affected. It appears to be conceded that the practice of the faith formally is weakened. It is a faith in which the rite counts heavily; the doing of certain acts, as a matter of observance, is a large part of its reality; but a default in the practice of religion is never a sure index to a decline in belief. Belief habitually outlives practice. It is certain that no Christianizing takes place. The White Brothers, the Catholic missionaries of the Sahara, have long confined their efforts to works of humanity and simple helpfulness, abandoning attempts at conversion. If the religion of Islam grows feebler in its hold, it means that free thought, scepticism, and indifference come in its place. Perhaps the fundamental fact is that the larger sphere which existed for religion in the old days no longer exists. The hermit is a holy man largely because he has nothing else to do except to be holy; and religion fills the world of Islam partly, at least, because of the absence of other elements in that primitive monotonous life. The modern world has brought with it into the desert a great variety of novel interests, a diversified life, stimulating curiosity and attention and often absorbing practical participation in the new movement on the part of the people in trade, enterprise, amusement, information, news. It appears to be agreed that in the parts of longest occupancy by the French there has been a relaxation of religious practice and a softening of fanatic hatred, concurrently with a corruption of morals and degeneracy of racial vigor where European contact has been most close.
The final question is of the issue. The population has greatly increased under French rule. The development of the country in a material way goes on apace. The colonial empire of France in Africa has a great commercial future. Will the native people in this new economic civilization be able to hold fast and secure for its own at least a share of the products of this great movement, or will they be merely a servile race in the service of French proprietors and over-lords, or in a condition of economic serfage to vast accumulations of capital, analogous to that of industrial workers in our capitalistic society? Will the moral decay, incident to the change of civilizations, eat them up and destroy them, as has been the luck of half-barbaric peoples elsewhere in their contact with the modern world? In a word, is the Berber people, for that race is here the general stock and stamina, capable of assimilating this civilization and profiting by it? These are questions of a far future. Meanwhile the best opinion is sharply divided upon them. Historically, the Berber race has shown assimilative power racially by its absorption of the foreign bloods that have crossed it from the earliest days: the northern barbarians, the Arabs of the great invasion, the negroes of the south have all mingled with it freely; it has also shown power to take the impress of foreign institutions from Roman and Christian days to the time of its Islamization. Its resistant power, its vitality as a race, is scarcely less noticeable. There are some who look to see real assimilation, even to the extent of a miscegenation of the various strains of foreign blood; there are others who expect at most only a hegemony of civilization over a permanently inferior people; and there are still others who hope for a true assimilation of material civilization, with its blessings of science and order, but see an impassable abyss between the old European and the soul of the desert, inscrutable, mysterious, alien, which remains immutable in the Berber race.
Theold life of the desert is passing away; the fact is written on the landscape, on the faces of the people and in their hearts. It was as full of miseries as of grandeurs; and its disappearance is for good. What was admirable in it was the endurance of the human heart in the sterile places, and the mysterious flowering from it, amid this desolation, of a great faith. The death of a religion, no more than the decay of other institutions, should perplex or disturb; all these alike are the work of the soul, and when the soul leaves them they perish; and as in the revolutions the daily life of men goes on, so in the religious changes of organization and dogma the spiritual life of the soul continues. The soul can no more be without religion than the body without life. The sense of the mystery of its own being abides in the soul, in however half-conscious or imperfect forms, implanted in its vital and animating principle, and shares with shaping power in its thoughts, emotions, and will, and exhales the atmosphere in which it realizes its spiritual life; it is here that religion, in the external sense of worship and dogma, has its source. The desert soul may cast the old life like a garment—faith and all; but under these old skies and in these supreme horizons it cannot change its nature, which is, in a sense, the human form of the desert. The flower of faith will grow here, and blossom in the wild, in the future as in the past, for the desert is a spiritual place; and in this austere and infinite air faith will continue to be a religion of the desert truly, with the least of the corporeal in its manifestation and idea, with the least of the defined in creed and localized in place; for the spiritual, the universal, the vague are the intuitions and language of the desert; there religion is less a thought than a feeling, less a prayer than a mood.
I closed my meditations in such thoughts as these, instinctively seeking, amid so much that was mortal, the undying, in the decadent the permanent, in the transitory the eternal.
Thestars were coming out in the sky; the coolness of the night was already in the air. The old Arab had long ago departed; the kif-smoking youth were gone. I was alone under the vine trellis, with the dark lines of the palm grove before me in the falling night. The proprietor, a mild-faced and gentle-mannered old Arab, came, as I rose to go, with a few pleasant words, and gave me a small branch of orange-flowers and a spray of the white flower of the palm. “C’est le mâle,” he said with a smile. And as I rode home over the silent desert, and, crossing the bed of the oued, looked back on the mountain wall and swept with my gaze the great, dark waste under the stars, I found myself repeating his words—“C’est le mâle.”