“Somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan.”
“Somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan.”
“Somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan.”
“Somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan.”
Itwas a brilliant morning. I went to the edge of the desert and looked off south with the wish to go on that all unknown horizons wake, but which the desert horizon stirs, I think, with more longing insistence, with a greater power of the vague, than any other; for there it lies world-wide, mysterious, unpenetrated, and seems to open a pathway through space itself, like the sea. All true travellers know this feeling, the nostalgia for the “far country” that they will never see; it is an emotion that is like a passion—mystical, and belongs to the deep soul. The desert horizon, like the sea’s, at every moment breeds this spell. But as I turned back, with the sense of the chained foot, my disappointment was tempered by the knowledge that I was to companion my friend, who had been ordered to Tonkin; and I had timed my departure to go with his detachment on its way north. As I went down to the train my Arab boy, with the infinite hopefulness of such attachés, brought me a dead wolf, if by chance I would like it; but I could not add it to my baggage, whereat he was sorrowful, but was comforted. The station presented a lively scene—many soldiers in their white duck trousers and red caps; there was a band; the air was filled with good-bys and laughing salutations; the car windows grew lined with leaning forms and intent faces; the music struck up, high and gallant, and with the last cries and shouts we were off on the line.
It was too short a ride, though the train climbed slowly up the incline, while the desert grew a distant outlook and was shut from view as we made into the winding valleys; and we mounted up through the black defiles, the desolation of the shivered rock, the passes of the toothed ranges, the blocking cliffs and columnar heights—all the petrifaction and fantasy of that naked and severe land; but I was less sensible of its enmity and melancholy than when I came through it alone, though it was harsh and wild, aterre perdue. My friend travelled with his comrades, but we had a long lunch in the train before Aïn-Sefra, and a longer dinner when night began to fall, with tales and talk. Tales of the mutiny of thebatallion d’Afrique—Othello tales these, fit for fearful ears; tales of night surprises, Arabs crawling by inches for hours in the sands, the sentinels killed without a sound, the first alarm bayonets through the tents, and then the rouse, the square, the victory; tales of the desert madness, thecafard. Stirring tales. Talk, too, of home and friends left behind us in the world, of the dead and the living, and of what might yet be for both of us. He told me much of the Legion, for that interested me; but he never complained, and if he caught some unspoken thought on my face from time to time, “C’est le métier” he would say, and smile my sympathy away. He was a youth after my own heart; but the night fell darker and darker, and there would be an end. At the last station where it was possible, he came back to me. It was good-by.
TOUGOURT
IV
TOUGOURT
IT was a cold dawn in late April at Biskra. The carriage, long and heavy, with three horses abreast, stood at the door. Ali, a sturdy Arab, young but with no look of youth, wound in a gorgeous red sash, sat on the box; and as I settled in my place, Hamet, the guide, followed me gravely and sat down beside me, and at a word from him we were briskly off on the long, uneventful drive to Tougourt, over the desert route of about a hundred and thirty miles southward, to be covered in two days’ travel. We were soon beside the sleepy silence of the oasis, and passed the old yellow slope that was once a fortress to guard it on the edge of the sands; we dipped along by little fields of fresh green barley and rose on the steppe of thebois, a tangle of low undergrowth, scarcely waist-high, of twisted and almost leafless shrub, that clothes the desert there with its characteristic dry, rough, tortured, and stunted but hardy vegetation. A few Arabs were to be seen in places cutting it for fire-wood. Camels, too, far away in almost any direction, loomed up, solitary and ungainly as harbor-buoys on a windless morning tide. On all sides lay the sharp black outlines of oasis clumps of palm-trees, distinct, single, solid, each a distant island, with miles to cross before one should land on its unknown shore; and behind us the range of the Aurès seemed to block out the world with the wild beauty of its precipices, which made one cliff of all the north as if to shut out Europe. It was like a wall of the world. All about us was the desert; everything seemed cold and gray and distant, lifeless, in the pallor of the morning; but with every mile the whole world brightened and warmed. Desert air intoxicates me; every breath of it is wine, not so much to my blood or my nerves, but to my whole being of man; and long before we reached Bordj Saada, the first halt, I was keyed to the day. It was a glorious day, cloudless and blue, and drenched with sunshine and radiance and warmth pouring on vast spaces; and the Bordj, a disused military post, a sort of large stockade for refuge and defence, standing solitary on its high ridge, was an old friend and a place of memory for me; there once I had turned back, and now I was going on. There was excitement in the moment, in the look ahead; and so it was only as we swept round the curve down into the valley of Oued Djedi and crossed its dry channel that I felt myself embarked, as it were, on my first true desert voyage. I had coasted the Sahara for a thousand miles here and there, like a boy in a boat; but now I should be at last out of sight of land.
We were quite happy voyagers, the three of us. Ali, on the box, sang from time to time some cadenced stave, careless as a bird, in a world of his own; indeed the drive was an adventure to him, for, as I afterward found, it was his first going to Tougourt; and had not Hamet, almost as soon as we started, lifting one intent, burning glance straight in my eyes—it was the first time I had really seen him, as a person—told me that I had brought him good luck, for that night his wife had borne him a boy? He was content. A fine figure, too, was Hamet; he answered, as no other guide but one I ever had, to the imagination; he filled my dream of what ought to be. A mature man, rather thick-set, with a skin so bronzed that in the shadow it was black, with the head of a desert sheik, noble, powerful; when he moved he seemed still in repose, so sculptural were all the lines of his figure, such dignity was in every chance attitude; he seemed more like some distinguished aid to attend me than a guide. His white burnoose fell in large folds, and as he threw it partly over me in the first cool hours, he disclosed some light, white underdress over whose bosom hung low a great gold chain with beads under; a revolver swung in a leather case, rather tightly drawn below his right breast with a strap over the shoulder; white stockings and slippers completed his garb. We talked of trifles, and the conversation was charming, not too fluent—talk of the road; but what I remember is my pleasure in finding again what often seems to me that lost grace of a fine natural demeanor in men. It is of less consequence to me what a man says than is his manner of saying it, and speech is not of the lips only, but of the whole man; and, in my experience, it is the unlearned who are also unspoiled, that, all in all, say things best. And ever as we talked or were silent the horses went on, the brilliant bare line of the Aurès sank slowly down, and round us was the waste of rock with its fitful tangle of tamarack and drin, the sea of sand with its ridged breadths, the near or distant horizon lines as the track rose and fell; and with the hours the panorama of the road began to disclose itself.
The road was really a broad, camel-trodden route on which the carriageway, winding about, found going as best it could; the railway that will some time be had been surveyed along it, and the telegraph-poles that already bore the wire far beyond Tougourt into the desert were seldom far away. On the earlier part of the journey the going was excellent in that dry season. It was not a lonely road, though for long stretches it was solitary. Over the brink of a rise suddenly would spring up a half-dozen human figures, sharp outlines on the blue sky, and a flock would come tumbling after as if clotted about their feet, and there might be a donkey or two; it was a Bedouin family on its northern migration to the summer pasturage. What an isolated fragment of human life it seemed, flotsam tossing about with the seasons, as little related to anything neighborly as seaweed, yet spawning century after century, living on, with the milk of goats, in such a waste; and how infinitely fresh was the simple scene! one or two men, a boy, women, children, and goats tramping in the desert toward water and green food, a type of humanity for ages—and it was such a wretched subsistence! But what a bodily vigor, what a look of independence, what a sense of liberty there was there, too! Now it would be two or three camels with the canopy in which women ride, with flocks, too, and more men and boys, more warmly clad, with more color and importance—some wealthier head man with his family going the same northward journey. Or, as the carriage crested some ridge, we would see miles ahead a long line creeping on toward us—a trade caravan; and after a while it would pass, the camels pouting in high air, under the loads of balanced boxes or bales laid across them, lumbering dumbly along in the great silence, like convicts, as it always seems to me, from another sphere of existence.
Many creatures give me vividly this impression of having haplessly intruded into a state of being not meant for them. The turtles in the swamps of my boyhood, leaning their sly and protruded heads out of their impossible shells, the fish that have great staring eyes in aquariums, frogs and toads and all centipedal sea creatures, are to me foreigners to life, strays, misbirths, “moving about in worlds not realized,” and all grotesque forms of life—even human deformity when it becomes grotesque—wake in me something between amusement and pity that they should be at all. I feel like saying as a guide, wishing to correct a friend of mine, once said: “Monsieur, you are a mistake.” But of all such creatures, the camel fills me with the most profound and incurable despair. He is the most homeless-looking of all creatures. He has been the companion and helpmate of man from the dawn of human life, and our debt to him through uncounted ages and in places where the human lot has been most penurious and desperate is untold; but man has never been able to enlighten him; he looks, on all occasions and under all circumstances, hopelessly bored with existence, unutterably sick of humanity. There is a suicidal mood in animal life, and at times one can see glimpses and intimations of it surely in the eyes of animals; the camel embodies it, like a stare. I wish they were all dead; and when I see their bones in the sand, as I often do, I am glad that they are gone and have left the ribs of their tabernacle of life behind them by the wayside. Every desert traveller writes a little essay on the camel. This is mine. I will not modify it even for the sake of the meharis that come down the route, overtaking us from Biskra; they are the racers that have just competed in the yearly trial of speed from Tougourt—aristocrats of the species; they have a clear gray tone and slender delicacies of flank and skin; all day they will be speeding ahead and dropping behind us; the desert is their cloth of gold and they its chivalry—splendid beasts they are, as native to this blown empire of the sand and the sun and the free air as a bird to the sky—and they lift their blunt noses over it with unconquerable contempt. It is amazing how the creature, supercilious or abject, refuses to be comforted. There is no link between him and man. If you seek a type for the irreconcilable, find it in the camel.
It is said that one meets his enemy in every place, and every traveller experiences these surprising encounters that prove the smallness of the world; but I better the proverb, for it is a friend I meet in the most solitary places. On the loneliest road of Greece a passing traveller called out my name; in the high passes of Algiers I came face to face with a schoolmate; and, however repeated, the experience never loses its surprise. Surely I had seen that gaunt figure pressing up on a stout mule from the head of the fresh trade caravan that was just approaching; that face, like a bird of prey, that predatory nose before the high forehead and bold eyes—yes, it was Yussef, my guide of years ago, with welcome all over his countenance and quick salutations to his old companion. He was a caravan man now, for the nonce, and coming up from the Souf. How natural it was to meet on the desert, with the brief words that resumed the years and abolished the time that had sped away and renewed the eternal now. But we must follow the meharis, slim forms on the horizon ahead, and we went on to overtake them at Aïn Chegga, a mere stopping place, where there was on one side of the way a sort of desert farm, and a relay of horses waiting for us, and on the other a small, lonesome building by itself where we could lunch from our own stores. The sun was hot now and the shade and rest grateful; but we had a long way to go. With thoughtless generosity we gave our fragments of bread to some adjacent boys, and started off rapidly with the fresh horses on the great plain.
The road was lonelier than in the morning hours; the solitude began to make itself felt, the silence of the heat, the encompassment of the rolling distances, the splendor of the sky. There was hardly any life except the occasional shrub, the drin. I saw a falcon once, and once a raven; but we were alone, as if on the sea. Then the Sahara began to give up its bliss—the unspeakable thing—the inner calm, the sense of repose, of relief, the feeling of separation from life, the falling away of the burden, the freedom from it all in the freedom of those blue and silent distances over sandy and rock-paved tracts, full of the sun. How quiet it was, how large, and what a sense of effortless elemental power—of nature in her pure and lifeless being! It is easy to think on the desert, thought is there so near to fact—a still fresh imprint in consciousness; thought and being are hardly separate there; and there nature seems to me more truly felt in her naked essence, lifeless, for life to her is but an incident, a detail, uncared for, unessential. She does but incline her poles and it is gone. Taken in the millennial æons of her existence, it is a lifeless universe that is, and on the desert it seems so. This is the spectacle of power where man is not—like the sea, like the vault of heaven, like all that is infinite. What a repose it is to behold it, to feel it, to know it—this elimination, not only of humanity, but of life, from things! The desert—it is the truth. How golden is the sunlight, how majestic the immobile earth, how glorious the reach of it—this infinite! And one falls asleep in it, cradled and fascinated and careless, flooded slowly by that peace which pours in upon the spirit to lull and strengthen and quiet it, and to revive it changed and more in nature’s image, purged—so it seems—of its too human past.
It was late in the afternoon. Hamet roused himself as we passed down to Oued Itel and crossed its dry bed, and Ali ceased from his vagrant music as the horses breasted the slope beyond. We came out on a high ridge. It was a magnificent view. The long valley of the great chotts lay below us transversely, like a vast river bottom; far off to the northeast glittered, pale and white, Chott Melrir, like a sea of salt, and before us Chott Merouan stretched across like a floor, streaked with blotches of saltpetre and dark stains of soil. The scene made the impression on me of immense flats at a dead low tide, reaching on the left into distances without a sea. It was a scene of desolation, of unspeakable barrenness, of the waste world; its dull, white lights were infinitely fantastic on the grays and the blacks, and the lights in the sky were cold; the solitude of it was complete; but its great extent, its emptiness, its enclosing walls of shadow in the falling day crinkling the whole upper plane of the endless landscape round its blanching hollows and horizontal vistas below, stamped it indelibly on my eyes. I was not prepared for it; it was an enlargement, a new aspect of the world. This was the southwestern end of the chain of chotts, or salt wastes, that lie mostly below sea-level and are the dried-up bed of the ancient inland arm of the sea that washed this valley in some distant age; they stretch northeasterly and touch the Mediterranean near Gabès and the suggestion is constantly made that the sea be let into them again by a canal, thus flooding and transforming this part of the Sahara. It may some time be done; but there is some doubt about the lay of the levels and whether such an engineering feat would not result merely in stagnant waters. Meanwhile it is a vast barren basin, saline, and in the wet season dangerous with quicksands, unsafe ground, a morass of death for man and beast. The ridge where I stood commanded a long view of this sterile and melancholy waste; but I did not feel it to be sad; I only felt it to be; it had such grandeur.
We went down by a rough descent and began the crossing of the chott before us, Merouan, on its westerly edge. The road ran on flat ground, often wet and thick with a coating of black mud, and there was the smell of saltpetre in the air; the view on either side was merely desolate, night was falling, it began to be chill; and by the time we reached the farther side the stars came out. It was a darkened scene when we rode into the first oasis of young palms, without inhabitants, which belonged to some French company. It was full night when we emerged again on the sands; a splendor of stars was over us and utter solitude around; it was long since we had seen any one, and as the second oasis came into view it looked like a low black island cliff on the sea, and as deserted. We drove into its shadows by a broad road like an avenue, with the motionless palms thick on either side, as in a park; there was no sign or sound of life. It was like night in a forest, heavy with darkness and silence, except where the stars made a track above and our lights threw a pale gleam about. This oasis, which was large, also seemed uninhabited; and we passed through it on the straight road which was cut by other crossing roads, and came out on the desert by the telegraph-poles. The going was through heavy sand, which after a mile or two was heavier; our hubs were now in drifts of it. Hamet took the lights and explored to find tracks of wheels, and the horses drew us with difficulty into what seemed a route; in ten minutes it was impracticable. We crossed with much bumping and careening to the other side of the telegraph-poles, and that was no better; forward and back and sidelong, with much inspection of the ground, we plied the search; we were off the route.
We drove back to the oasis thinking we had missed the right way out, and on its edge turned at right angles down a good road; at the corner we found ourselves in the dunes—there was no semblance of a route. We returned to the centre of the silent palm grove, where there were branching ways, and taking another track were blocked by a ditch, and avoiding that, coasting another and ruder side of the grove, again at the upper corner of the oasis struck the impassable; so we went back to our starting-place. Hamet took the lanterns and gathered up his revolver and set out apparently to find the guardian, if there was one. It was then Ali told me he had never been to Tougourt before; Hamet was so experienced a guide that it was thought a good opportunity to break in a new driver. These French oases across the old route, with their new roads, were confusing; and Hamet had not been down to Tougourt of late. The silence of the grove was great, not wholly unbroken now: there were animal cries, insect buzzings, hootings, noises of a wood, and every sound was intensified in the deep quiet, the strange surroundings. It was very late. We had spent hours in our slow progress wandering about in the sands and the grove in the uncertain light. Hamet was gone quite a long time, but at last we saw his waving lantern in the wide dark avenue and drove toward him. He got in, said something to Ali, and off we went on our original track, but turned sharply to the right before issuing from the wood, down a broad way; we were soon skirting the western edge of the oasis; branches brushed the carriage; the ruts grew deep, the track grew narrow, the carriage careened; we got out, the wheels half in the ditch, horses backing. Hamet threw up his hands. It was midnight. We would camp where we were. The route was lost, whatever might be our state; and I did not wonder, for as nearly as I could judge we were then heading north by east, if I knew the polestar. We were on the only corner of the oasis we had not hitherto visited; the spot had one recommendation for a camp—it was a very out-of-the-way place. The horses were taken out, and each of us disposed himself for the night according to his fancy. It was intensely cold, and I rolled myself in my rugs and sweaters and curled up on the carriage seat and at once fell fast asleep.
An hour later I awoke, and unwinding myself got out. It was night on the desert. Ali was asleep on the box, upright, with his chin against his breast. Hamet lay in his burnoose in the sand some little distance away. The horses stood in some low brush near the ditch. The palm grove, impenetrably black, stood behind, edging the long, low line of the sky; there was a chorus of frogs monotonously chanting; and before me to the west was the vague of the sands, with indistinguishable lines and obscure hillocks, overlaid with darkness. Only the sky gave distance to the silent solitude—such a sky as one does not see elsewhere, magnificent with multitudes of stars, bright and lucid, or fine and innumerable, melting into nebulous clouds and milky tracts, sparkling and brilliant in that keen, clear, cloudless cold, all the horizon round. I was alone, and I was glad. It was a wonderful moment and scene. Hamet stirred in his place, and I went back to my post and slept soundly and well.
I wokeat the first streak of dawn. Two beautiful morning stars still hung, large and liquid, in the fading night, but the growing pallor of daybreak already disclosed the wild and desolate spot where we had fortunately stopped. Drifts of trackless sand stretched interminably before us; the young palms showed low and forlorn in the gray air; the scanty brush by the ditch was starved and miserable; everything had a meagre, chill, abandoned look. As soon as it was light we reversed our course, and re-entering the oasis hailed a well-hidden group of buildings with a koubba that Hamet seemed to have discovered the night before. An old Arab gave us our bearings. We were seventeen kilometres short of Mraïer, the oasis which we should have reached; and now, making the right turn-off, we saw in another direction over the sands the black line of palms toward which we had gone astray. We soon covered the distance to Mraïer, which was a large oasis with a considerable village and a caravanserai whose gates were crowded with camels; here we got a very welcome breakfast, but we did not linger, and were quickly out again on the desert on the long day’s ride before us.
Since we passed the chott we were in the valley of Oued Rir, along which is strewn a chain of oases like a necklace as far as to Tougourt and beyond. We were really on the crust of what has been well called a subterranean Nile, formed by the converging flow of two Saharan rivers, Oued Igharghar and Oued Mya, whose underground bed is pierced by wells and the waters gathered and distributed to feed the oases. There are now forty-six of these palm gardens that lie at a distance of a few miles, one from another, spotting the arid sands with their black-green isles of solid verdure, making a fantastic and beautiful landscape of the rolling plain of moving sands, with many heights and depressions, stretching with desert breadth on and on under the uninterrupted blue of the glowing sky. The district has long been a little realm by itself, sustaining with much toil the meagre life of its people and periodically invaded and subdued by the great passing kingdoms of the north. Its prosperity, however, really dates from the French occupation. At that time the oases were dying out under the invasion of the unresting sands that slowly were burying them up. The French almost at once with their superior skill sank artesian wells, and the new flood of water brought immediate change. The number of the inhabitants has doubled; the product of dates, which are of the best quality, has increased many-fold; and new oases of great extent and value have been planted by French companies. This is one of the great works of public beneficence accomplished by France for the native population; and evidence of prosperity was to be seen on every hand all the way.
The route for the most part was sandy with occasional stretches of rock, often a beautifully colored quartz, whose brilliant and strange veins harmonized well with the deep-toned landscape; but the eye wandered off to the horizon and drifts of sand, as the heavens began to fill with light and the spaces grew brilliant; in that vacancy and breadth every detail grew strangely important and interesting; a single palm, a far glimmer of salt, a herd of goats would hold the eye, and, as the day grew on, the deceptive atmosphere gave a fresh touch of the fantastic, playing with the lines and forms of objects. We passed from Mraïer, leaving these island oases on the horizon as the route threaded its way more or less remote from them, and at intervals we would touch one—a palm grove on the right, and the village by itself on higher dry ground to the left. Two of these villages, of considerable size, were entirely new, having been built within two years; they were constructed of the sun-dried mud commonly used, but they did not have the dilapidated look of the ksar; they were clean and fresh, a new home for the people who had abandoned the old, unhealthy site that they had formerly occupied, and had made a new town for themselves; and Hamet, who told me this, said other villages had done the same, and he seemed proud of their enterprise and prosperity.
We went on now through heavy sand at times—and always there was the broad prospect, the gray and brown ribbed distance, the blue glow—a universal light, a boundless freedom, the desert solitude of the dry, soft air. “C’est le vrai Sahara” said Hamet, content. For myself I could not free my senses of the previous day’s impression of the great chotts as of the shore of a world, and the landscape continued to have a prevailing marine character. I do not mean that the desert was like the ocean; it was not. But the outlooks, the levels, the sand-colored and blue-bathed spaces were like scenes by the seashore; only there was no sea there. The affluence of light, the shadowless brilliancy, the silences, the absence of humanity and human things as again and again they dropped from us and ceased to be, were ocean traits; but there was no sea—only the wind sculpture of the sands, beautifully mottled and printed, and delicately modulated by the wind’s breath, only a blue distance, an island horizon. Even the birds—there were many larks to-day—seemed sea-birds, so lonesomely flying. But there was never any sea. It was the kingdom of the sands.
Here, not far from the route, I saw what was meant by the invasion of the sand. The oasis on its farther side toward the desert was half blown over with the white drifts of it that made in like a tide; the trunks of the palms were buried to a third of their height in it; the whole garden was bedded with it, and as we drew away from the place, looking back, the little oasis with its bare palm stems resembled a wreck driving in the sea of sands. Elsewhere I saw the barriers, fences of palm leaves and fagots, raised against the encroaching dunes, where the sand was packed against them like high snow-drifts. The sand grew heavier now, and as we came to Ourlana, about which palmerais lay clustering in all directions, the horses could hardly drag through the deep, loose mass up to the low building and enclosure where was our noon stopping place. The resources of the house were scanty: only an omelet, but an excellent one, and coffee; bread, too, and I had wine. The family, a small one with boy and girl, whom chocolate soon won to my side, was pleasant, and there was a welcome feeling of human society about the incident; but as I lit a cigarette and watched the fresh horses put in—for here we found our second relay that had been sent ahead some days before—I saw that, if the population seemed scanty, it was not for any lack of numbers. A short distance beyond our enclosure, and on a line with it, in the same bare sandy waste, stood another long building with a great dome, evidently a government structure, and at right angles to it before the door was forming a long line of young children; it was the village school—these were the native boys marching in to the afternoon session, for all the world like an American school at home. I had not expected to see that on the Sahara. I photographed it at once—a striking token of modern civilization; and I saw no happier sight than those playful little Arabs going to school.
We dipped ahead into the oasis by the long lines of palms lifting their bare stems far overhead and fretting the sky with their decorative border of tufts. Here and there were fruit trees, and occasionally vegetables beneath, but as a rule there were only the palms rising from bare earth, cut by ditches in which flowed the water; there was no orchard or garden character to the soil, only a barren underground, but all above was forest silence and the beauty of tall trees. It was spring, and the trees had begun to put out their great spikes and plumes of white blossoms in places, and the air was warm and soft. A palm fascinates me with the beauty of its formal lines; where two or three are gathered together they make a picture; a single one in the distance gives composition to a whole landscape. This was, notwithstanding the interludes of the oases, a continuously desert ride, and I remember it mostly for its beauty of color and line, and a strange intensity and aloofness of the beauty; there was nothing human in it. It seemed to live by its own glow in a world that had never known man; the scene of some other planet where he had never been. There was, too, over all the monotony and immobility of things, a film of changefulness, a waver of surface, a shifting of lights and planes; it was full of the fascination of horizons, the elusiveness of far objects, and the feeling of endlessness in it, like the sky, was a deep chord never lost. It was beyond Ourlana that I noticed to the southwest, a mile or two away, three or four detached palms by a lake; their tall stems leaned through the transparent air above a low bank over a liquid, mirror-like belt of quiet water, a perfect oriental scene. It was my first mirage; and two or three times more I saw it that afternoon—the perfect symbol of all the illusion of life. How beautiful it was, how was its beauty enhanced framed there in the waste world, how after a while it melted away!
Oasis after oasis dropped from us on the left and the right, and in the late afternoon we were climbing a sharp rise through the deepest sand we had yet encountered, so that we all got out and walked to relieve the horses, and ourselves toiled up the slope; and soon from the ridge we saw a broad panorama like that of the day before; but instead of that salt desolation, here the eye surveyed an endless lowland through which ahead ran a long, dark cluster of oases, one beyond another, like an archipelago; and Hamet, pointing to one far beyond all, on the very edge of the horizon, said: “Tougourt.” We descended to the valley, passing a lonely old gray mosque, or koubba, of some desert saint by the way—very solemn and impressive it was in the failing light, far from men; and we rolled on for miles over land like a floor, as on a Western prairie; and the stars came out; and at intervals a dark grove went by; and we were again in the sands; and another grove loomed up with its look of a black low island, and we passed on beside it. I thought each, as it came in view, was our goal, but we kept steadily on. It was nigh ten o’clock when we saw, some miles away, the two great lights, like low harbor lights, that are the lights of the gate of Tougourt. Ali was perceptibly relieved when we made sure of them; for they were unmistakable at last.
Then, in that last half-hour, I witnessed a strange phenomenon. The whole sky was powdered with stars; I had never seen such a myriad glimmer and glow, thickening, filling the heavenly spaces, innumerable; and all at once they seemed to interlink, great and small, with rays passing between them, and while they shone in their places, infinite in multitude, light fell from them in long lines, like falling rain, down the whole concave of night from the zenith to the horizon on every side. It was a Niagara of stars. The celestial dome without a break was sheeted with the starry rain, pouring down the hollow sphere of darkness, from the apex to the desert rims. No words can describe that sight, as a mere vision; still less can they tell its mystical effect at the moment. It was like beholding a miracle. And it was not momentary; for half an hour, as we drove over the dark level, obscure, silent, lonely, I was arched in and shadowed by that ceaseless, starry rain on all sides round; and as we passed the great twin lights of the gates, and entered Tougourt, and drew up in the dim and solitary square, it was still falling.
I emergedthe next morning from the arcaded entrance of the hotel, which was one of a continuous line of low buildings making the business side of the public square, and glancing up I saw a great dog looking down on me from the flat roof. There was little other sign of life. The square was a large, irregular space which seemed the more extensive owing to the low level of the adjoining buildings over which rose the massive tower of the kasbah close at hand on the right and, diagonally across, the high dome of the French Bureau, with its arcaded front beneath, filling that eastern side. A fountain stood in the midst of the bare space, and beyond it was a charming little park of trees; and still farther the white gleam of the barracks, through the green and on either side, closed the vista to the south. The Moresque architecture, which the French affect in the desert, with its white lights and open structure, gave a pleasing amplitude to the scene; and the same style was taken up by the main street straight down my left, whose line was edged by a long arcade with low, round arches, and the view lost itself beyond in the market square with thick tufts of palms fringing the sky. A few burnoosed figures were scattered here and there.
Hamet joined me at once, still content; he held in his hand a telegram from his new boy, or those who could interpret for him. We turned at once to the near corner by the kasbah, where was the entrance to the old town and the mosque—a precinct of covered streets, narrow, tortuous ways, with blank walls, dim light. There were few passers-by; occasionally there was a glimpse of some human scene; but the general effect, though the houses were often well built, was dingy, poor, and mean, as such an obscure warren of streets must seem to us, and there was nothing here of the picturesque gloom and threatening mystery of Figuig. I remember it as a desert hive of the human swarm; it was a new, strange, dark mode of man’s animal existence. This was a typical desert town, an old capital of the caravans. It had been thus for ages; and my feeling, as I wandered about, was less that of the life than of its everlastingness.
We went back to the mosque and climbed the minaret. It was a welcome change to step out on the balcony into the flood of azure. The true Sahara stretched round us—the roll of the white sands, motion in immobility; and all about, as far as one could see, the dark palm islands in the foreground and on every horizon. The terrace roofs of the old town lay dark under our feet; off there to the west in the sand were the tombs of its fifty kings; eastward the palm gardens, bordering and overflowing into the new quarter with its modern buildings, lifted their fronds; and near at hand the tower of the kasbah, and here and there a white-domed koubba, rose in the dreaming air; and the streets with their life were spread beneath. Tougourt, at the confluence of the underground streams, is the natural capital of the Rir country, a commanding point; on the north and west it is walled against the inroad of the sands; south and east is a more smiling scene, but the white sand lies everywhere between, like roads of the sea; it is the queen of the oases, and one understood in that sparkling air why it was called a jewel of the desert. I went down to the gardens, where there were fruit trees and vegetables among the palms, but for the most part there was as usual only the barren surface of earth, fed with little canals and crossed by narrow, raised footways, over which sprang the fanshaped or circular tufts of swarded green. On that side, too, was a native village—dreary walls of sun-dried earth with open ways; they seemed merely a new form of the naked ground shaped perpendicularly and squared—windowless, sealed, forlorn. I entered one or two. Indeed, I went everywhere that morning, for the distances were short.
In the afternoon I sat down by a table near a café in the market square, and I remained there for hours over my coffee, watching the scene. All Arab markets are much alike, but this was prettily framed. On my right a palm grove rose over a low wall; on the left, across the broad space, the low line of shops, with a glistening koubba dome in their midst, broke the blue sky; and all between, in front, was the market-place. In the foreground were a few raised booths, or tables, and at the near end by a group of three or four palms was a butcher’s stock in trade, the carcasses hanging on the limbs of a dead tree. Farther off to the left squatted a half-dozen Bedouins round little fagots of brushwood spread on the ground, and beyond them a group of animals huddled; in the centre, on the earth, one behind another into the distance, were many little squares and heaps of country goods, each with its guardian group as at a fair—vegetables, grains, cloths, slippers, ropes, caps, utensils, that together measured the scale of the simple wants of the desert. The place, though not crowded, was well filled with an ever-moving and changing throng, gathering into groups here and there—turbaned people of every tint and costume, young and old, poor and prosperous, picturesque alike in their bright colors or worn rags; but the white or brown flowing garments predominated. There were Arab and Berber faces of purer race; but in the people at large there was a strong negroid character, showing the deeper infusion of negro blood which one notices as he goes south of the Atlas. All the afternoon the quiet but interested crowd swarmed about; and round me at the close tables were soldiers and Arabs who seemed of a more prosperous class, drinking and talking, playing at cards, chess, and dominos, and some were old and grave and silent. At our table there was always one or two, who came and went, to whom Hamet would perhaps present me, a thin-featured cadi, a burly merchant, and we talked a little; but I left the talk to them and watched the scene and from time to time snapped my camera. A caravan came down the street, with great boxes strapped on the camels, and I thought the first two would sweep me, camera, table, and all, out of the way; but the long line got by at last, ungainly beasts with their pawing necks and sardonic mouths. At Tougourt one was always meeting a caravan. As I stood, at a later hour, in a lonely corner by the wall outside the gates, one was just kneeling down on the great sweep of the sand-hill to camp in the melancholy light that was falling from the darkening sky—a sombre scene; and when I came out of the hotel at night I found another sleeping, humped and shadowy, on the public square. The camel was as omnipresent as the palm, and belonged to the same dunes and sky; and as I sat watching there through the uneventful and unhurried hours, the market-place was a microcosm of the desert world.
I spentthe evening in theCafé Maureof the Ouled-Naïls. They arela femmeof the Sahara, daughters of a tribe whose centre is at Djelfa, not far from Laghouat, leagues away to the west, and thence they are dispersed through the desert, adept dancing-girls who perform in cafés; and in that primitive society, it is said, no reproach attaches to their mode of life, which yields them a dowry and brings them at last a husband. The custom is not peculiar to the Sahara; I have read of its existence in Japan and in the north of Scotland in the eighteenth century. I had met with them before, and was familiar with their figures, but always in a tourist atmosphere; here they were on their own soil, andau naturel, and I expected a different impression.
The room was rather large, with the furnace and the utensils for coffee in the corner near the entrance; four or five musicians, on a raised platform, were discoursing their shrill barbarian art, but it pleases me with its plaintive intensity and rapid crescendos, in its savage surroundings; a bench went round the wall, and there were tables, at one of which Hamet and I sat down, and coffee was brought. There were not many in the room—a sprinkling of soldiers, mostly in the blue of the tirailleurs, Arabs, old and gray-bearded, or younger and stalwart like Ali, whom I had lost sight of and now found here, much more attractive than I had thought possible, with a desert rose in his mouth and a handsome comrade. A few women with the high head-dress and heavy clothes they wear were scattered about. Close behind me, and to my left, was a wide entrance to the dark shadows of the half-lighted court whose cell-like rooms I had inspected in the morning, and men and women were passing in and out, singly and in groups, all the evening. For a while there was no dancing—only the music; but at some sign or call a full-grown woman, who seemed large and heavy, began the slow cadence and sway of the dance. I had often seen the performance, but never in such a setting; at Biskra and in the north it is a show; here it was a life. She finished, and I beckoned to a young slip of a girl standing near. She came, leaning her dark hands on the table, with those unthinking eyes that are so wandering and unconcerned until they fill with that liquid, superficial light which in the south is so like a caress. I offered her my cigarettes, and she smiled, and permitted me to examine the bracelets on her arms and the silver ornaments that hung from her few necklaces; she was simply dressed and not overornamented; she was probably poor in such riches; there was no necklace of golden louis that one sometimes sees; but there were bracelets on her ankles, and she wore the head-dress, with heavy, twisted braids of hair. A blue star was tattooed on her forehead, and her features were small but fine, with firm lines and rounded cheek and chin; she was too young to be handsome, but she was pretty for her type and she had the pleasant charm that youth gives to the children of every tint and race. She stood by us a while with a little talk, and as the music began she drew back and danced before us; and if she had less muscular power and vivacity than the previous dancer, she had more grace in her slighter motions. She used her handkerchief as a background to pose her head and profile her features and form; and all through the dance she shot her vivid glances, that had an elasticity and verve of steel, at me. She came back to take our applause and thanks, and talked with Hamet, for her simple French phrases were exhausted; there was nothing meretricious in her demeanor, rather an extraordinary simplicity and naturalness of behavior; she seemed a thing of nature. The room began to fill now; three women were dancing; and she went over to the bench by the wall opposite, and I noticed a young boy of eight or ten years ran to sit by her and made up to her like a little brother. There were three or four such young boys there.
The scene was now at its full value as a picture; not that there was any throng or excitement, and to a European eye it might seem only dull, provincial, rude; the rather feebly lighted room was obscure in the corners and the walls were naked; the furnace corner, however, was full of dark movement, the sharp music broke out afresh, the dance was almost sombre in its monotony, seen mechanically and without any apparent interest by the Arabs, wrinkled and grizzled, banked together or leaning immobile on the bench by the wall; and the cavernous shadow of the court behind me made a fine background to the figures or groups that disappeared or emerged, or sometimes stood stationary there in the semi-obscurity. To my color and shadow loving eye it was an interesting scene; and its rudeness enhanced its quality. I noticed many a slight thing: a tall negro stalked along the opposite wall with a handful of candles which he offered to a woman and found no welcome for, and he went away apparently exceeding sorrowful. And I sat there long in the midst of it, thinking of striped tents by the city wall in the sand near the graves; of streets in the Orient and the north where the women sit by the door-post like idols; and especially reconstructing in imagination the scenes of a romance by an Arab, which I had lately read, depicting the life of an Ouled-Naïl along these very routes where I had been passing, a book full of desert truth—“Khadra,” it is called. Toward ten o’clock we rose to go, and I caught the eye of the young girl I had talked with, and had a smile for good-by.
Thehorses stood at the door early the next morning for a drive to Temacin, some thirteen kilometres south. We were soon out of town, travelling beside an oasis on the left and going in the open desert; a boy joined us from the oasis and excitedly struggled to keep up with the carriage, no difficult task, for the route was heavy with sand; two other boys on donkeys ahead were having a race; and the route had always some touches of travel. The openness of the view was boundless, and I had not seen finer sands, stretching away in long rolls and ridges, and mounded into splendid dunes, with palms here and there for horizon lines. There were always groups and little strings of camels, isolated but living, in the expanse over which the eye roamed; we passed from time to time within view of clumps of lost palms, little oases buried and left in the sands, half-submerged, derelicts; now there were Bedouin tents, low, striped shelters, by ones or twos, pitched on the sterile waste, looking infinitely solitary, at a distance from a small village on a ridge, that itself seemed a heap of ruined and ribbed walls left abandoned. The morning was hot, the sun beat down, and every line and tracery of the wind was visible on the sand. The surface of the dunes was beautiful—light and full of the spirit of fantasy; the modulation was exquisite, ribbed and fretted, furrowed in lines and touched all over with little disks and curves, like the imprint of small shells; and their mottled and wavy surfaces broke the monotony of the vast slopes and dunes like an infinite enamelling of nature. It was the land of the blue distance, the simple in the grand, the apotheosis of paucity in the means, of poverty in the substance, elemental, abstract, superb: the glory of the desert. I never so felt it as on that morning. I watched the slender, film-like, far-off minaret of Temacin take body and height as we drew nearer and nearer, and saw plainly and distinctly at last the boldly perched, irregular oblong of walls and roofs that topped a rising ridge of the sands, with its minaret like a dark, mediæval tower standing in heaven with a lance-like solitude. Its top was bordered with a broad frieze of colored tiles and capped with a pyramidal head or balcony pierced with slim Moorish arches. There were men working under the wall; but the town looked marvellously silent and alone, dark and withdrawn, like an impenetrable earthen ruin, incommunicable; it rose as if made of the earth itself, with the dilapidation of old earthworks, forbidding and melancholy, with no touch of life except the gleam of its tiled minaret; in all that sun it seemed sunless—ruinous, decadent, infinitely old. Soon after we passed another heap of earth walls on a sand-mound, a small village, and came almost at once to Tamelhat, the zaouia, which we had set out to see.
High walls surrounded the enclosure, which was extensive. Tamelhat is a holy village, a chief seat of the religious order of the Tidjania and daughter of the mother zaouia at Aïn Madhi, near Laghouat, with which it shares the devotion of this important brotherhood, one of the most influential of the Moslem associations in North Africa. The zaouia is a sort of monastery or abbey; but I was not prepared to find it so large an establishment. We left the carriage at the gate and passed in to a second gate, and I was struck by the ornamental work and texts on them and on the walls. A straight avenue led down to an open space where the mosque stood on the right side of the street as we turned sharply upon it. Three square windows set in little ornamented arches in the centre broke the broad white space of the wall, and there were other windows irregularly placed. A little to one side was a heavy door, with a double row of faience set over its square top and descending on beautiful onyx pillars. An octagonal dome, tipped with a shaft of three golden balls, completed the building above. It was a pretty exterior with a touch of art in the line of windows, and as I passed into the interior by the lovely onyx columns it seemed like a reminiscence, almost a renaissance, to find before my gaze the familiar blue and green tiles, plaques of wrought plaster in arabesque, pretty bits of faience adornment—forms of the ornament and color so delightful to me. The interior was roomy, with good spaces, and lofty above; in the main fore part a palanquin was in one corner, and a few tombs were placed here and there; but the shrine, the tomb of the Marabout who founded the zaouia, stood in the space to the left, directly under the dome, as in a chapel. It was heavily covered with stuffs, as usual, and overhung with many banners; a grill ran round it, and outside of that a wooden rail; the tomb also bore Arabian texts. The whole effect, notwithstanding the bareness, the few elements, the uncostly materials, had the grand simplicity of the Moslem faith; it was impressive—imposing to a simple soul; but, beyond the restful sense of the neighborhood of beautiful and sacred things in that far and desert solitude, what pleased me most and the feature I carried away to be my memory of it was the ample lights in the cool spaces by the open windows above the tomb toward the street, where the birds were continually fluttering in and out, unfrightened and undisturbed, as if this was their quiet home.
I thanked the Arab sacristan who stood looking at me with old and tranquil eyes, and we went out and walked up the street, which seemed like a long cloister. There were grilled windows on the well-built walls at intervals; a few men sat here and there on benches along the way; it seemed a place of peace. The street, which was quite long and straight, ended in a large court near which was the dwelling of the Marabout. Hamet asked me if I would like to see him, and I gladly assented. After a brief interval an Arab came to us, to whom I gave my coat and what things I was carrying; and leaving them below, he guided us up an irregular stairway, as in an old house, and took us into a rather large, high room, plainly plastered and bare. The desert saint—such he was—was seated on the floor in the middle of one side by the wall on a rug; he was old and large, white-bearded, with a heavy look, as if he were used to much repose and was aged. He gave me his hand as I stooped down to him, and after a word or two invited me to be seated at a plain table before him in the middle of the room; and attendants silently brought food. There was already in the room the caïd of Temacin, a stout and prosperous-looking Arab, to whom Hamet presented me, and the three of us sat down to what turned out to be a hearty breakfast. Two or three other tall Arabs, apparently belonging to the family, sat by the wall to my left, as I faced the Marabout, and at a doorway in the corner on the right stood a group of different ages, younger, with one or two boys, intelligent and bright-eyed. The caïd and myself talked in low tones, and no one else spoke, except from time to time the Marabout gave some direction to the attendants, apparently of a hospitable nature, as each time it resulted in fresh dishes. There was pastry that resembled rolls, and after a few moments, served in another form, hot with sugar, it resembled pancakes, but I dare say it was something quite different, and the Marabout urged it upon me; there was another combination that reminded me distantly of doughnuts, with which the hot food ended; but there was a dessert of French cakes, almonds, and a dried aromatic kernel like peas, and much to my surprise there were oranges that must have come on camel-back from Biskra. There was coffee, too, with a curious pot and sugar-bowl, and the whole service was excellent, the attendants kindly and pressing, though very quiet. It appeared afterward that no one ever sees the saint eat; his food is brought and left, and he takes what he likes alone. I observed him through the meal, and occasionally he addressed a sentence of inquiry or interest to us. The impression he made on me was one of great indolence, as if he had never done anything for himself, and also of what I can only describe as a somnolent temperament, heavy and rousing himself at times; but it may have been only age. The profound silence and atmosphere of awed respect were remarkable; the few words spoken were hardly above a whisper, and the caïd and I used low tones. It was a hospitable and generous breakfast, however, and the manner of it wholly pleasant and friendly; and as I again took the old Marabout’s large, soft hand, and expressed my pleasure and thanks for having been thus received, he seemed to me very cordial and kind; and for my part I was glad that I had found the unusual experience of breakfasting with a saint so agreeable. The caïd and I parted below, and I walked back through the tranquil street and by the mosque with the bird-haunted windows and the onyx portal, well pleased with my morning in such a place of peace and good-will.
We drove back through the hot horizons of a burning noon; by sombre Temacin with its far-seen tower, old watcher of the desert; by the distant western oasis with its two gleaming koubbas, that seemed to dissolve between the sands and the blue; by the Bedouin tents crouched in the long drifts below the brow of the earthen ruin whose walls gaped on the hill with fissure and breach. We passed a bevy of bright-colored Bedouin women hurrying in their finery to some Marabout to pray. The long slopes and mounded dunes had not lost that wonderful enamel of the breath of the wind. All nature seemed to stretch out in the glory of the heat. It was spring on the desert; it was a dreaming world. “Le vrai Sahara,” said Hamet, half to himself. And slowly over the palmy plain, beyond the lost oasis, the tower and minaret of Tougourt, slim lines on the sky, grew distinct in their turn, and solid, and near, and we drove in through the garden green as over a threshold of verdure. It was a great ride.
The day ended lazily. I had the pleasure of a few courteous words with the agha of Tougourt, to add to my hospitable distinctions. “He is an Arabian prince,” said Hamet proudly, as we walked away. Along the arcade I saw a Jew seated cross-legged, with his back to the jamb of his shop; he held a heavy folio volume on his lap and seemed to peruse it with grave attention; that was the only time I ever saw a native reading a book in North Africa, and I looked curiously at the fine venerable face. The boys were playing leap-frog before the hotel as I came back from my walk; they had thrown off their haiks, or jackets, or whatever their upper garment might be. How they played! with what strong, young sinews and vivacity of rivalry and happiness! though the children of the street seemed often poor, destitute, and with faces of want. I photographed two of these Bedouin boys, with whom I had made friends. In the evening I sat outside and watched the camp-fires burning by the camels in the square. I thought of the massacring of the French garrison here forty years ago, and of the protests that a military interpreter, Fernand Philippe, records from the lips of the soldiers when a year or two later the government contemplated withdrawing from this advanced desert post. It was a place of home-sickness, of fever, and of utter isolation; but the soldiers wished to stay—withdraw? never!—and all this peace and prosperity that I had witnessed was the French peace.
Itwas three o’clock in the morning when I went out to start on the return under the stars. The streets were dark and silent as we drove out; but the heavens were brilliant, and the twin lights of Tougourt shone behind us like lighthouses as we made out into the sandy plain. A few miles on we passed a company of soldiers convoying a baggage-train—strong, fine faces above their heavy cloaks, marching along in the night. The stars faded and day broke quietly—a faint green, a dash of pink, a low, black band of cloud, and the great luminary rolled up over the horizontal waste. The morning hours found us soon in the heavy sands of the upland, with the old gray mosque and stretches of thebois, the desert drin, and we descended into the country of the marine views, the land of the mirage, mirror-like waters shoaling on banks of palm, dreaming their dream; and now it was Ourlana and the school, fresh horses and an early arrival at Mraïer, and sleep in the caravanserai amid horses and camels and passing soldiers, a busy yard. The chotts looked less melancholy as we passed over the lowland in the bright forenoon, and again there shimmered the far salt—the ocean look where there was no sea, close marine views, and there was much mirage; and we climbed the ascent and glided on over the colored quartz, and the range of the Aurès rose once more above the horizon, beautiful and calling, and Aïn Chegga seemed a familiar way-station. Fresh horses, and the last start, and Bordj Saada seemed a suburb; and as we drove into Biskra, with its road well filled with pedestrians and carriages, it seemed like a return to Europe—so soon does the traveller’s eye become accustomed to what at first was “rich and strange.” And Hamet went to his baby boy.