FIGUIG

I

I woke, in the train, on the high plateaus. Dawn—soft green and

pallid gold, luminous, then dying under a heavy cloud while faint

pink brightened on the sides of the great horizon—opened the lofty

plain, boundless and naked, thinly touched with tufts of vegetation;

as far as one could see, only the elements—color, cold, swathing

wild herbage on rugged soil; and far off, alone, the haze of an

abrupt mountain range. It was the steppe beyond Khreider. The

vast, salt chott of El-Chergui, that streaks the middle of the

steppe with its waste and quicksands, lay behind; but its saline

arms still clung to and discolored the surface, and whitened the

view westward with dull crystalline deposits. This wide blanching

of the gray and red soil striped and threw into relief the rigid

scene—aridity, vacancy, solitude, from which emerged the still

grandeur of inanimate things. It was the characteristic scene of

the high plains—a vague monotony, colored with sterile features

flowing on level horizons. As the train ascended nature seemed

still to unclothe and uncover, to strip and peel the land; but not

continuously. From time to time the steppe lapsed back to a thicker

growth of tough-fibred alfa, whose home is on these plains, and bore

other dry, sparse, darkish desert plants upon reddish hummocks; on

this pasturage distant herds of camels browsed unattended, as on a

cattle-range, in the wild spaces fenced by rolling sands; then the

climbing train would soon pass again amid low dunes. Few stations, at

long intervals; isolated, meagre, they seemed lost in the spreading

areas, mere points of supply; the most important was but a village,

with sickly trees; but they took on an original character. They were

fortified; obviously built for defence, with sallies and retreats in

their walls; guarded casemates obliquely commanding all avenues of

approach and the walls themselves; doors that were meant to shut. It

was a railway in arms, a line of military posts, or blockhouses,

as it were, on an unsettled border. The sight gave a tang of war

to the silence of the uninhabited country, and reminded one of

unseen tribes and of the harsh frontier of Morocco over opposite,

south and west. Slowly the mountains sprang up; one had already

drifted behind, Djebel-Antar; and now the peaks of the Saharan

Atlas, rising sheer from the plain a thousand metres, lay on either

hand, bold crests and jutting ranges—Djebel-Aïssa on the left,

the Sfissifa on the right in the southwestern sky, Djebel-Mektar

straight ahead. We had passed the highest point of the line at an

elevation of thirteen hundred metres, and were now on the incline

and rapidly approaching the last barrier of the Sahara. We were soon

at the foot of Mektar. It was Aïn-Sefra, an important military base.

But I did not think of war; to me Aïn-Sefra is a name of literature

and has a touch of personal literary _devoir_; for there in the

barren Moslem cemetery, outside the decaying ksar, is buried the

poor girl who taught me more about Africa than all other writers; she

had the rare power of truth-telling, and lived the life she saw; her

books are but remnants and relics of her genius, but she distilled

her soul in them—one of the wandering souls of earth, Isabelle

Eberhardt. She was only twenty-seven, but years are nothing—she

had drunk the cup of life. Here she died in the oued, the torrent

river whose bottom I was now skirting, a wide, dry watercourse,

strewn with stones, and with roughly indented banks. It was dry

now, but on these denuded uplands and surfaces, after a rainfall,

which is usually torrential, it fills in a moment with a furious

sweep and onset of waters; and thus a few years ago it rose in the

October night and tore away the village below the high ground of

the French encampment; and there she was drowned. The echo of her

soul in mine, long ago at Tunis, was the lure that drew me here.

There, before my eyes, was the sight I had longed to see, just as

she had described it. I knew it as one recognizes a lighthouse

on a foreign coast, so single, so unique it was—the leap of

the red dunes up the defile, fierce as a sword thrust of the far

desert through the mountains. That was Africa—the untamed wild,

the bastion of nature in her barbarity, the savage citadel of

her splendid forces to which man is negligible and human things

unknown. The dunes are golden-red, tossed like a stormy, billowing

sea; they charge, they leap, they impend—petrified in air; an

ocean surf of red sand, touched with golden lights, frozen in the

act of the wild wind. They are magnificent in their lines of motion,

in their angers of color; but the spirit of them is their _élan_,

their drive, flung forward as if to ram and overwhelm the pass with

a wide sandy sea. The light on them is a menace; they threaten;

nor is it a vain threat; they move with the sure fatality of all

lifeless things, they will invade and conquer—a foe to be reckoned

with; and to fend the valley against them, man takes a garden,

trees, plantations, advancing a van of life against all that

lifelessness. It is a superb picture there, among the mountains,

a symbol of the struggle—the long battle of vegetable and mineral

forces, clothing and desolating the planet; and it holds the rich

glow of the African temperament, a spark of the soul of the land.

The train winds on in the bright morning air by a shining koubba,

dark palm tufts, and the high, silent tricolor, and goes down

the oued, turns the mountain, passes into the rocks, a strange

scene of stormy forms and sterile colors, and makes from valley

to valley by sharp curves, from oued to oued by deep cuts,

piercing and grooving its passage to lower levels through the

range of the ksour. Almost from the first it is unimaginable,

that landscape. It is all rock in ruins, denuded and shivered,

shelving down, disintegrating; fallen avalanches of rotten strata;

every kind of fracture; whole hills in a state of breaking up into

small pieces, pebbly masses, bitten, slivered. We traverse broken,

burnt fields of it, all shingle; expanses of it so, beneath walls

cracked and scarified; we curve by scattered bowlders of all sizes

and positions, down valleys of stones; new hills open, sharp-edged,

jagged—continuous rock. All outlooks are on the waste wilderness

crumbling in its own abandonment; all contours are knife-edges;

the perspectives are all of angles. In the near open tracts lie

relics and remains, mounds, mountains, and hills that have melted

away; steep lifts on all curves; and on the sky horizon, following

and crossing one another, saw-toothed ranges, obliquely indented

with sharp re-entries, or else acute cones and rounded mamelons:

the whole changing landscape a ruin of mountains being crumbled and

split and blown away. It is an elemental battle-field, where the

rock is the victim—a suicide of nature. In this region of extreme

temperatures with sudden changes—burning noons and frozen nights,

torrid summers and winter snows, downpours of rainfall—the fire

and frost, wind and cloudburst have done their secular work; they

have stripped and pulverized the softer, outer rock shell, washed it

down, blown it away, till the supporting granite and schist are bare

to the bone. It is a skeletonized, worn land, all apex and débris;

near objects have the form and aspect of ruins, the horizons are

serried, the surfaces calcined. It is an upper world of the floored

and pinnacled rock, an underworld shivered and strewn with its own

fragments, a “gray annihilation”—of the color of cinders. I

imagine that the landscapes of the moon look thus.

A mineral world, bedded, scintillant, flaked. It is dyed with color.

All life has gone from it, and with the departure of life has come

an intensification, an originality, an efflorescence of mineral

being. The earlier stages of the ride—the red mountains striped

beneath with black, beyond the middle ground of a prevailing reddish

tint sparsely scattered with a vegetation of obscure greens and

dull grays amid strong earth colors, once with the bluish-black

of palm-trees blotting the distance—I remember now almost as

fertility. Here there is not a leaf—nor even earth nor sand. It

seems rock devastated by fire, like volcanic summits. A sombre

magnificence, a fantastic grandeur! Blue-grays, browns, and ochres

of every shade gleam on the slopes of the hillsides; reds splash the

precipices and walls; innumerable, indescribable tones, too gloomy to

be called iridescence, shimmer over the mid-distance and die out in

twilights of color amid the manganese shadows, on the cold limestone

heights, in the sandstone gullies. Where I can see the surfaces of

the shivered stones, I notice their extraordinary smoothness. There

are purples and black-greens and violets among them, but for

the most part they are black, like soot; for amid this fantastic

coloration, what gives its sombreness to the scene—the trouble

of the unfamiliar—and grows most menacing, is the black. The

land is oxidized—blackened; its shivered floor is strewn with

black stones; black stripes streak its sides far and near; amid all

that mineral bloom it is to black that the eye returns, fascinated,

enthralled. It invades the spirits with its prolonged weirdness; it

awes and saddens. And all at once we emerge from a deep ravine—oh,

_la belle vie!_—a sea of dark verdure makes in from below, like

a fiord, among the naked mountains round it—silent, mysterious,

living, the green of the palm oasis; and swiftly, after that

stop, we dip into the black gorges beyond Moghrar, more sombre,

sinister—valleys of the color and aspect of some strange death, the

incineration of nature in her own secular periods, the passing of a

planet. Slowly vegetation begins—tufts amid the rock interstices,

desert growths, the _chaufleur saharienne_, the drin, the thyme,

plants of ashen-gray, stiff, sapless; trees now—betoums, feeble

palms; a beaten track with a trio of Bedouin Arabs. It is the oued

of the Zousfana; and we debouch on the far prospect—off to the

right the oases of Figuig, oblong dark spots on the foot-hills of

Morocco, and before us to the left the great horizons of the Sahara,

the _hamada_. Five hours from Aïn-Sefra. It is Beni-Ounif.

I descended from the train amid groups of soldiers. I lose my

prejudice against a uniform when it is French or Italian; and in

North Africa the blue of the tirailleur, the red of the spahi,

are a part of the _mise en scène_. These were soldiers of the

Foreign Legion. I had been familiar with their uniform, too, in

the north at Oran, and particularly at Sidi-bel-Abbes, one of their

rendezvous; and I saw it again with friendly eyes, for all that I

had here—harborage, security, freedom to come and go—did I not

owe it to them? The Sud-Oranais is their work, like so much else

in Algeria. I trudged through the sand, a young Arab tugging at my

baggage and guiding me, to the hotel, which occupied a corner of

an extensive flat building of Moresque style, rather imposing with

its towers though it was only of one story, on a street that seemed

preternaturally wide because all the buildings were likewise of one

story. The whole little town, a mere handful of low, fragile blocks,

looked strangely desolate and lonesome, forsaken, isolated, dull. The

host received me pleasantly—I was the only guest to arrive, and

there was no sign of another occupant—and took me to my room in the

single corridor; it was clean and sufficient—a bed, a basin, and

a chair; a small, heavily barred window, at the height of my head,

looked on a large, vacant court. So this was the _terre perdue_.

I was “far away.” “The brutality of life—” I was “clean

quit” of it, like a lark in the blue, like a gull on the gray

sea. “_Adieu, mes amis,_” I thought. Where had I read it—“The

man who is not a misanthrope has never loved his fellow men.”

There was a knock at my door: “Monsieur, some one to see you.”

It came with a shock, for the solitude had begun to seize me. I

went toward the office. A young soldier of the Legion approached

me, full of French grace, with a look of expectancy on his fine

face. “I heard there was an American here,” he said in English;

“I did not believe it,” he added; “I came to see.” “Yes,”

I said, “I am an American.” “There hasn’t been one here

in two years—not since I came,” he spoke slowly—keen,

soft tones. “South American?” he ventured. “No,” I said,

melting. “Truly from the United States—where?” His look hung on

my face. “I was born near Boston,” I replied, interested. “I

was born in Boston.” I shall never forget the gladness of his

voice, the light that swept his eyes. A quick, soldierly friending

seized us—the warmth that does not wait, the trust that does not

question. In ten minutes he was caring for me like a younger brother,

introducing me with my letters at the Bureau Arab, doing everything

till he went to his service. In the evening we met again, and so the

lonely journey of the day ended in an African sunset, as it were,

of gay and brilliant spirits, for I know of no greater joy than

the making of friends. He was of French parentage, and the only

American in the Legion; at least, he had never seen nor known of

another. And I went to bed thinking of the strange irony of life,

and how the first thing that the _terre perdue_ gave me was the

last thing I expected in the wide world—a friend.