TLEMCEN

I

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.