I went out 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.