SCENES AND VISIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“While barrëd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thecrudities of the desert have a charm all their own. There is a wild flavor not only in the life but in the nostrils. The strong saltpetre smells, impregnating the air for leagues, the earthy scents of the marsh-like and sodden soil, the odors of cattle, are stimulants; they recall the whiff of salt marshes by the sea, the tarred ropes of wharfs, the sharp fragrance of rolled seaweed on the beaches, aromas of low tide, in days of long ago. They are both prophecies and memories. They wake my boyhood blood and are a renewal of long slumbering appetites. I want salt in my life, an acrid savor. The desert dispenses with unnecessary refinements; all pruderies cease; nature returns. Nature is clean; the wind and the sun are great scavengers; even death is no longer a corruption, but a negligible detail. The skeletons of the camels in the sands have nothingmacabre; they are there as the tamarisk and the drin are there, objects of the sands, like floating spars at sea, wasting away in the great deep; they show the way that life has gone. Even the dogs, with their paws on the carcass, tearing the flesh, seem ordinary; the brutality ceases in the primeval naturalness of the act in the scene. It is the will of nature that rules there in the wild, and is accepted almost without notice. It is the same, too, with human life. Poverty, hardship, privation, lose half their repugnancy; it is only when men dispense them that they revolt us; humanity accepts necessary suffering with little appeal. The eye hardens, the heart stiffens; the fibre of an older world forms in us. It is a veritable return to nature. Old instincts awake; old powers of endurance come back and bring with them old moods of patience; old indifferences appear. Cruelties of man or nature are incidents. A new resistance is unlocked in the body, in the spirit. It is a strong life. It is the desert world.

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

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

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

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

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