TLEMCEN
II
TLEMCEN
SNOW in April! I could hardly believe my eyes as I looked through the blurred panes of the one small window on the large, moist flakes falling thickly, the trees green with spring-time whose young foliage was burdened and slim limbs delicately heaped with snow an inch deep in the windless air, while the little park was a white floor and the half-invisible roofs a drifted curtain like a broken hillside—it was so like a snowy spring at home. I was in the unpretending hotel, in an upper corner room, bare, narrow, but clean, which reminded me curiously of such accommodation as one used to find in western Kansas towns thirty years ago, fit for the seasoned traveller, but without superfluities,—frontier-like, a border lodging; and the impression was deepened and vivified when I descended the rude and confused stairway and found the private-family dining-room, with the only fire—olive-knots burning reluctantly on a small hearth. A French officer, hanging over it, made room for me, and in a moment two other officers appeared, heavily clothed with leather and capes, prepared, as I gathered, for a long ride in the country. It might have been a hunting scene in Colorado, in the early morning, except for the military color, the foreign physiognomy and the French coffee we were drinking; it had the traits of rude vigor, hardihood and weather that belong to an outdoor life.
It seemed more natural to go out into the snow than not, and so I found an Arab and went. Our path led us a short way through streets of Sunday quiet, and soon broke by a city gate into irregular country, picturesque from the beginning with ruined masses of old ramparts. The road was bordered with trees and hedges, a lovely road even in the snow, and soon it was apparent that we were passing through the midst of an old and extensive cemetery with cypresses, cactus, fig-trees, here and there an immense carob-tree, and olives and locusts, diversifying the uneven lines of the slopes; and everywhere, as far as one looked, neglected graves, shrines in ruins, koubbas—small, square, dome-covered memorials of the saints—dilapidated and with broken arches, the débris of centuries of devotion and mortality. It was quite in keeping; for I was myself on pilgrimage, where for seven centuries the faithful Moslem of the land had preceded me, to the holy tomb of Sidi bou-Médyen, the patron saint of the little city. As he ended his earthly travels on one of these neighboring slopes—and he had wandered through the Arab world—he exclaimed: “How good it were to sleep in this blessed soil the eternal slumber!” and so they buried him there. It was a place of immemorial consecration; in early times of the faith a body of pious Moslems had been cloistered near by, and already in that age in these fields the “men of God” had their resting-places about which the Moslems liked to be buried, as old Christians used to wish to lie in holy ground about the church. It was even then a place of pilgrimage, and a village grew up about it, and ruins of minarets and mosques still lie there; and later, about Sidi bou-Médyen’s shrine, another village was built among the encumbering graves, for he was a famous saint and many pilgrims came there, and now the inhabitants say pleasantly: “We have the dead in our houses.” The landscape is thus a place of tombs; but it is enchanting, and one sees at a little distance terraced mountain edges, thick gardens of olive, the pomegranates, the ancient fig-trees, masses of foliage and vines, abounding fertility and freshness, green and flowering with spring; and sown all along the tree-sheltered road the low and humble ruins of mortality.
I entered the village—the road ran a mile or more through such a scene—and climbed the steep way to the wooden door through which one comes into the precincts of the saint’s tomb with its attendant mosque and school. I did not anticipate a mausoleum; I was familiar with such shrines and knew what I should see; but the square koubbas, with their white domes, which one sees everywhere in the fields, on the hilltops, all over this lonely country, give a grave and solemn accent to the landscape, and I felt the reverence of the place, remote and solitary, where so many thousand men had warmed their life-worn hearts in the glow of the faith. In the antechamber, adjoining the shrine, Moorish arches fell on four small onyx columns of beautiful purity, resting on the tiled floor, and just at my feet was an ancient holy well whose onyx edge was deeply cut by the wearing of the chain that had given water to twenty generations of those who thirsted for God. As I turned, the room of the shrine was open before me—heavy with shadows, almost dark, while the light struggled through vivid, dull spots of colored glass, blue, green, red, on the obscurity where I saw the raised coffin, swathed with silken stuffs and gold-wrought work and thick with hanging standards; another coffin, with the body of the companion and disciple of the saint, stood beside, more humbly covered, and there were candles, chandeliers, suspended ostrich eggs, lanterns, and banal European objects, the common furnishings of shrines. I lingered a while with the sombre and thoughtful respect natural before a sight so very human, so impregnated with humanity. I noted the votive offerings on the door, bits of silk and tangled threads, which attested the humility of the estate of multitudes of these poor people—remnants of fetichism; and the strips of painted wood upon the walls of the antechamber, with ordinary Mohammedan designs, rude scrawls of art.
I issued into the court, in the raw snowy air, and crossed the narrow space to the mosque. It was a magnificent portal that rose before me through the falling flakes, raised on its broad steps as on a base, and lifting the apex of its wide horseshoe arch more than twenty feet in air; a high entablature expanded above. The whole surface of the gateway was covered with arabesque work in mosaic faience to the architrave, bearing its dedicatory inscription in beautiful architectural script, and with enamelled tiles above—all in sober colors of white, brown, yellow, and green—and finely wrought in Moorish designs; it was a noble entrance. I passed within its shadows, and found myself in a stately porch, richly ornamented, the lateral walls overlaid, from a lower space left bare and severe, by delicately arcaded work in stucco as far as to the springing of the stalactite ceiling of the cupola, whose central points gave back the reflected snow-lights from below; massive bronze doors, sombre, rich in shadowy tones, filled the fourth side—their plates, riveted to the wood, chiselled and overspread with large, many-pointed stars engaged in an infinite lineal network of that old art, in whose subtility and intricacy and illusory freedom of control the Moorish decorative genius delighted to work. The momentary sight, as my eyes rounded out the full impression of the porch I stood in, was, as it were, a seizure; the novelty—for I had never before seen this art in its own home—the refinement, the harmony relieved on the sense of mass and space, the seclusion, the winter lights without, the cool and sombre peace, combined to make a moment in which memory concentrates itself. It was an Alhambra chamber in which I stood; and the first realizing sight of a new art, like that of a new land, is a vivifying moment, full of infinite possibility, almost of a new life for the artistic instincts. I shall never forget the moment nor the place where the spell of the Andalusian craftsmen first thus seized me in the slowly falling snow.
The way led me on into the arcaded court, and then the hall of prayer, under the arches of its crossing naves, to the ornamented recess sunk in the further wall, the mihrab, which is the Moslem altar and guides the hearts of the people, as they pray, toward Mecca. Its arch rested on two small onyx columns, with high, foliated capitals, exquisite in their romantic kind; and above and about ran the arabesque decoration in plaster and all over the walls of the mosque and the surface of the Moorish arches, whose intervening roofs were ceiled with sunken panels of cognate but diverse design—a beautiful garniture of wandering lineal relief, like the veining of a leaf, netted in geometrical forms, emboldened with lines of cursive script, flowing with conventionalized floral branch and palms, varied, repeated, interlaced. The architectural masses and spaces defined themselves with firmness and breadth in contrast with this richly elaborated surface; there seemed a natural unity between the design and the decoration, as of the forest with its foliage; through all one felt the effect that belongs unfailingly to the mosque—a grand simplicity. I wandered about, for a mosque charms me more than a church; and then I turned to the médersah, or college, adjoining its precinct, with its central court lined with scholars’ cells and its hall for lectures and prayer beyond. It was pleasing to find a college under the protection of the saint. Sidi bou-Médyen was himself a scholar, bred at the schools of Seville and Fez; he retired to the anchorite’s life on these hills while yet a youth, and being perfected in the friendship of God, admitted to ecstasy and invested with the power of miracle, preached at Baghdat, professed theology, rhetoric, and law at Seville and Cordova, and opened a college of his own on the African shore at Bougie, then a hearth of liberal studies, where his tall figure, his resonant, melodious voice and flowery and fiery eloquence gained him a great name; it was thence he was summoned by the reigning prince of Tlemcen on that last journey on which, nearing the city’s “blessed soil,” where his divine youth was passed, he died. It was quite fit that a college, as well as a mosque, should be raised and perpetuate his name near his tomb. I left its portal and passed down by the stairway to the court, and gazed up at the minaret, decorated above and wreathed with a frieze of mosaic faience, that lifted its three copper balls at its culmination, dominating the little group of sacred buildings on this hill, so characteristic of the Moslem faith and past; and its slender and guarding beauty was the last sight I saw as I went down through the narrow way and issued into the village road. A tall, grave Arab youth, standing in the snow, offered me a great bunch of violets, which I took; and in the clearing weather I began my walk back through that broad orchard cemetery, with its endless human débris under the light fall of snow—arch and mound and wall among the trees, while brief glints of sunshine lightened over it. Cemeteries are usually ugly; but this is one of the very few that I remember with fondness, perhaps because here there was no effort to delay the natural decay of human memory. Death is as natural as life, and here it seemed so; there was no antithesis of the fallen ruin and the blossom springing in the snow, but a tranquil harmony. It is so that I remember it.
Laterin the afternoon, the weather continuing to clear, I drove with a French gentleman—we were mutually unknown—to the cascades lying not far to the southeast. Tlemcen is posed at a somewhat high elevation on the last spurs of the ranges that encircle and dominate it from behind, and faces a great plain, bounded with distant blue mountains on the sides, and having the Mediterranean at its far limit, whose gleam can be seen only on fair, clear days. It is a spacious prospect; and the near view in which we drove by a rising serpentine road was finely mountainous—dolomitic crags on the right, and on the left a deep ravine denting the plain whose gently sloping plateau had many a time been a chosen battle-ground. Birds flew about the heights and verdure clothed the scene. The geological formation lends itself to numerous living springs; the upper limestone rests on sandstone, which in turn lies on marl and clay, and the mountain rainfall is thus caught in natural reservoirs, which issue in innumerable outlets in the porous surface. These successive ranges of the extreme North African shore are, in fact, a continuation of the hills of Grenada, with which they form a great half circle, centred at Gibraltar, and with its hollow turned toward the Mediterranean; it is the country of the Moroccan Riff, and the character of the landscape on the African side is precisely the same as in Spain—it is Andalusian scenery. As we drew near our goal, the rocks took on more distinctly the picturesqueness of outline, due to long erosion; they had a look like natural ruins high in air, and opposite, just beyond the cascades, a superb cliff mountain filled the lower sky.
We passed through a little garden to the foot of the fall. It was a grotto scene. The water issued in masses from low cavernous walls and recesses over whose broken floors and spurs it poured. It was not a simple waterfall, however, that we had come to see, but a succession of cascades that fell from shelf to shelf far up the precipice. The whole scene was robed in new-fallen snow, and the way wet and slippery; but the ascent was easily practicable by a path that led up the incline, with many a gyration, often dipping into the bed of a flowing stream and mounting by the rocks in the midst, often too steep and slippery to climb without the friendly aid of bushes, grasping hands and canes. But one scrambled up, and the running water underfoot, snow and icy slides, only gave a wild tang and gentle touch of adventure to the rather breathless labor; and every little while one stopped and looked below into the deepening ravine, or approached the falling waters in some new aspect, till we came out at the summit of the upper cascade, where it poured beautifully down in the midst of a cirque of pointed rocks that rose from an indescribably fantastic mass of juts and hanging eyries, as it were, all clothed and thick with vegetation, vivid and bathed, inexpressibly fresh, trees and shrubs and flowers and vines, an exuberance of plant life; and the glittering cascade fell spraying far into its rocky heart and sent back mellow music from the depth. “It is a landscape of Edgar Poe,” said my companion. I was startled for a moment, but a glance assured me that the aptitude of his remark was unknown to the speaker—it was only a spontaneous tribute to genius, which perhaps the casual presence of an American had helped to germinate. But, indeed, the impression of the scene could hardly have been better given than in those words. It was “a landscape of Edgar Poe”—just such a one as he would have chosen as the scene of one of his romances, as my companion went on to say; it wassui generis, fantastic, a marriage of the garden and the wilderness, not without a touch ofdiablerie, the suggestion that would make of such a retreat the haunt of Arabian fancy, primitive tragedy, and enchanted legend. It had the formal character of romance and the atmosphere of natural magic; a place whereunearthlinessmight find its home. That was the Poesque trait that the random suggestion, perhaps, overdefined. This scene, however, was not all, as, indeed, our ears warned us; and crossing a narrow crown of land toward the muffled roar, we saw another falling river; the slender column of wavering waters came from a great height, sprayed and united, and rushed with a flood of force and speed to join the waterfall below; it had the beauty of something seen against the sky, in contrast with what was seen below against the earth; it was a unique combination, and the only time I have ever seen the junction of two rivers by the waterfall of one flowing into the waterfall of the other.
We went by an upper path to the high viaduct of a railroad that crosses the deep glen at that point, and thence commanded the broad expanse of the seaward plain with its near amphitheatre of mountain ranges, and Tlemcen lying below on its headland among its orchards. The reason why it grew up, and stood for centuries, was plain; it is the key of the country. It seemed, and is, a garden city; and as we walked or scrambled down the looped pathway over the terraced face of the hill on that side, and drove on round the circuitous road and back on our track to the city, I was most struck by the endless orchards lying beneath us on the bottom-lands at the foot of the ravine, and others through which we passed; and during all my stay I saw them—orchards of orange, lemon, almond, peach, and pear, and apple trees, and olives, and especially cherries, in profusion everywhere, and among them the constant sound of running waters from the springs.
Thefruit-bearing feature of the country must have been an original trait. Pomaria, or as one might say in our own phrase, Orchard-town, was the name of the first settlement in the colonizing days of Rome. I walked to the place, just under the northern wall of the city, one morning for a stroll. I was soon at the foot of the tall minaret of the ruined mosque of Sidi Lahsen that rises on the site of old Agadir, which was the Berber name that next absorbed the Roman Pomaria; and I saw the Latin-inscribed stones built into the foundation, ruin under ruin, as it were; for the walls of the minaret, which towered a hundred and fifty feet, were dilapidated, their enamel weather-worn, showing faded green and yellow tones in the rectangular spaces on the sides and the bordering band at the top, which bore the ceramic decoration; the campanile above, tipped with a stork’s nest and a stork, added a touch of lonely desertion, and grass and flowers were growing between the stones of the adjacent roofless floor. Ruined mosques are often as beautiful as English abbeys.
I wandered on through a country district over which was scattered a native village, but in the main an open region. It was remarkable for the number of old trees it contained; and, indeed, hardly less striking a feature of the landscape of Tlemcen, in general, than its garlanding orchards is this grouping of old trees, though it is rarer. The whole African coast affords specimens of trees of great mass and age. I remember one such on the eastern borders of Algeria that I found among the fields, deep in the country; or rather I was guided to it by the Arab children I had gathered in my train, and especially by one Bedouin shepherd lad who had left his wandering herd to follow me, and they insisted that I should see the sacred tree. It was a monarch of the vale—one of a group of three; massive in foliage, long of limb, great of girth, horizontal in aspect, a leaning, almost fallen, tower of the forest. It looked as if centuries were indifferent to it—it was so old. It was a holy tree, amarabout, as they called it; and bits of cloth, strips of rags, fluttered from its boughs, where they had been placed as votive offerings by the poor people of the district. I was told that I should put some copper coins on the bough or in the hollow, for an offering and to have good fortune, for no one would take them, and I did so, glad to pay my devoirs and wondering inwardly how long it was since my own far ancestors had joined in tree-worship. It was the first time I had ever seen a sacred tree, one actually worshipped, and it touched my imagination. At Tlemcen I saw no tree so fine as that; but there were several that bore a patriarchal resemblance; and in the morning stroll I speak of I found a grove of them, not close together, but spread out over the open landscape and nigh enough for neighborhood. They were terebinths, old ruins of the vegetable world, with that same horizontal reach and earth-bowed air—they might almost seem on their knees in some elemental adoration; age filled them; in that cemetery—for it was a cemetery—they were monumental. It was a quiet landscape; cattle were grazing here and there; three or four ruined koubbas with broken arches and fallen walls rose at intervals, once stately monuments, for this was the burial-place of the royalty of Tlemcen in their empire years. Not far away, on a knoll, in a place apart, was the shrine of the first patron saint of the city, then Agadir—for Sidi bou-Médyen was a later comer, and saints, like dynasties, have their times and seasons, and this cemetery of the City-Gate was old before his hillside began to know the furrow of death. The first patron, Sidi Wahhâb, a companion of the Prophet and a comrade of the conqueror, lies under the terebinths. Pointed by a magnificent tree, I passed along its shadow down a shelving, stony way to a little garden of roses; there, in the hollow, sunken in the surrounding soil by its antiquity, I found the grave of Sidi Yaqoub, walled, but open to the sky—a lovely place, with the rose and the terebinth and the sky. This cemetery of the City-Gate was a kind of spiritual outpost for protection; the saints, indeed, camped about all the gates to guard the city in their death; nor was it altogether in vain; it is related of at least one prudent conqueror that he carefully inquired as to number and virtue of the saints who lay at the various gates, as if they had been modern batteries, and selected for attack that postern where least was to be feared from the ghostly artillery. The position at the spot I have described was uncommonly strong.
I followed on my return the broken line of the old ramparts of Agadir, a knife-edge path, or divide, as it were, a climbing, tortuous, rough way, great masses of red soil heavily overgrown with vivid vegetation, trees, bushes, vines, emerging on a bewildering combination of gardens and tanneries—a dilapidated, ruinous way it was altogether. I remember a Tower of the Winds that might have been on the Roman campagna; and to the north there was always the broad prospect of the great plain. It was but a short walk from here to one of the modern gates of Tlemcen, that stands on a higher level than Agadir; and just under it I came on the mosque of Sidi’l-Halwi, or, as one would say, Englishing his name, Saint Bonbon. In his mortal days he made sweetmeats for the children, and the touch of a child’s story hangs about his legend. When the wicked vizier beheaded him and his body was cast outside the gate, it was said that in answer to the guardian’s nightly call for all belated travellers to enter, the poor ghost would cry from the outer darkness: “Go to sleep, guardian; there is none without except the wretched Saint Bonbon.” The repeated miracle found the ears of the Sultan and was verified by himself in person, and the wicked vizier was at once sealed up alive in the neighboring wall, which was conveniently being repaired at the time, and the body of the saint was honorably laid in the shrine where it still reposes in the shelter of another of those secular trees—a carob, this time; and duly the mosque rose hard by with its fair minaret, on whose faces still the brown and yellow tones of the half-obliterated faience duskily shine in the sun. I entered under the portal, partly sheathed in the same weather-battered colors, with touches of blue and green, relics of an older beauty, and I rested there an hour about, under the fretted wooden ceilings, untwining the sinuous arabesque patterns of the arcaded walls, cooling my eyes with the translucent onyx columns of the nave—low columns with Moorish capitals, whose gentle forms attested the burning here ages ago of the lamp of art.
A littleto the west of Tlemcen, and almost adjoining it, stands another ruined city, Mansourah. I rambled out toward it on a road alive with market-day bustle and travel, where the country people were arriving in groups with produce and beasts of burden, and the interest of the weekly holiday in town—a rough, hard people, not at all like the Tunisians, but doubtless of a more vital stock. The French cavalry were exercising in the Great Basin that had once been like a lake in that quarter of the city, a part of the water-works of the old days. Almost as soon as I was beyond the gate I saw Mansourah lying on the slope near by, well marked by its great ramparts, with towers. It was the site of an immense fortified camp, where once a Moroccan army had sat down to besiege Tlemcen, and had abode many years in that great siege, and had built a city to house itself. At one point began a paved road, and I passed down its well-worn, smooth flags into the enclosure, which was wooded with olives, and looked like a large orchard, showing spaces of strewn stone, some rough, ruined masses, and on the far side a lofty single tower. The fallen stones indicated the place of the palace, and the tower was the minaret of the destroyed mosque. In those fighting days a siege might consume a reign, and an army was a population; the march might seem a migration; the army brought its women and children along with it and the people who were necessary to its subsistence, traders and the like, and established ordinary life on the spot; a city grew up, and in this case, perhaps, throve especially on the intercepted caravan trade that could no longer find its natural and customary outlet through the besieged town; and if the war were waged successfully the new city would swallow up the old one that would fall to decay. So Tagrart, long before Tlemcen, had been the camp over against Agadir, and, conquering, had become the new seat of the city. The lot of Mansourah, however, was different; it did not finally succeed, but Tlemcen in the end drove the plough over the new city, exterminating it, and leaving only these ruins to be the memorial of the event.
I found little of interest in the detail except that splendid tower, which was a spectacle of ruin; it commanded the scene by its single and solitary figure, and was imposing to the eye and to the mind. It was a minaret, but of a different order from any I ever saw. It stood in the middle of the façade of the mosque, which was entered by the central door of the minaret, massively crowned by concentric arches over the portal; and this base was continued above, in the upper stories, by a bolder and more solid construction than usual, with ornamental details fitted to its severe lines, with a balcony halfway up, and at the top a group of small Gothic arches. It was thus more like a cathedral tower in aspect, position, and use; and in its majestic ruin it seemed such. The treatment of the surface, however, was altogether Moorish. The material was a beautiful rosy stone; and, overlaid on this, one still saw the half-obliterated green and blue lights of the incrusted work like a dull peacock lining. The discreet relief of this ceramic ornament on the rose stone, used as a ground and having its own warm and massive effect in the harmony of tints, must have made a superb example of that mosaic art of color which treated great surfaces like a jewel box. But what a marvel it is to find the camp of a horde of Berber tribes, in the confusion of a fierce and bloody siege, afoyerof the great arts—of architecture, delicate sculpture, and mosaic color! All those onyx columns that have so delighted me were brought from these ruins and reset in their new places in Tlemcen. What an interesting group of impressions a few days had brought me, here! not one city, but a nest of cities, like a nest of boxes—or like Troy, superposed one on another: Pomaria, Agadir, Tagrart, Mansourah, Tlemcen. A necropolis of saints; a mountain-pleasance of fountains, orchards, grottos, the haunt of pigeons and fruits, rich in the privacy and delights of country life; a land of campaigns, and Berber dynasties, and sieges! I began to feel the inadequacies of my schoolboy geography and college histories, the need of a new orientation of my ideas to serve as a ground-plan for my knowledge of the people and its past, the race-character; and, on my return, I sought out the book-shop—an excellent one—and purchased all the little city could tell me about itself.
Theconversion of a people to a new religion, notwithstanding the glory of apostolic legends, must have always been largely a nominal change. The victorious faith takes up into itself the customs and cardinal ideas, the habits of feeling and doing, the mental and moral leaf-mould, as it were, of the old, and it is often the old that survives in the growth under a new name and in a new social organization. It was thus that Catholicism re-embodied paganism, whether classical or heathen, without a violent disturbance of the primeval roots of old religion with its annual flowering of fêtes, its local worships, its sheltering thoughts of protection in the human task-work, its adumbrations of the world of spirits, its ritual toward the good and evil powers; and the religion of Mohammed, sweeping over Africa on the swords of Arab raiders and hordes, subdued the country to the only God, but the Berber soul remained much as it had been, a barbarian soul, still deeply engaged in fetichism, magic, diabolism, primitive emotions, and ancestral tribal practices—superstition; nor was this the first time that the Berber soul had encountered the religion of the foreigner, for pagan temples and Christian churches already stood upon the soil. The faith of Mohammed was more fiercely proselytizing; it was, moreover, of desert and tribal kin; and it imposed its formulas and exterior observance more widely and thoroughly than its predecessors.
The Berber race, nevertheless, was hard-bitted, obstinate, independent; it was scattered over deserts and in mountain fastnesses; its conversion was slow and remained imperfect in spite of much missionary work on the part of the pious proselytizers from the schools of Seville and Fez, who in later generations followed the fiery conquerors to “Koranize” the rude mountaineers, such as those of Kabylie, and settled beside them as daily guides and teachers. Long after the first conquest Christianized Berbers and other dissident groups were to be found here and there, and were tolerated. The elements of primitive savagery held their own in the life of the people at large, just as pagan practice and thought survived in southern Italy, and in the last century were easily to be observed there; the Riff, in particular, was a stronghold of magic; and everywhere beneath the thin Moslem veneer was the old substratum of superstition embedded in an unchanging savage heredity of mood, belief, and social custom. Fetichism persisted in the mental habit of the people, and still shows in their addiction to holy places, magical rites and modes of healing, charms and amulets, and the whole rosary of primitive superstition.
The Berbers were also by nature a Protestant race; their independent spirit quickly availed itself of every sectarian difference, reform or pretension, to make a core of revolt, inside the pale of the religion, against their foreign orthodox masters. It was their way of asserting their nationalism against the Arab domination; it was, essentially, a political manœuvre. The first great Moslem heresy, Kharedjism, instituted by the followers of Ali, the son-in-law of Mohammed, found the Berber tribes an army flocking to its banners; and, afterward, wherever schism broke out or a pretender arose, there were the Berbers gathered together. In that world they were the opposition. Islam itself, by the example of Mohammed, had shown the way; every tribe had its inspired prophet, sooner or later; and one, at least, among them, the Berghouaia, once most powerful in this region, had its own Koran, specially received in the Berber tongue from the only God, whose prophet in this instance was Saleh. The expectation of the Mahdi, too—the last imam, who, having mysteriously disappeared, shall come again to bring justice on the earth—a tradition that mounted to Mohammed himself, was an incentive to his appearance; and inasmuch as the prediction circulated under the popular form—“the sun shall arise in the west”—the Berbers regarded themselves as the chosen people among whom the Mahdi should arise. Under these conditions there was no lack of Mahdis. One of them, the greatest, Obéïd Allah, the Fatémide, built that lonely seaport of Mahdia on the Tunisian coast, whence he extended his sovereignty over the Moslem dominions from the Egyptian border to the Atlantic, including Sicily, and warred on Genoa, Corsica, and Sardinia; but his son had to contend with a prophet pretender, “the man with the ass,” who with a great following from the tribes maintained himself for a while, until between his own new-found taste for fine horses and the desire of the tribesmen to return to their own country, his authority and the army melted away together, like snow in the desert. It was a characteristic incident in Berber history.
The natural and various course of such events had ample illustration in the Morocco country about Tlemcen. Edris, the last alleged descendant of Ali, found refuge in this quarter on the Atlantic edge of the Mohammedan world; the Berbers, after their custom of rallying about a promising dissenter, soon had him at their head; his son founded Fez, and the dynasty was prosperous and glorious. Then a cloud appeared in the far south, a cloud of horsemen with the veil—I suppose the blue veil that I associate with the Touaregs, themselves doubtless the best living type of that old horde of desert raiders. They mounted up from the borders of Senegal, gathering masses of foot-followers as they went, preaching a reform of faith and manners, breaking all musical instruments, and cleansing the land; they were fighting Puritans of their age and religion, establishing an austere life and a pure form of the faith. So the princely Edrisides gave place to the princely Almoravides, and their dynasty, too, was prosperous and glorious, and extended its realm into Spain. Then rose the Mahdi. In this instance he was Ibn Toumert, a Berber, lame and ugly, small, copper-colored, sunken-eyed, who had schooled himself at Cordova, and then, like Sidi bou-Médyen, warmed his enthusiastic and mystic temperament in the oriental fires of Baghdat and Mecca, and had returned along the cities of the African seaboard a reformer, breaking winecasks and violins, and publicly reproaching devout dignitaries for corruption of manners, even the reigning prince of the Almoravides. He was soon the Mahdi, with a new Koran, institutor of the sect of the Unity of God, which after his death came to the throne of the country in the dynasty of the princely Almohades. The students of Tlemcen had once sent one of their number to the prophet with an invitation to come and teach them; he, however, found himself ill at ease in the college, and soon went away into hermitage among the mountains; but the youth remained with him as his disciple and companion, and it was this youth, Abd el-Moumin, who founded the new dynasty, like its predecessors prosperous and glorious; and it was he who drove the Normans out of their last stronghold at Mahdia, having extended his power so far, and with his conquering arms brought the Andalusian arts to Tunis. In the four centuries of this brief historic survey—from the eighth to the twelfth—a sectary, a reformation, and a Mahdi were the initial points on which the great changes of the government of the country turned.
It might seem that in this civilization politics was only another form of religion; but, deeply engaged as political changes were in religious phenomena, this is perhaps a superficial view. It may also be maintained that the Berbers took no metaphysical interest in dogma, and found in divergent sects and the incessant agitation of unbridled religious enthusiasm only modes of partisanship and levers of political ambition; their religion was, at least, compatible with a vigorous secular life. On the theatre of history religious events gave to politics their dramatic form, at moments of crisis; but the religious life of the community is not to be found in them, but rather in facts of more usual nature and daily occurrence. The cardinal fact, and one that swallowed up all the others, from this point of view, was the extraordinary development of saint worship; its mortal efflorescence and fossilized deposit, so to speak, was this strata of tombs, koubbas, which cover the region. The Marabout, to give the saint his peculiar designation, was a man bound to religion, and was called the “friend of God”; he was revered in his life, and in his death he became the protector of the locality of his tomb, the intermediary of prayer to Allah, whose personality he obscured and tended to displace in practice. It was natural that the cult of saints should flourish in such a superstitious population; and the country itself, by its inaccessible character—desert and wilderness—lent itself to hermit lives, to types of the religious brooder and mystic, the solitary, with his dreams, illusions, and trances. Religious consecration was also a protection in a country of rapine and disorder, and a source of profit among a credulous people. There was, indeed, in the circumstances everything to favor such an order of men. It appears, also, that in the time of the great exodus of the Moors from Spain, a considerable body of fugitives, learned men, found refuge in the Zaouïa of Saguiet-el-Hamra, a famous monastery in Morocco; and the labor of these “men of God,” pious and ardent, who seemed to be almost of another order of beings between mankind and the divinity, is sometimes assigned as the original source of the magnitude of the development of saint worship in these regions. It was they who “Koranized” the tribes, a body of missionary monks, educated, devoted, with the traits of apostolic zeal and ascetic temperament. There were Marabouts long before their day, but to them and their example may be due the fact that the tombs, the holy koubbas, increase toward the west, beyond Algiers and in Morocco, where they “star” the earth.
The lives of the Algerian saints, of which many may be read, do not differ materially from that kind of biography in any religion. Every village has its patron saint, its “master of the country,” as he was called, and, as at Tlemcen, one may oust another with the lapse of time. The koubba was a shrine, a local hearth of religious life and practice, and the worship of the shrine was the near and warm fact in daily experience; the veneration of the Marabout appears to hold that place in the hearts of the people where religion is most human. The Marabout himself was of many types, ranging from plain idiocy, as was the case of Sidi bou-Djemaa on the hill above Mansourah, to the mystic height, the “pole of being,” as was the case of Sidi bou-Médyen on the hill above Agadir. He was miracle-worker, thaumaturgist, medicine-man, and might be consulted for all human events, from cattle disease to thief hunting; he was a preacher, a doctor of the law, an agitator, a recluse, a madman, anything out of the common; and the story of the legends runs the whole gamut of friar, anchorite, and fanatic in all religious history. Women, in particular, gathered about him and his shrine. In a region and civilization where there was no effective mastery of authority or reason, given over to individual initiative in a half-barbarized mental condition, such a development was entirely natural; and the landscape itself is the history and mark of it—there is a koubba on every hilltop, in the beds of the streams, on the slopes of the plains—sometimes clumps of them; in every prospect emerges the shining white cube of the holy tomb.
Thesecular phase of Berber life in these ages is vividly illustrated in the person and career of Yarmorâsen Ben Zeiyân, the founder of the first kingdom of Tlemcen. He belonged to the tribe of Abd el-Wâd, who, with their cousins, the Beni-Mérin, under the pressure of the Arabs of the second invasion, came up from the desert and took possession of the coast, the former about Tlemcen and the latter in Morocco. For many years these tribes, under the Almohades, had exercised feudal rights over the country; they came north in the spring and summer, and collected tribute from the agriculturalists and townsmen, and returned in winter to their desert homes with the supplies they had thus obtained. Their rise has been termed, not inaptly, a renaissance of the Berber race power, as, indeed, the entire history of the Berbers was a series of explosions of national force, succeeding each other in one or another place at long intervals, but impotent to found a permanent political state. Yarmorâsen was of the type of Tamburlane; a simple Berber, he was unable to speak Arabic, but he had military and organizing genius, became chief and conqueror, and founded the dynasty with which the glory of Tlemcen began. At the moment the Almohades were nearing their fall. The country is described as in anarchy: everywhere the spirit of revolt broke out, the people refused to pay taxes, brigands infested the great routes, the officials were shut up in the towns, the country people were without protection; the region was at the mercy of its nomad masters. It was then that Yarmorâsen found his opportunity, seized independent power, and established order such as was known to that civilization. He was a great man of his race, brave, feared, honored, who understood the interests of his people, political administration, and the art and ends of rule. He reigned forty-four years, amid continuous war; he was defeated early in his career by the ruler of Tunis, but the victor could find no better man on whom to devolve the government than the foe he had overthrown; and it is an interesting point to observe that his ambassador of state, on this occasion, who made the treaty, was his mother. He was respectful of the rights of courtesy, at least, and won applause by his kind treatment of the sister and women of the Almohad prince he overthrew, sending them back to their own land under escort.
In the battle which marked the fall of the Almohades and the independence of Tlemcen there were characteristic incidents. The van of the march of the old princes was led by the Koran, one of the earliest and most famous copies, which the Almohades had captured from the Moors of Grenada and rebound and incrusted with jewels; it was borne on a dromedary, and enclosed in a silk-covered coffer surmounted by a beautiful palm; small flags fluttered from the corners, while before it floated a great white banner on a long staff. It was thus that the Almohades always went out to war. When the two armies stood in battle order, the women on both sides ran through the ranks with uncovered faces and by their cries, gestures, and looks animated their warriors to fight. A similar scene is described by a modern author in writing of a Kabyle village feud; the battle-field, he says, was the dry bed of a torrent, between two slopes; on the heights of the ravine on either side stood the women, barefooted, bare-armed, uttering sharp cries which crossed over the heads of the fighters. “They are all there, their mothers, their wives, their sisters, their daughters, serried one against another like the flowers of a crown; even the widows whose husbands were killed in the last spring combat, even therévoltéeswho had left their husbands declaring they would no longer serve them,—all adorned and painted for the battle. Rich or poor, young or old, beautiful as idols or disfigured by age and suffering, they are all together, their arms interlaced, their eyes wide and full of fire, at the foot of each village, a confused mass of ornaments, bright colors and miserable rags, lifted by one movement, erect with hate and terror.” The men charge, fire point-blank, engage hand to hand with their yatagans—“better a hundred times die here than go back to the village, because their women will that they should die.” It was such a scene when Yarmorâsen fought with the Almohad prince, Es-Saïd.
Yarmorâsen was more than a fighter; he was an enlightened governor. Tlemcen was then a double city—Agadir and Tagrart, not an arrow’s flight between them. Tagrart had been the “camp” of the invading Almoravides, who had taken Agadir, and as victor it was now the city of the functionaries and government, while the people—the old inhabitants—continued to live in Agadir. Yarmorâsen cared for both, and built the minaret of Agadir, and also that of the grand mosque of Tlemcen, but he declined to inscribe his name upon them, saying: “It is enough that God knows.” He built other public works and the city grew into a thriving capital, not only of war, but of residence and trade, and also became famous for its schools. Among other learned men whom his reputation as a protector of the liberal arts attracted to his court was one, brilliant in that century, Abou Bekr Mohammed Ibn Khattab, whose story especially interested me. He was a poet, and commanded not only a fine hand, but a beautiful epistolary style. Yarmorâsen made him the first secretary of state, and he wrote despatches to the lords of Morocco and Tunis so elegantly composed that, says the Arabian historian Tenesi, they were still learned by heart in his day; and he adds that with this poet the art of writing diplomatic despatches in rhymed prose ceased. The Berber prince deserves grateful memory among poets as the last patron of a lost grace of the art, not likely to find its renaissance ever; and they must read with pleasure the starry and flowery titles with which the chroniclers adorn his glory—the magnanimous, the lion-heart, the bounteous cloud, the shining rose, the kingliest of nobles, the noblest of kings, the well-beloved, the sword of destiny, the lieutenant of God, crown of the great, Emir of the Moslems, Yarmorâsen Ben Zeiyân.
He left a line of strong and brilliant rulers who were warriors first of all, for the glorious age of Tlemcen was a period of intense life, and the little city had often to battle for its existence. It suffered reverses; not long after the death of Yarmorâsen a contemporary Arabian traveller thus depicts it: “This city is very beautiful to see, and contains magnificent things; but they are houses without inhabitants, estates without owners, places that no one visits. The clouds with their showers weep for the misfortunes of the town, and the doves on the trees deplore its destiny with their moaning cry.” Its recovery, however, must have been rapid, for in the next reign Tachfin found time in the intervals of war to build the Great Basin and a beautiful college, and he reared also the minaret of the great mosque at Algiers. These were the years of the life-and-death struggle with the Beni-Mérin, of which Mansourah is the monument. The great siege had been sustained and the peril beaten back; but now the enemy returned, and from a new Mansourah on the same site they directed their attack so well that they took Tagrart, old Tlemcen—Tachfin, the king, falling in battle. The victor, Abou’l-Hasen, was a worthy conqueror and the founder of the artistic Mansourah, that I have described, with its palace, its mosque, and its columns; he made the new city his royal residence, over against Tagrart as Tagrart had stood over against Agadir, and he adorned the suburbs of the old city; he built the mosque and college of Sidi bou-Médyen, and his son the mosque of our good Saint Bonbon; he was an art-loving prince and a wide victor, magnificent in royal presents which he exchanged with the Sultan of Egypt, and in all ways glorious; but I remember him best as the conqueror who, after he had swept the coast of Africa to the desert limit, returning, stood on that solitary beach at Mahdia, that so impressed me, and “reflected on the lot of those who had preceded him, men still greater and more powerful on the earth.” But this domination of the Beni-Mérin, who after all were cousins, lasted only a score of years; and the line of Yarmorâsen came to its own again, in the person of Abou-Hammou, of the younger branch. He had been born and bred in Andalusia, and was an accomplished prince. He wrote a book upon the art of government for the education of his son, which may be read now in Spanish, and he was a great patron of learning; he built a beautiful college, adorned with marble columns, trees and fountains, for his friend, the sage Abou-ben-Ahmed, attended the first lecture and endowed the institution with sufficient property for its maintenance. He, too, labored in war; but the remarkable trait of these princes of the rude Berber stock is that, notwithstanding the state of instant and long-continued warfare in which they held their lives and power, they were as great builders as warriors, and unceasing in their patronage of learning and the arts. This was the great age of the city in the reigns I have touched on. A score of descendants carried on the rule through another century to the scene of trade, war, and study that Leo the African portrays in the city. He describes the various aspects of this great market of the desert, its buildings, and especially its four classes of citizens, merchants, artisans, soldiers, and students. Of these last he says: “The scholars are very poor and live in colleges in very great wretchedness; but when they come to be doctors, they are given some reader’s or notary’s office, or they become priests.” Alas, the scholar’s life! Doubtless it was the same in Yarmorâsen’s time. It is a pathetic thing to me to think of those thousands of poor free scholars, through generations, seeking the light as best they could in this university city, for such it was—what a record of self-denial and deprivation, of belief in the highest, of living on the bread of hope! But it was all to end—the old Tlemcen—with the coming of the Turk; he came in the peculiarly atrocious form of the pirate, Aroudj, master of Algiers, who gathered all the young princes of the old blood royal, a numerous band, and drowned them in the Great Basin.
Inthe brilliant years of Tlemcen, during which it was a spray of the flowering branch of Andalusian art, what is most striking and remains on the mind with a touch of surprise is the sense of the long and various contact of the Berber world with inherited Mediterranean civilization. We are accustomed to think of the north coast of Africa as a much-isolated country; but no place in the world is ever so isolated as it may seem to be; and the connection of the North African peoples with the centres of Christian history was never broken from the first Christian ages. Some Christian communities were encysted among the Berbers by the first Arab invasion; in the tenth century there were still five bishoprics among them. Charlemagne sent an embassy to Kairouan in respect to the relics of some saint at Carthage, in the reign of Ibrahim, the Aglabite, who received it with great splendor. The trade of the country was of vast territorial extent, reaching the Soudan and Central Africa and the furthest Mohammedan East; in the eleventh century negotiations were entered into with the Papacy with a view to attracting Christian merchants and markets. En-Nacer, a prince of the Hammadites, sent presents to Gregory VII, including all his Christian slaves. The contact with the Christians as enemies, in Sicily, Spain, and on the sea, was incessant in the period of Moslem power. Christians, too, made a part of the mercenary troops of the Moslem armies; the Beni-Mérin are said to have had at one time twelve thousand such troops, and Yarmorâsen had two thousand, who mutinied and were slain; these were the last of the Christian cavalry in Moslem pay.
Contact with the old civilization was still more intimate and continuous toward the East in commerce and the arts. The Berber tribes of the coast had contained artisans from Roman times; but the Arabs were from the beginning dependent on civilization for all articles of luxury, and, especially in their religious needs, for the architectural arts. The mosque was built on the plan of Byzantine churches, and the Greeks and Persians became the masters of construction and decoration in building; Roman temples and palaces and Christian churches were the quarries from which materials were taken. The great mosque at Kairouan is “a forest of columns” of antique make, and in this it is an example of a general practice. Original building came slowly into being, and was rudely imitative. The Andalusian art, as it is called, the special form in which the Moorish genius embodied itself, was evolved in Spain, and its history is incompletely made out; for although the Alhambra, together with other examples at Seville and Cordova, is its most perfect product, yet the art was developed also on the Moroccan side of the strait, and its creations at Fez, Marrâkeck, and other points still await thorough examination and study. The examples at Tlemcen belong to this African branch of the art, which was patronized by the early king of Tlemcen, and was most illustrated, perhaps, by the Beni-Mérin prince in his reign at Mansourah; for his predecessors at Fez had been rulers on both sides the strait, and were, therefore, in more immediate contact with the sources of the art, which, however, had already by reason of the emigrant Andalusians made Fez a noble Moorish city. As compared with Fez, Tlemcen was provincial.
The Berber princes ruled over a border state continually at war, and their city retained the rudeness of the nomad life; they were kings of a master-warrior caste among the other elements of the population, but with a pride in public works and a delight in decorative luxury, a capacity for civilization and elegance, which transformed them into accomplished princes of Andalusian culture, like their neighbors. In realizing their ambitions they were, however, dependent on the aid of their neighbors; they obtained both workmen, architects, and in some cases material already wrought, from Spain, and especially from the lord of Andalusia, Abou’l-Walîd, who sent them the ablest artisans he could command. The legend that the bronze plates of the door of the mosque of Sidi bou-Médyen were miraculously floated there from abroad doubtless contains the truth that they were brought from Spain. Some of the tiles are of foreign manufacture. The art, whether in spirit, style, or skill, is to be looked on as an importation, though it achieved its works on the spot. It affords admirable examples, and they are of uncommon purity, since each newcomer did not restore and refashion older work in current modes of later skill or taste, but left it, as the Arabs will, to its own decay; this art is seen, therefore, very often just as it was in its first creation save for the ravage of time.
It was not an art of structure, though at times, as in the tower at Mansourah, it has structural nobility, or, as elsewhere, lines of grace; neither the architects nor the workmen were expert builders, and they treated structural elements—the column, the arch, the dome—decoratively; these were subordinated to a decorative intention. The genius for decoration, however, found its main channel in the treatment of surfaces, sometimes curved and limited, but usually flat and spacious. It sprang rather from the art of graving than of modelling, and flowered especially in the line—arabesque. The line was employed in a series of geometric patterns—squares, polygons, circles—symmetrically arranged, and mingled with more or less distinctness; or in rectilineal or curvilineal combinations that were also patterns, repeated indefinitely; or in formalized script based on calligraphy. The origins of this mode go far back into antiquity; but its predominant use is the special trait of Moorish decoration. The second main feature of the art was in its color—mosaic. It is true that the lineal decoration of plaster and wood was painted, in red, blue, and olive-green, but this color has disappeared; for our eyes, so far as color is concerned, it is the mosaic that has survived; and here, too, the mosaic sometimes borrows its interior designs from the patterns of lineal decoration. The origin of this mosaic is also lost in antiquity; the art in one or another of its forms had long been widely diffused in the Mediterranean world. The Roman soil of Africa had been covered with mosaic floors, which may still be seen in beautiful and varied collections of them at Tunis and Sousse; Byzantine work, such as is found at Ravenna and in Sicily, was a living art through the Middle Ages; and the contemporary Persian manufacture of tiles and similar work passed everywhere in the commercial world, and may be closely connected technically with the art in Andalusia. It was for exterior decoration that the mosaic faience was principally employed. The motives of the lineal decoration are few—disks, stars, and the like—and in the floral design only the acanthus formalized is used; similarly, the colors of the mosaic are few—manganese-brown, white, copper-green, iron-yellow, rarely blue. The combination of these few elements—colors and patterns—is unrestricted by any limit, they are undefined by any form, they grow by accretion, and they thus obtain and give the quality of the infinite, the illimitable, which is the most obvious trait of the arabesque. It is an art that plays with form only to escape from it, whether in color or in line.
The charm of this art does not lie merely in its perfect fitness to its light and cheap materials, nor in its easy solving of its own problems, but rather in its kinship to the Arab genius, its response to the desert spirit. This is most deeply felt in the mosques, where it is in contact with the gravest things in life. The mosque is the plainest of sacred places, and delights a Puritan soul. There are no images of humanized deities or deified men; there is neither god nor saint nor mythic story; neither is there any mystery of dogma or speculation to be told in symbolism of material things; there is only unbodied and unformulated religious awe, the worship of the spirit in the spirit. The art that defines has here no function. The Western genius, master of life, is a defining genius; the oriental way is different—it is an effusion, an expansion, an illimitable going forth. This art, too, with its few motives, its paucity of fact, its monotony of structure, yet issuing always on the illimitable, the infinite, resumes the structure of the desert, which is similar in its elements and effects, its composition and its sentiment. It is also completely free from the burden of thought, the fatal gift of Western genius with its hard definings, too avid of knowing, whose art is rather a means to cage than to free the bird of life. It is an art restorative of the senses in their own kingdom—whether in line or color, a pure joy to the eye, a “disembodied joy,” too, as art should be, full of abstraction, yet unconscious of anything beyond the sensuous sphere. It is easy to sum its salient technical points and to indicate its obvious affinities with the mosque, with desert nature, with the Arab genius; but even though he see it, one cannot easily appreciate it in its decay, nor well imagine it in its fresh beauty, as a visible harmony for the soul, without some initiation into the fundamental moods of the race for whom and of whom it was. To me, nevertheless, the sight was a pure delight, as is the memory; a nomad art it seemed, born of the desert and expressive of it, an evanescence of beauty playing on fragile and humble materials, as life in the desert is fragile and humble, and clad in the evanescence of nature—life not too seriously valued, sure of speedy ruin, not worthy of too great outward cost.
I wentout into the night on my last evening and wandered in the dark streets till the falling gleam of a Moorish cafe drew me into its shadowy spaces, where I drank a cup of coffee, listening to sudden snatches of native music and observing the swarthy and stalwart Arabs where they were banked up on a sort of high stage at my left. It was a characteristic but dull and lifeless scene. At a later hour I visited the moving pictures. The large, obscure shed was jammed full of rough-looking men and boys, French soldiers in many colors, and Arabs in hanging folds, with life-worn faces, often emaciated; but I noted as a general characteristic that self-contained, self-reliant immobility of countenance that is the type of border men; it was the crowd of a frontier town. I went back to my hotel under the keen midnight sky at last, thinking of the long and crowded life of the historic past in this old caravanserai of the desert tribes, of the scenes of which I had been reading—the Koran-led army, the battle of the women, the palace feasts, night-long, where pages swung rose censers among the guests and the revelry ended with the morning prayer; of the great figures—the scholar-saint, Sidi bou-Médyen, the ascetic revolutionary, Ibn Toumert, the Berber shepherd boy who found a kingdom, the world conqueror by the sea at Mahdia, the young princes drowned; of the desert courage that had flashed here, a sword from the scabbard, of the desert piety that had here flung away the jewel of life a thousand times, of the generations of desert idealists who in the crowded schools had walked the way of light as it was vouchsafed to them; and in the waking reality of the French border town, whose night scene had depressed me, it seemed an Arabian dream.