It was the time of the April fêtes at Biskra, and I went out in
the delightful warmth of the early afternoon to see. There were
to be races, but I was especially attracted by the promise of a
falcon hunt. A long line of white-robed Arabs streamed into the
country fields, and I drove amidst them by a quiet road shimmering
with dust, and when I turned by the great pen where the horses were
kept, into the enclosure, the crowd was already assembled. It was
a large, open plain whose side-lines were defined by the crowds
of spectators who did not enter. In the field were many scattered
groups. French soldiers, lining the course, and a squad gathered on
a neighboring hill gave the picturesqueness of military color to the
scene; a little group of soldier camels enlivened the foreground;
and everywhere were boys leading fine horses, venders of all sorts,
velvet-eyed children in gala clothes, grave Arab men. I wandered over
to where a company of white Mzabites, girt with brown cords, sat in
a circle, with guns in their hands, and a superb banner on a staff
floating over them, and to the place where the Ouled-Naïls—some
forty of them—displayed their charms and ornaments with holiday
faces. It was an animated scene of waiting—festal, decorative;
native and European soldiers, pawing horses, prancing cavaliers,
crowds of white-robed Arabs, with ample spaces. The carriage of the
caïd of Biskra, drawn by two beautiful mules, stood next to me;
he was a grave old man, a mould of courteous dignity, and with him
were some young children in gay vests—a charming party. But the
brilliant note of color was given by the red cloaks of the caïds
and sub-caïds, blowing in the wind as they rode here and there on
beautiful and spirited horses. Then there was a drawing in to the
course, and the races went on—tense moments of excitement as the
horses sped by, pauses and waits, like races everywhere.
One scene stands out from the memories of that day. It was just
before the hunting with the falcon began. It was a great and
solemn scene, fit for a painter’s eye, but no earthly canvas
could hold it. The landscape lines were all low and long, immense
in extension, the rigid lines of the desert firm and broad. The
scheme of composition was one of horizontal planes. In the eastern
sky the pink range of naked rock, the Aurès, cut the liquid blue
with its almost rosy edges, a bank of color reaching far away
into the distance; in the foreground, perhaps half a mile off,
a second line of red-toned sand-hills notched the range low down;
beneath them, and below the horizon line of the earth, stretched
a long row of white-robed Arabs massed standing in a continuous
line, and grouped together as in a bas-relief. Every figure was
distinct in the brilliant light poured from the descending sun
on the vast distances round about. I had never seen humanity and
nature posed in just that way. It was a processional bas-relief,
immovable and majestic, sculptured on the sand-hills and the rock;
it was monumental, architectural, Egyptian. The sight defined for
me one quality of desert landscape which I had vaguely felt; it
is the bas-relief of nature. The lowness of the visual plane, the
clarity of the human figures, the framing of the scene against which
everything is relieved, suggest to me the effects of bas-relief;
the repose of the Arab, too, the fall of the folds of his garment,
the simple actions, have more of the sculptural as a living-thing
than I have elsewhere observed. This scene was a supreme example of
my meaning and of the artistic intuitions involved; it simplified
my perceptions and also universalized them. I saw in it the arts
of Egypt on which the immensity of nature still rested, as truly a
desert art as the Moorish arabesques at Tlemcen. It was under this
splendid and glowing entablature that the black falcon was loosed
in air.
The gazelle—delicate and fragile creature—ran a short way ahead;
the horsemen followed behind; the bird circled above, sighted his
prey, darted swiftly on, and swooped down, striking the animal’s
head. The gazelle staggered and ran on as the bird rose, and from
his height the falcon swooped again and struck; the animal fell,
but sprang up and ran here and there terrified. Again—and again
the little creature collapsed and bounded, ran on, but it was dazed
and circled feebly; and again the black shadow shot down from the
blue, and it was over. The horsemen ran in, and took the falcon
from the convulsive body, killed the gazelle, and flung a piece of
the flesh to the victor. It was brief and brutal; but it was the
reality of life, not human life, but Life itself on earth—the
spirit of life as it might be in the desert without a human eye. I
drove back through the sunset cloud of dust among the solid press,
and came out on long lines of white-robed figures in procession ahead
by the countryside, vividly green with the warm spring. I had seen
two visions: one, that seemed almost of the eternal; the other,
of life’s moment—the living bas-relief on the mountain wall,
the gazelle’s death agony in the sand. I think that the earth
never seemed to me more like a great amphitheatre than then—a
spectacle, solemn, inscrutable, fated.