The crudities of the desert have a charm all their own. There is a
wild flavor not only in the life but in the nostrils. The strong
saltpetre smells, impregnating the air for leagues, the earthy
scents of the marsh-like and sodden soil, the odors of cattle,
are stimulants; they recall the whiff of salt marshes by the sea,
the tarred ropes of wharfs, the sharp fragrance of rolled seaweed
on the beaches, aromas of low tide, in days of long ago. They are
both prophecies and memories. They wake my boyhood blood and are
a renewal of long slumbering appetites. I want salt in my life,
an acrid savor. The desert dispenses with unnecessary refinements;
all pruderies cease; nature returns. Nature is clean; the wind and
the sun are great scavengers; even death is no longer a corruption,
but a negligible detail. The skeletons of the camels in the sands
have nothing _macabre_; they are there as the tamarisk and the drin
are there, objects of the sands, like floating spars at sea, wasting
away in the great deep; they show the way that life has gone. Even
the dogs, with their paws on the carcass, tearing the flesh, seem
ordinary; the brutality ceases in the primeval naturalness of the
act in the scene. It is the will of nature that rules there in
the wild, and is accepted almost without notice. It is the same,
too, with human life. Poverty, hardship, privation, lose half their
repugnancy; it is only when men dispense them that they revolt us;
humanity accepts necessary suffering with little appeal. The eye
hardens, the heart stiffens; the fibre of an older world forms
in us. It is a veritable return to nature. Old instincts awake;
old powers of endurance come back and bring with them old moods
of patience; old indifferences appear. Cruelties of man or nature
are incidents. A new resistance is unlocked in the body, in the
spirit. It is a strong life. It is the desert world.
It is under these lights that one contemplates the wretched human lot
in the wild glory of nature. The grandeur of the natural scene—the
miserable life of men—no eye can miss that contrast over all these
horizons. The splendid force of nature, visible in all its energies,
on a scale of sublimity, triumphant, the master of the world! But
life—it is _la misère_. Look at the crouching tent, irregularly
striped with brown and white, wool and camel skin, pitched under
the crest of the great yellow dunes or in some wrinkle of the rock
face of the waste. There are a few sacks of barley and dates,
a scanty provision for the future, heaped at the foot of the pole;
a wooden plate or two, cups, an earthen pot; ropes, a goatskin of
water, mats of alfa or other grass to sleep on. The wife, with a
babe on her back and others tumbling about, toils through the day,
draws water, boils the pot, weaves, bears the heavy burden. The
boys go with the herd, the man to his labor. The night is an
uneasy watch. The master sleeps, some weapon near by, his head
on the little sack that holds the women’s trinkets of coral or
silver, or other trifles of value to them; if there is money, it
is buried. The yellow dog with the pointed teeth growls, and howls,
and barks—a jackal, a thief. Such is the day and night of the tent,
the nomad life, moving from place to place with the seasons, subject
to all weathers, threatened by violent winds and sudden torrents,
and often flitting day by day and leaving no trace. When a stay
is more prolonged a hedge of fagots fends the tent from the wind,
and gives a slight protection against nocturnal attacks of other
wanderers. One sees the tent; it is a common object, and gives up
its bareness at a glance; but one cannot realize its life. It is
too near to the soil, to the deprivations and insecurity of animal
life. What humility in its joys and pains! What parsimony! What
a place for age, which comes rapidly here, and is isolated in its
uselessness! Death reaps in it as in a harvest. The weak, the old,
the stricken, in this life of continual contingency, go quickly away,
and are as quickly forgotten. It is the life. The infant mortality
is enormous, like the death-rate of creatures that spawn in order
that the race may survive.
The life of the tent is on the outer margin of observation, though it
is the nomadic life of the land. Where the natives gather together
in villages one sees them more nigh. In a Europeanized place
like Biskra, the native quarter of the town—not the village,
which lies in the oasis—takes on the look of a ghetto. There,
in the street, in the market, one sees the poverty of the Arabs,
the slender pittance of their days, wherever the humble wants and
lean provision of their life emerge to public view; and Biskra is
a place of great prosperity. There are many villages in the Rir
country, however, that are quite untouched by the European. They
have not the look of dilapidation and misery of the ksour of the
Sud-Oranais, scarce distinguishable from the soil, dark and fallen
warrens; but they are only a degree removed from that, and their
life must be analogous. Arab poverty you may see anywhere in the
land, but the full sense of it comes and sinks in only when one
has broken the blank wall of the secrecy of such a village, and
in some outlying place of their own, in the sand and the sun, gone
into their houses. When a poor Arab enters his house it is as when
some animal leaves the life of the forest for his hole in the ground.
One day I went up to El Kantara, the station at the mouth of the pass
above Biskra, whose superb view, so often described, first gives
to the traveller the measureless vision of the warm-toned, sterile
lands, an empire worthy of the sun, and unrolls before his eyes for
vague leagues the red and yellow earths, spotted by the black of the
oasis-green—the desert’s “panther skin,” in the old Roman’s
phrase. In the gorge below lies a great palmerai with three villages,
and there I wandered all one winter day. I entered one of them—the
first I had ever seen—and passed among the low houses through the
narrow lanes. They were made of sun-dried mud—a continuous blank
wall with rough-boarded entrances. It might have been a low line of
rude stables. There was hardly any one in the streets; occasionally
a figure came into view, and passed out of sight. There was intense
silence—the silence of night—broken perhaps by the sound of a
hammer, or a muffled voice in some interior. The streets were slimy
and foul. It was desolation—nothing. It was depressing. The bright
sun shone upon all; the cold, vivid green of the palmerai lifted
its eyebrow masses against the stone of the cliffs and the intense
blue of the sky; in the silence it might have been a dead village,
a ruin in some abandoned land, like Yucatan. The strange sadness
which is here so often felt and seems to exhale from the desert
landscape, which is independent of brilliancy or gloom, a feeling
so intimate as to be almost physical, like the languor of heat,
lay on everything. It was _la tristesse_, which is universal in the
desert, the pathos of “something far more deeply interfused”
and infinitely sad; it lurked in the air, the silence, the distance,
in the light—everywhere.
I went into some of the houses. They were obscure. The shadows, the
damp earth smells made them seem like caves in the ground. They were
bare, rude, humble beyond description. I would not have believed that
a man who had seen the sun could live in such a cellar-like abode. I
was not naturalized then, not subdued to the land; it was a shock to
my sensibilities; but later I would stand in such a place and, like
my soldier-poet, feel glad that it was not Paris or Marseilles. One
easily detaches himself from civilization if the desert talks to
him long. One room stamped itself upon my memory. It was a dark,
bare bedroom; the bed was made of rough timber, the unstripped bark
still on its four posts; there was little else in the room. But
on the walls there were three or four beautifully written Arab
texts—verses of the Koran.
“So near is heaven to our earth,”
I thought, instinctively varying the line to the case; it was an
unconsciously bitter jest. It sometimes seems that devotion in races
is in proportion to the fewness of the blessings that the lord of
heaven and earth gives to his wandering creatures, and this was
in my mind. But that bare, earth-walled room with its texts is my
most vivid symbol of Arab piety. It is a believing race.
I remember when the reality of their belief first struck home to
me. I was driving on the high plains below the peaks of the range on
their northern side, returning from Timgad, that magnificent ruin of
a Roman city of high civilization which still lifts erect its vistas
of columns over the strewn ground of the abandoned plain, and in its
vacant desolation brings back to me more vividly than Pompeii, with
a greater nobility and dignity, with a finer imperialism, the great
Roman world. I had seen it diminish and sink in the low sunlight,
and drop behind. Night had long fallen over the uninhabited, long,
Colorado-like, starlit slopes where we drove. It was bitter cold,
and I had just drawn another sweater over the head of my Arab boy
beside me. Suddenly he said with quick and earnest tones: “_Le bon
Dieu_ will take care of you.” I was startled by the intensity of
the unexpected voice. “_Le bon Dieu_,” I said; “what do you
mean?” The boy gazed at me steadily. I could see the gleam of
his deep eyes in the starlight. “_Le bon Dieu_,” he said, and
nodded up to the sky. That nod was the most convincing act of faith
I ever saw. It was plain that he believed in God as he believed
in the reality of his own body. I fell silent, thinking in how
marvellous ways we are taught; for the boy taught me something. And
as the earthen room with its texts is a symbol to me of Arab piety,
the boy’s gesture is my symbol of Arab faith—_la foi_.
I emerged from the obscurity into the brilliant silence of the day;
but I could not shake off my oppression. The strange sadness,
whose nature I have hinted at, which belongs to the desert,
was beginning to make itself known to me. It does not come from
the land; it is exhaled from the human spirit in contact with its
mortal fate. It may be felt anywhere on the earth; but its home is
in the desert. It is sometimes more defined amid the ruins of old
cities, or where great tragic events of the race have left their
traces on the scene or in the memory—_sunt lacrimæ rerum_. Here
it is indefinable, a mood—_mentem mortalia tangunt_; something
that haunts the brilliancy before the rainless eyes of the race
of men who do not lament any particular catastrophe or weep an
unusual loss; a half-unconscious sense of the spirit penetrated
and impregnated with having lived, with a feeling of its common
lot, its universal fate. It marries with the monotony of things,
of life. What monotony of life must be here! Who could understand
such lives! I felt a darkness under all that I had seen of Arab
existence. There is another side, an underworld, beneath what
appears on the surface. Read the annals of Arab war, of Arab love,
of Arab rule. What cruelty, what baseness, what rapacity! What a
power of hate! No pen can tell the horrors of their warfare, their
lust for blood and pain, their delight in carnage and savagery. It
is the same with the story of their amours—violent, unmeasured,
remorseless—explosions of life. The natural happiness of the race
is in these things. So they paint the paradise before the French
came, when “the true believers divided their time between love,
hunting and war, and no one died without having known the drunkenness
that an adored mistress or a day of powder gives.” In the race
at large, what lower forms does this heritage of the wild take on!
One may read the books, hear living tales, share in actual scenes,
and so come to stand in the fringes of their experience and
temperament; but he does not penetrate into the Arab soul.
I wandered all day in the palmerai and along the river bank,
loitered and forded and climbed, and enjoyed sun and wind and
prospect; but the echo of the morning sadness did not leave me,
nor did it fade from the atmosphere. The desert life had laid its
hand upon me. Later, day after day, as I stood in its lights and
shadows, and began to understand, the desert moods grew at once
more precise and more commingled, and one among them all seemed to
absorb the others. It was the feeling of fatality in all things. It
is sympathetic with the drift of my own consciousness. In my common
days the sphere of our forethought and volition seems small. Our
freedom is no more than a child’s leash from the doorstep. We are
embedded in an infinite body of law and circumstance; not much is
trusted to ourselves alone. Within this narrow range human liberty
is a creation of civilization, a partial dethronement of the tyranny
of nature without, and of impulse within, a victory of knowledge,
invention, and conscience. Submission is written all over the desert
world, which is still in touch with the savage state. There man yet
remains in large measure the slave and sport of nature and of his own
unreasoned vital instincts. It is true that our diminished and shorn
personal liberty in the state is a tame wine to the rich vintage of
the freedom of the barbarian to kill, to rape, to rob—to eat up his
neighbor and all that is his. The barbarian is the true superman,
that monster of an all-devouring and irresponsible self-will. The
soul of the desert is not barbarous, but emerging from barbarism;
it is on the way to some command of nature and to self-rule, and
is rich in the ferment of life forces and in personal adventure;
but it knows the iron net of necessity in which it is enmeshed. How
extraordinary it is to observe that it is from the freedom of desert
life that fatalism emerges in its most rigid and thought-vacant form!
The first words of the struggling soul in its dim self-consciousness,
amid the throes of impotency and defeats of effort, world-wide are:
“It is written.” The will of nature, the will of Allah, the
will in which is our peace, however the formula be read, is the
deepest conviction and last resort of humanity in the stage which
it has not yet known, if it shall ever know, to transcend. Fatality
stares from the face of the desert, and drops from the lips of its
wandering race like leaves from the dying forest. It is the period
of all their prayers.
Moods of the desert, which are also scenes and visions! the infinity,
the solitude, the monotony; _la misère, la foi, la tristesse_;
fate, peace! They are not words, but things; not thoughts, but
experiences; not sentiments, but feelings. On the page they are
shadows; there they are realities.