The fascination of the desert, that which makes a desert lover,
is not in its incidents, voyages, sights; it is in its life. It is
the life of nature. I do not mean the picturesqueness of its human
traits, the passage of men and animals over a scene with which they
are so sympathetically colored as to seem only a part of its flora
and fauna, its transitory efflorescence; nor the landscape with
its breadths, infinities, hallucinations, hierarchies of color,
_élans_ of the soul and poems of the eye, with which they are in
conscious contact. It is a more intimate tie, and something that
passes within—purifies, refreshes, and releases. The brain ceases
to act; the nerves are put to sleep; the fever is over. The Old
World has receded far away; years, decades have passed, dropping
their burden of oblivion on all that was, and especially on what
was acrid and fiery in the past. It is a return to nature in which
she seems to have cast out devils. The senses bring their messages,
but they have lost their material utilities. The soul rests in
its sensations as a bird floats in the air. It is a foretaste of
Nirvana. Thought has ceased; duty is silent; labor has vanished;
and the life that is deeper than these and of which they were but
mortal fragments, “unconcerning things,” resurges, vibrates,
flowers. What a relief! what a transmigration! and what a new
sense of vitality—almost of a new sort of vitality! It is the
repose, the silence, the concentration of being within—the
peace. In the Western world one may attain this at times; the
desert imposes it as the habit of the soul that yields itself to
its influences. But it is more than this. The cerebral weight is
lifted and the physical life resumes its natural lethargies. It is
not really lethargic. It is a new kind of existence—the life,
unburdened by thought, that has moulded the fine physical nature
of this race abounding in energies. What a sense of freedom, of
nonchalance and timelessness! What a vigor as I draw in this pure
air! The world without a thought has a life of its own, a strange
vivacity; it is rich with fresh and unexpected pulses of being;
and this renewal and invigoration does not come whip-like, as in
the north, with a bracing winter stroke on the blood and nerves;
but like a caress, with a softness and a secrecy, a tenderness of
the solitude, something almost voluptuous.
These are the words of a desert lover and make no claim on
the credence of others; but no words can express the peace, the
liberty, the vitality I felt in my desert voyages. The symbol and
image of the mood and life I describe is to me the palm-tree. No
other tree has ever so influenced my spirit except the cypress in
a very different way. I would go out to the oued in the morning,
for I could not spare to the day the initial sense of largeness,
the tranquil desolation, the sea suggestion of the river bed, with
its lonely koubba; and, as the sun warmed, I wandered into the palm
gardens of the oasis, and sat on the rough soil, and, as it were,
adored the palms. I would lie there for hours, and the sun shone
above them. Occasionally Arab workmen would pass near, or a boy or a
guardian would come and sit beside me. Otherwise there was only the
solitude, the unbroken silence, the repose. The gardens are rude and
unkempt, with earth ditches and humps of ground, and an arid look,
except where the vivid green of some cereal here and there beneath
the palms, or the softer form and foliage of low fruit trees amid
their towering stems, give a brighter and more delicate touch to the
general scene. There is no luxury of turf or anything garden-like
in these precincts of earth and running waters and trees. There
is no effeminacy in the palm. Severity is the artistic trait of
everything in the desert. The long lines of the landscape here
are rigid, solemn, sombre; the naked rock of the mountain ranges
is stern, worn to the bone by wind and rain and sand; except for
the diaphanous and veiling effects of atmosphere and heat, and the
cloud and mist conditions that I have mentioned earlier, an austere
sublimity governs the horizons and vistas all around. Even in the
sands of the south about Tougourt, where every line the eye rests
on is a curve and softens on the eye and lulls it like a diapason of
great rhythms, this austerity is not lost from the desert scene. It
is the nude in landscape—not mere nakedness of earth, but landscape
sculptured and modelled in grand harmonies of line and color; and
however it may become fiery with light and heat and darken with the
violence of heaven, it always retains its look of bare and solitary
power. There is no softness in the race either. Their bodies are
cast in hard lines, but often with great physical beauty. There
faces are, indeed, seldom of the nobler type; but their fine brown
hands, their clear torsos and throats, the curve of strength and
elasticity in their firm backs and limbs, with the weathered and
sun-toned skin, their _fierté_, their perfection of repose, are
objects of delight to an eye that values bodily beauty. To me this
splendid vigor and careless abundance of the human beauty of life
is one of the elements of the land. They have muscles of steel
and lines of living bronze. It is daily art—art brought down
from the vague of fancy and out of the museum to live with. The
palm is like the land and the people; there is no softness in it;
it is the most virile of vegetable growths. Its trunk, its leaves,
its sway—but I will not trust myself to describe it. I am never
lonely with a palm to look at. I lie on the ground for hours and
gaze up at their massed green tops in the blue and the sun and the
warmth—“their feet in the water, their heads in the fire.” I
am never tired of looking. I do not notice the absence of thought. I
am quiet, content, and doing nothing am very much alive if vaguely
aware of my life. It is a new mode of living, this vital dreaming—a
_volupté_ without weakness, consciousness without meditation, vision
without thought. That is the human aspect of this life of nature;
and, in the world without, the palm over there symbolizes it for me.
The soldier-poet, Lieutenant Charles Lagarde, whose “Promenade dans
le Sahara” I have already mentioned as at once the most realistic
and best-portrayed book of the Sahara with which I am acquainted,
well describes the palm:
“A monumental tree, puissant, royal; it shares in perfection form,
majesty, elegance. Its isolated trunk fills a frame of five leagues
and peoples a solitude. Its lift toward heaven has a magnificent
simplicity, and it raises also the levels that surround it; it
enlarges by contrast the vast sheets of sand on which it elongates at
sunset its slender and unmeasured shadow. In groups it has attitudes
full of grace; among the tufted shoots rise the unequal and diverging
trunks which in turn depress and proudly hold up their plumes. The
wind in the palms has strange modulations. Its oscillations have I
know not what of the voluptuous; it is the sultana that sways, an
attentive slave. The tempest tests it without shaking it; it bends
like a bow and springs back with the strength of a sword-blade. All
in it breathes primordial energies, and chants the canticle of
the Orient.”