I emerged the next morning from the arcaded entrance of the hotel,
which was one of a continuous line of low buildings making the
business side of the public square, and glancing up I saw a great
dog looking down on me from the flat roof. There was little other
sign of life. The square was a large, irregular space which seemed
the more extensive owing to the low level of the adjoining buildings
over which rose the massive tower of the kasbah close at hand on the
right and, diagonally across, the high dome of the French Bureau,
with its arcaded front beneath, filling that eastern side. A fountain
stood in the midst of the bare space, and beyond it was a charming
little park of trees; and still farther the white gleam of the
barracks, through the green and on either side, closed the vista
to the south. The Moresque architecture, which the French affect
in the desert, with its white lights and open structure, gave a
pleasing amplitude to the scene; and the same style was taken up
by the main street straight down my left, whose line was edged by a
long arcade with low, round arches, and the view lost itself beyond
in the market square with thick tufts of palms fringing the sky.
A few burnoosed figures were scattered here and there.
Hamet joined me at once, still content; he held in his hand a
telegram from his new boy, or those who could interpret for him. We
turned at once to the near corner by the kasbah, where was the
entrance to the old town and the mosque—a precinct of covered
streets, narrow, tortuous ways, with blank walls, dim light. There
were few passers-by; occasionally there was a glimpse of some
human scene; but the general effect, though the houses were often
well built, was dingy, poor, and mean, as such an obscure warren
of streets must seem to us, and there was nothing here of the
picturesque gloom and threatening mystery of Figuig. I remember
it as a desert hive of the human swarm; it was a new, strange,
dark mode of man’s animal existence. This was a typical desert
town, an old capital of the caravans. It had been thus for ages;
and my feeling, as I wandered about, was less that of the life than
of its everlastingness.
We went back to the mosque and climbed the minaret. It was a welcome
change to step out on the balcony into the flood of azure. The true
Sahara stretched round us—the roll of the white sands, motion
in immobility; and all about, as far as one could see, the dark
palm islands in the foreground and on every horizon. The terrace
roofs of the old town lay dark under our feet; off there to the
west in the sand were the tombs of its fifty kings; eastward the
palm gardens, bordering and overflowing into the new quarter with
its modern buildings, lifted their fronds; and near at hand the
tower of the kasbah, and here and there a white-domed koubba, rose
in the dreaming air; and the streets with their life were spread
beneath. Tougourt, at the confluence of the underground streams,
is the natural capital of the Rir country, a commanding point; on
the north and west it is walled against the inroad of the sands;
south and east is a more smiling scene, but the white sand lies
everywhere between, like roads of the sea; it is the queen of the
oases, and one understood in that sparkling air why it was called
a jewel of the desert. I went down to the gardens, where there
were fruit trees and vegetables among the palms, but for the most
part there was as usual only the barren surface of earth, fed with
little canals and crossed by narrow, raised footways, over which
sprang the fanshaped or circular tufts of swarded green. On that
side, too, was a native village—dreary walls of sun-dried earth
with open ways; they seemed merely a new form of the naked ground
shaped perpendicularly and squared—windowless, sealed, forlorn. I
entered one or two. Indeed, I went everywhere that morning, for
the distances were short.
In the afternoon I sat down by a table near a café in the market
square, and I remained there for hours over my coffee, watching the
scene. All Arab markets are much alike, but this was prettily framed.
On my right a palm grove rose over a low wall; on the left, across
the broad space, the low line of shops, with a glistening koubba
dome in their midst, broke the blue sky; and all between, in front,
was the market-place. In the foreground were a few raised booths,
or tables, and at the near end by a group of three or four palms was
a butcher’s stock in trade, the carcasses hanging on the limbs
of a dead tree. Farther off to the left squatted a half-dozen
Bedouins round little fagots of brushwood spread on the ground,
and beyond them a group of animals huddled; in the centre, on
the earth, one behind another into the distance, were many little
squares and heaps of country goods, each with its guardian group
as at a fair—vegetables, grains, cloths, slippers, ropes, caps,
utensils, that together measured the scale of the simple wants of
the desert. The place, though not crowded, was well filled with
an ever-moving and changing throng, gathering into groups here and
there—turbaned people of every tint and costume, young and old,
poor and prosperous, picturesque alike in their bright colors or worn
rags; but the white or brown flowing garments predominated. There
were Arab and Berber faces of purer race; but in the people at large
there was a strong negroid character, showing the deeper infusion
of negro blood which one notices as he goes south of the Atlas. All
the afternoon the quiet but interested crowd swarmed about; and
round me at the close tables were soldiers and Arabs who seemed of
a more prosperous class, drinking and talking, playing at cards,
chess, and dominos, and some were old and grave and silent. At our
table there was always one or two, who came and went, to whom Hamet
would perhaps present me, a thin-featured cadi, a burly merchant,
and we talked a little; but I left the talk to them and watched
the scene and from time to time snapped my camera. A caravan came
down the street, with great boxes strapped on the camels, and I
thought the first two would sweep me, camera, table, and all, out
of the way; but the long line got by at last, ungainly beasts with
their pawing necks and sardonic mouths. At Tougourt one was always
meeting a caravan. As I stood, at a later hour, in a lonely corner
by the wall outside the gates, one was just kneeling down on the
great sweep of the sand-hill to camp in the melancholy light that
was falling from the darkening sky—a sombre scene; and when I
came out of the hotel at night I found another sleeping, humped and
shadowy, on the public square. The camel was as omnipresent as the
palm, and belonged to the same dunes and sky; and as I sat watching
there through the uneventful and unhurried hours, the market-place
was a microcosm of the desert world.