I
It was in my early days in the desert, and Yussef told me
tales. There was a Bedouin camp—indicated vaguely in the
distance by a gesture; a real desert encampment. “Were there many
tents? Twenty? A hundred?” “There might be—thousands!—who
could know?” It was near an old French fort where some relative,
variously designated as little brother, step-brother, nephew, cousin,
was in charge; we would be welcome; there would be cous-cous, real
cous-cous, made in the desert. It was mid-winter; but a caravan
had come in last night—the roads were good.
So we set out on a bright, cold morning with a heavy carriage and
two large, strong horses, with wraps and rugs in plenty, and some
Christian stores, and drove out by old Biskra as the low sun began
his great circuit over the extended plain. It was my first venture
into those long reaches of the waste, with their interminable roll
into the horizons. The beautiful cliffs of the Aurès began to stand
up in their true grandeur, detaching themselves from the level,
massing their long line and isolating the range in blue heaven—a
wall of the world; the desert floor spread out like endless shallows
of a sea of marshes, rising and falling with a vast undulation
of shadows, far away; the winter desolation solemnized the quiet
scene. The road was good enough at first, firm, though muddy; but
the amount of water was surprising, and after a few kilometres,
when old Biskra was only a dark-ribbed reef behind us, not to be
distinguished from the other oases that dotted the distances about,
the scene suggested more than ever an archipelago. It was soon
heavy going continuously, and we were at our best when we could
keep the edge of a ridge along which a lively brown stream poured
turbulently. The land was wet, soaked, but not submerged; and on all
sides, at varying distances, were living objects—flocks, camels,
men—and the herds, though they were really far apart, gained an
effect of number from the great spaces that the eye took in. Except
for the character of the landscape, it would have been a monotonous
drive; and it was high noon when we drew up at the old French fort,
Bordj Saada.
I went toward the brow of the hill. A solitary Arab, an old man,
was doing his devotions, and after I had passed, I turned and
looked at him. It was the first time I had seen an Arab praying in
the desert. With his face toward Mecca, he extended his arms and
made his genuflexions, prostrating himself, oblivious to all about
him; he was alone with his God. The ease and immediacy with which
an Arab withdraws into his religion, independently of time, place,
and circumstance, is one of the primary traits of the physiognomy of
the land. I kept on to the crest of the rise, and as my eyes ranged
over the great circuit of the field of vision the impressions that
had vaguely fed me all the morning came to a climax and, as it
were, focussed; it was a scene of the patriarchal age. It was as
if the dark film of my memories had suddenly developed in my eyes
the picture of Biblical life—the Scriptural landscape. The sky was
filled with gray clouds in strata, spotting the expanse, where tracts
of light interchanged with the shadows; and in the eternal vacancy,
scarcely disturbed by the far, dark line of some emerging oasis,
everywhere in the sea of light and distance were herds of camels,
standing thin and tall, but distinct, in the long perspectives,
solitary or netted wanderingly together, and straggling flocks
with Bedouin boys in couples; here and there a low, brown Bedouin
tent crouched to the soil; yonder was a brace of horsemen riding;
the long line of a caravan behind me was rounding the sweep of the
hill up from Tougourt, with its dwarfed camel leaders rudely clad.
Few elements, but widely distributed. Flocks and herds and weather;
the life close to nature; the lowly companionship of animals;
the deeper feeling always intensified in broad prospects, of the
spiritual brooding of nature around—in the blue and the sun and
the cloud, in the distant mountain range, and in land and water:
the simple, early, primitive world. It lay unfolded in such infinite
silence, with such an effect of agelessness and continuity, of the
elemental thing—human life on earth! To me it was early centuries
made visible. It was desert life first grasped by my eye—primary,
quiet, enduring; and how humble in its grandeur! The impression did
not pass quickly away, but persisted long afterward; however obscured
by the superficial incidents of the day, it emerged again; the mood
was always there within. It is not unusual for me, and I suppose
not for others, to live thus at times in a double consciousness of
the outward and the inward life, a twofold stream of being whose
currents never mix, whose fountains are different; but on that day
I especially marked the preoccupation and excitement of the deeper
element. It was as if from some Pisgah height I actually saw the
old Scriptural world.
Yussef came to tell me that the cous-cous was ready, for we had been
much delayed and everything was more than prepared when we arrived. I
went back to the old French post, an extensive four-walled structure,
built like a _fondouk_, with stables and rooms on the inner sides, as
a military rallying-point for storage and harborage, and commanding
the route to Tougourt. It had been long disused and was in charge,
apparently, of Yussef’s “little brother,” who turned out to
be a full-grown man with a wife. She had cooked the cous-cous,
and as I sat down to my meal in one of the bare interior cells
looking on the great yard, it was brought in smoking. It is made
of farina with small pieces of lamb mixed with it, and was piled
up in a great, yellowish cone, enough for twenty appetites; and
it was hot, not only in the ordinary sense of fragrant fuming,
but it had bowels of red pepper. It was excellent, and I formed a
liking for this _pièce de résistance_ of an Arab feast that has
never since betrayed me. Afterward there was coffee, with dates
and an orange. So far as the meal was concerned, our plan had
been a brilliant success. I lit a cigar with contentment, leaving
Yussef and the rest to their own share of the improvised fête, and
when he appeared again I said impassively, “Well, the camp”;
for I had not seen any signs of that Timbuctoo which had lured me
forth on the winter desert. “Do you want to see the camp?” said
Yussef. “Yes,” I answered; “where is it?” It was close by.
He led me out down the northern hillside a short distance, toward
a small enclosure on the slope, stopped, and said “_Voilà!_”
There was one Bedouin tent. A low hedge of fagots surrounded it,
on which a yellow dog frantically volleyed defiance. “Well,” I
said, “come on; I want to see it.” But he stayed in his tracks;
and, as I looked back questioningly, he said with great solemnity:
“Too much dog!” A woman appeared, and he hailed her, and we
went off to halloo to her husband, who presently approached and
very willingly led me toward the tent. The woman had collared the
dog, and the man shouted to him, but he was irreconcilable. The
last word in my vocabulary of abuse—that beyond which nothing
can go—is “the manners of a Kabyle dog”; and this one was a
fair specimen. As I came into the enclosure and stooped to enter
the tent, his fury knew no bounds. The woman, bending down, held
him securely with her arm tight about his neck, and the daughter,
a young and pretty girl, clutched his hind legs in a firm grip; and
he howled as well as he could. This was the central group in that
low interior; and the woman, with her black hair and full, gleaming
eyes, a face that in shape resembled that of an Indian squaw, heavy
silver hoops in her ears, and a short, muscular, full-bosomed frame,
was a striking and vital figure as she half strangled the beast
and cheerfully and with interest guided my undue curiosity. I
looked over the rude cooking arrangements, the bed, the strange
implements—all the scanty furnishing of that human nest, almost
hidden in the wet ground of winter, close to the earth. They were all
polite and kindly and let me see and handle what I would. The space
was small, and one could not stand upright. This was “their toil,
their wealth”—I thought of the Syracusan fishers of the old idyl;
and as I came away with snatches of it in my head, and the faithful
watch-dog again danced and barked maniacally on the fagot-fence, I
was glad that the poor fishers “had no watch-dog”; and I forgot
to reproach Yussef for his tale of Timbuctoo—numbers are vague
things at best, and in Africa quite indescribable in their behavior.
While the horses were being harnessed, I sought out my hostess,
the “little brother’s” wife, and found her in a deep, large
kitchen in one corner of the enclosure. She was dressed to receive
me in all her finery. She was tall and gaunt, and garbed like an
Ouled-Naïl—bright stuffs, rings, necklaces, ornaments, a barbaric
vision to my then unfamiliar eyes, and with the tinsel a good deal
rubbed off in places. She did the honors with touches of coquetry,
and showed me the place where the cous-cous had been concocted,
the cradle with the baby, and the _ménage_, and she took me up a
dark, winding, stone stairway to the bedroom above. It was _triste_
there—a place for a traveller’s murder, I thought, in some French
romance of feudal journey; when we descended, the cavernous gloom
and rude largeness of the kitchen, in which a good many chickens
were wandering about, seemed almost like a return to sunshine and
life. Then we said good-by to the little group of various persons
who had served us with so much good-will, and drove off by another
route, westward, toward the oasis of Oumach, a dark line far away.
We swept into the country on higher ground, under a clearing sky,
and the panorama came back—the primeval story of shepherd and
herding races, in the immutable grandeur of the great lines that
framed it. We were going toward the sun, and there seemed no limit
to the scene before and about us. It was the plane of its extension
that was wonderful—and everywhere the intensity of the silence,
the clarity of distant objects, and that quality of the infinite
which no words, but only a real memory, can convey. Flocks and herds
and men, scattered at great intervals, lessened behind us and drew
near in the offing. The road was mud, but by no means the slough of
the morning. We met no one; only we were abroad in the wet waste. We
passed but one house, where there was an Arab—also with dogs,
but not of the Kabyle variety—who gave us coffee; and the sun was
westering far when we came to the angle where we struck the Biskra
route and turned homeward. The dense blackness of the Oumach palms
showed like an island in the dying day, as we passed them, near at
hand; it was too late, too wet to stop there; and shortly afterward
the sun went down in a clear sky, immense and red on the desert
edge. Then I saw what was to me a remarkable phenomenon: a sunset
on the earth instead of in the heavens. The ground, more or less
overgrown with scattered vegetation, sloped upward in a long, bold,
westerly swell, and cut the horizon clear with its whole breadth;
and this wide-flung earth surface through its entire width flamed
scarlet, like a low prairie fire, burning with light; the ground
glowed rosy red, and the plants and shrubs and every growing thing
stood up, distinct in every twig and blade, as if on fire with gold,
burning unconsumed, and slowly all turned to scarlet and faded to
rich crimson, softened, paled and died. It was all on the earth;
at least, if there was any color in the clear sky above, except the
long horizon glow, I did not see it. I remembered a line of Keats
that had always troubled me, because I did not know what he meant:
“While barrëd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.”
I suppose it was a similar scene that he had witnessed. But in my
own experience I never saw anything remotely resembling the marvel
of that desert-kindled flame that brought black night.
It grew dark rapidly. There was no moon. The stars flocked out. In
the obscurity the slight noises of the wind grew insistent; the
cries of the camels in the darkness sounded weird. The road became
much worse. We dipped into pools, and as we advanced the tract was
entirely flooded. We went at a snail’s pace, the horses finding
their way in the level waters that stretched out like a lake in
the gloom. It was full night now. The water was at the hubs, and
with a lurch it came in on the carriage floor. We stopped, for it
was clear we were off the raised ground of the route on one side
or the other. Yussef had been very uneasy, as he might well be,
for two of the White Brothers had been drowned the previous week,
travelling somewhere in this wide waste. He threw his burnoose up
and knotted it, and drew up his garments beneath, and waded out to
determine the lay of the slopes. Then we turned to the rising side,
and after a hundred feet got onto the floor of the route again and
kept it till we had passed the flooded tract. There were two or three
Bedouin camp-fires on the west, and once we heard the sound of many
voices in the darkness round one of them. Yussef, who was constantly
in movement, asked me if I had a revolver, and where was it? It was
very handy. “_Bon!_” he said, with satisfaction. But nothing
could long distract my attention from the magnificence of the sky.
There was not a cloud. Sirius was in the east, and Orion rising;
and one by one I picked out the heaven marks of my boyhood, north
and west; but they shone with a splendor, a molten luminousness,
a size and lowness undreamed of, and the lesser constellations
were obscured by the multitude of starry lights—it was my first
view of the desert sky at night. The whole heaven was nebulous
with scintillating sparks and milky drifts, innumerable around
and about the old leaders of the flock. It was a revelation of the
starry universe. I was brought back from my reverie by Yussef’s
whole-souled ejaculation—“_Voilà! vieux Biskra!_” as he sank
back with a long sigh of relief into his seat. The oasis was dark
before us, and we were soon going by the earthen walls of the silent
village and passing under the tall black palms that bordered the
starred sky with their fronds, and caught the old constellations
in their tops, from which Orion, eastward, lifted himself free in
heaven. It was the end.
But how many times since then have the sights of that drive come
back to me! When I think of Esau and Ishmael, of Mizpah and Goshen,
I live over again the panorama of that winter day. It was not a
scene I had beheld; it was a vision.