II

I woke at 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.