I went by myself to visit the old ksar, the native village which
had occupied this site before the coming of the French and the rise
of the new town about the railway. It lay some little distance to
the west of the track—a collection of palm-trees, with a village
at the farther end, backed by a white koubba. My Arab boy, who
had never lost sight of me, had me in charge, and led the way. We
crossed into the strip of barren country and saw the ksar with its
palmerai before us, like a rising shoal in the plain. Accustomed
as my eyes are to large horizons, this country had an aspect of
solitariness that was extraordinary. The sand-blown black rock, the
_hamada_, lies all about; the mountains of the Ksour that back the
scene to the northeast are reddish in color and severe in outline,
and the mountains of Morocco, cut here by three passes, block it to
the north and west with their heavy and wild masses, while other
detached heights are seen far off to the south. From this broken
ring of bare mountains, red and violet and gray, the rocky desert
floor, blown with reddish sand, makes out into the open distance
interminably to horizons like the sea. In the midst of this the
little ksar with its trailing palm-trees, Beni-Ounif with its slender
rail and station, its white redoubt and low buildings, with the
Bureau Arab and its palms a little removed, seem insignificant human
details, mere markings of animal life, in a prospect where nature,
grandiose in form and without limit in distance, exalted by aridity,
is visibly infinite, all-encompassing, supreme. The sun only, burning
and solitary, seems to own the land. The moment one steps upon the
windy plain it is as if he had put to sea; he is alone with nature,
and the harshness of the land gives poignancy to his solitude.
We walked over rough ground awhile, and then crossed the dry bed
of a oued, one of the channels that in time of flood lead the
waters down to the Zousfana, whose shrunken stream flows in its
wide rocky bottom some distance to the north of the ksar toward
the mountains; and we climbed up on the farther side by crumbling
footpaths that run on little uneven ridges of dry mud, twisting
about in a rambling way, with small streams to cross, which groove
the soil; and so we came into the gardens. The aspect, however, is
not that of a garden; the background of the scene is all dry mud,
whose moulded and undulating surface makes the soil, while the little
plots are divided by mud walls, high enough at times to give some
shade and meant to retain the irrigating waters. There are a few
patches of barley, very fresh and green; but for the most part the
plots are filled with trees—fig-trees, old and contorted, with
their heavy limbs, the peach and almond with fragile grace and new
tender green, the pomegranate and the apple, and rising above them
the palms whose decorative forms frame in and dignify the little
copses of the fruit-trees, and unite them; but the dry mud makes
an odd contrast with the branching green of varied tints and gives
a note of aridity to the whole under scene. The plots vary only in
their planting, and were entirely deserted. We came through them
to the ksar itself with its wall. It is built of dry mud, which is
the only material used here for walls and houses alike. The rain
soon gives them a new modelling at best, and this ksar is old and
ruined, half abandoned now that the French town is near. The outer
wall is much broken, with the meandering shapelessness of abandoned
earthworks—scallops and indentations, the smooth moulding and mud
sculpture of time on the golden soil; and off beyond it stretches
the endless cemetery, with the pointed stones at the head and foot
of the graves, a tract of miserable death, so simple, naked, and
poverty-struck, and yet in such perfect harmony with the sterile
and solitary scene, that it does not seem sad but only the natural
and inevitable end. It belongs to the desert; it is its comment
on the trivial worthlessness of human life, whose multitude of
bones are heaped and left here like the potter’s shard. The sun
beats down on the wide silence of that cemetery; the sand blows and
accumulates about the rough stones that seem to lie at random; there
is no distinction of persons there, no sepulchral apparelling of the
mortal fact, no illusion, no deception; it is the grave—“whither
thou goest.” And it is not sad—no more than the naked mountains
of the Ksour, the dark Morocco heights, the silent sunlight; it is
one with them—it is nature. On its edge toward the ksar rises the
koubba of the saint, Sidi Slimanc bou-Semakha, the ancient patron of
the country; it is the only spot of this old Moslem ground that no
infidel foot has trod; there his body reposes in its wooden coffin,
hung with faded silks within its carved rail in the white chamber,
secluded and sacred, and the faithful sleep in the desert outside. It
is a world that has passed away.
The ksar itself was like all others in this region. They are walled
villages adjoining the palmerai that feeds them; the houses are built
of sun-baked earth supported on small palm beams and lean serried
one upon another in continuous lines and embankments; narrow alley
ways and passages honeycomb them, often with a roofing of the same
palm beams, so that one walks in underground obscurity; externally,
owing to their old and weather-worn aspect, they have a general
ruinous look. The walls on the street are blind; here and there in
dark corners a seat for loungers is hollowed out in the side; there
is somewhere a square for judgment where is the assembly of the
elders, and by the mosque or koubba an open space. There is always
a life outside the walls, a place for market, for caravans to stop,
encampments of all sorts. All have a look of dilapidation. But this
old ksar had more than that; it was obviously in a state of ruin
and abandonment. Walls had fallen, exposing the wretched interiors,
cave-like, mere cellarage. There was no one there. I passed through
some of the covered ways—blank obscurity, with holes of naked
sunlight. I did not see half a dozen living figures; they were
unoccupied, listless, marooned. It was still—a stillness of
death. I found the sources, the underground streams that supply the
little oasis; there were three or four young negro girls standing
in the water in discolored bright rags; they pointed out to me the
blind fish in the water. “_C’est défendu_,” said my Arab
boy when I asked him to catch one. Life seemed _défendu_. The
air was moribund. It was a decadence of the very earth. I was glad
to have the hot sun on my back again by the tall palms and green
fruit-trees springing out of their dry-mud beds, and I sat down on
a crumbling wall, amid the amber deliquescence of the rich-toned
soil, and looked back on that landscape of decay, and sought to
reconstruct in fancy the desert life of its silent years.
It was an old human lair. Its people, the _ksouriens_, who lived here
their half-underground life, sheltered from the burning blasts of the
summer sun and the bitter winds of winter, were a settled townfolk,
with their oasis agriculture and simple desert market. The ruling
race were the descendants of some Marabout; for the Moslem saint
was a patriarch, and one finds whole villages that claim to be
originated from some one of them; these men were the proprietors
of the gardens, which were tilled by native negroes or Soudanese
slaves and their progeny, a servile breed; and there were Jews,
who were compelled to live apart, a pariah caste. Outside were the
Berber and Arabized nomad tribes, scattered and living in fractions,
who went from place to place for the pasturage of their flocks;
their chiefs and head men were desert raiders, who took toll
by tribute or pillage of the caravans traversing their country,
and made forays on their neighbors; the people of the ksar held a
feudal relation to these desert lords. The most secure units of
property in the land were the zaouias, or monasteries, bound to
hospitality and charity, and ruled by Marabout stocks; their gardens
and flocks had a protective character of sacredness, the goods of
God. Society was in a primitive form of uncohering fragments, very
independent, self-centred, uncontrolled; though it was of one faith,
hostility pervaded it; feuds were its annals; it had pirate blood. A
pastoral, marauding, sanguinary world, with elements of property and
aristocracy, but democratic within itself, with slaves and outcast
breeds; a world of simple wants but always half submerged in misery;
a world of the strong arm. In such a world the _ksouriens_ lived here
by the mountain passes. They saw those old nomad tribes go by that
mounted to Tlemcen and drank the bright cup of the Mediterranean for
a season; but the _ksouriens_ had forgotten them; their passage was
only a wrinkling of the desert sand. Caravans stopped by the brown
walls; raiders rode by to the desert; the seven ksars of Figuig
fought petty wars, one on another, on the hill opposite; mountain
women pitched their striped tents by the cemetery wall; the Jews
worked at little ornaments of silver and coral; there was a coming
and going to the fountain, secret and ferocious love, the woe of
poverty and hate—the Arab life of violence and ruse and silence,
in the palm gardens, the underground passages, the darkened streets;
a life of obscurity and somnolence; and the _ksouriens_ grew pale
like wax, with their black beards and corded turbans, and the old
Arab vitality melted in their bones. The hours that no man counts
rolled over the languid ksar, where white figures sat in the seats
in the earthen wall along the covered streets in the silence; the
unborn became the living and the stones multiplied in the cemetery;
and there was no change. I could almost hear the bugle note yonder
that brought a new world of men. And now the ksar was dead.
The moon, almost at the full, was growing bright in the eastern sky;
the mountains of the Ksour, that still took the setting sun, glowed
with naked rock, rose-colored; on the left the mountains of Figuig
lay in black shadow, with the violet defiles between, clear-cut on
the molten sky. As I stepped on the rise of Beni-Ounif it was already
night; the brilliant white moon flooded the hard landscape with
winter clarity; the unceasing wind blew cold. It was a solemn scene.