ON THE MAT

I

It was afternoon in a small oasis village of the Zibans. I was seated

on a straw mat in a little garden-space just outside the café,

and dreamily regarding the intense blue sky through the vine leaves

trellised overhead, which flecked me with their shadows. An old

Arab was praying just in front. Two groups, one on each side of me,

were placidly seated on clean, yellow mats—young men, whose dark,

sad faces, thin-featured and large-eyed, contrasted with their white

robes. They were smoking kif—a translucence of gold in their clear,

bronze skin, a languor of light in their immobile gaze, content. The

garden made off before me, topped with palmy distance; the silent

street, to one side, was out of sight, as if it were not. It was

a place of peace. I had finished my coffee and dates. I filled my

brier-wood. The May heat was great, intense; and I settled myself

to a long smoke, and fell into reverie and recollection.

How simple it all was! That praying Arab—what an immediacy

with God! What a nonchalance in the dreamy pleasures of those

delicate-featured youths! What a disburdenment was here! I had only

to lift my index-finger to heaven dying, to be one of the faithful;

and the fact was symbolic, exemplary, of the simplicity of Islam. It

makes the minimum demand on the intellect, on the whole nature

of man. I had but lately placed the faith in its true perspective,

historically. Mohammedanism, the Ishmael of religions, was the elder

brother of Protestantism, notwithstanding profound differences of

racial temperament between them. The occidental mind is absorbent,

conservative, antiseptic. It is not content, like the Mohammedan,

to let things lie where they fall, disintegrate, crumble, and sink

into oblivion. Western education fills the mind with the tangle-foot

of the past. Catholicism was of this racial strain. It had a genius

for absorption. It was the melting-pot of the religious past,

and what resulted after centuries was an amalgam, rich in dogma,

ritual, and institution, full of inheritance. The Reformation

was an attempt to simplify religion and disburden the soul of

this inheritance in so far as it contained obsolete, harmful, or

inessential elements; many things, such as saint’s worship, art,

celibacy, were excised. Mohammedanism, ages before and somewhat

differently placed, initiating rather than reforming a faith, was an

effort of the desert soul to adapt to itself by instinct the Semitic

tradition of God that had grown up in it, and to simplify what was

received from its neighbors. The founder of Islam was more absolute

and radical in exclusion than the reformers in elimination. Islam

had a genius for rejection. Mohammed, with the profound monotheistic

instinct that was racial in him, affirmed the unity of God with such

grandeur and decision that there was no room in the system for that

metaphysical scrutiny of the divine nature in which Catholic theology

found so great a career; on the other hand, with his positive sense

of human reality, which was also racial, he shut out asceticism,

in which Catholic conscience worked out its illustrious monastic

future. He had achieved a reconciliation between religion and human

nature in the sphere of conduct, and he had silenced controversial

dogma in its principal field in the sphere of theology.

A creed so single and elementary had no need of a priesthood to

preserve and expound it. There was no room for a clergy here,

and there was none. The Reformation diminished but did not end

the priest; Islam suppressed him; yet there remained much analogy

between Mohammedanism and Protestantism in the field of religious

phenomena in which the priest is embryonic. Protestantism is the

best example in human affairs of the actual working of anarchy;

and, in proportion as its sects recede from the authority and

organization of the Catholic Church, it presents in an increasing

degree, in its individuality of private judgment and freedom of

religious impulse, the anarchic ideal of personal life. Islam offers

in practice a similar anarchy. I was struck from the beginning with

an odd resemblance to my native New England in this regard. It,

too, has been a Marabout-breeding country, with its old revivals,

transcendentalists, new lights, Holy Ghosters, and venders of

Christian Science. Emerson was a great Marabout. The Mormons,

who went to Utah and made a paradise in the desert, were not so

very different from the Mzabites who planted an oasis-Eden in

the Saharan waste. The communities that from time to time have

sprung up and died away, or dragged on an unnoticed life in country

districts, are analogous, at least, to the zaouias scattered through

this world of mountain and sand. In many ways my first contacts

with the faith were sympathetic. The faith that had no need of an

intellectual subsidy, that placed no interdict on human nature, that

interposed no middlemen between the soul and God, woke intelligible

responses in my agnostic, pagan, and Puritan instincts; here, too,

was great freedom for the religious impulse and toleration of its

career; and I saw with novel interest in operation before my eyes

the religious instinct of man, simple in idea, direct in practice,

free in manifestation, and on the scale of a race. It was the desert

soul that was primarily interesting to me—its environment, its

comprehension of that, its responses thereto; and, examining it

thus, its religion seemed a thing _intime_ and scarcely separable

from its natural instincts and notions.

What is it that is borne in on the desert soul, when it wakes in

the great silence, the luminosity, the boundless surge of the sands

against the sky! Immensity—the feeling of the infinite—nature

taking on the cosmic forms of God. The desert is simple. It has few

features, but they are all elements of grandeur. It is the mood of

the Psalms. Awe is inbred in the desert dweller. There is, too,

a harmony between these few elements in their superb singleness

and his lowly mind; not much is required of him, and that little is

written large for his understanding; he takes things in wholes. His

mind is primary, intuitive, not analytical; he does not multiply

thought, he beholds; and this vision of the world he lives in,

a wonderfully grand and simple world, suffices for a religious

intuition as native to him as the palm to the water-source. The

palm is a monotheistic tree. Monotheism belongs to the desert. The

faith of the desert is a theism of pure nature, unenriched by any

theism of humanity, of the human heart in its self-deification; it

is a spiritualization of pure nature worship, whereas Christianity,

at least under some aspects, is the grafting of a human ideal on an

old cosmogony. The God of the desert is an out-of-doors god, like the

Great Spirit of the Indians, who had no temples. No mosque can hold

him; there is no altar there, no image. He cannot be cloistered;

he has no house, no shrine, where one can repair, and abide for a

time, and come away, and perhaps leave religion behind in a place

of its own. He is in the desert air; and the desert dweller, girt

with that immensity, wherever his eye falls can commune with him;

five times daily he bows down in prayer to him and has the intimate

sense of his being; he does not think about him—he believes.

The desert cradles, nurses, deepens, colors, and confirms this

belief. It is a land of monotony, full of solitude and silence. The

impression it thus made upon me was profound, and amounted to an

annihilation of the past. The freshness of the wilderness, as the

discoverer feels it, lay there; it abolished what was left behind;

the Old World had rolled down the other side of the mountains. Life

in its turmoil and news, its physical clamor and mental clatter,

life the distraction, had ceased. It was not that silence had

fallen upon it; but the soul had gone out from it and returned

to the silence of nature. There is no speech in that rosy ring

of mountain walls, in the implacable gold of the sands undulating

away to the blue ends of earth, in the immutable sky; they simply

are. In the passage of the winds there is stillness. It is not that

there are no sounds. The hush is of the soul. Monotonous? Yes.

That is its charm. Monotony belongs to the simple soul; and what

is monotone to the eyes of the desert dweller is monotone in the

ideas and emotions of his psychology. Repetition belongs to Islam;

its words and rites, its music and dances are stereotyped, something

completely intelligible, identically recurrent, like tales that

please children—the same stories in the same words. Prayer and

posture, formula and rhythm, endlessly renewing the same idea and

the same sensation—they imprint, they intensify; desert moulds,

they help the soul to retain its conscious form. The larger mind

that discriminates, analyzes, and explores, may tire of this; but

it also finds in such a solitude, full of silence and monotony,

a place where the soul collects itself, integrates, and has more

profoundly the sense of its own being.

The desert is not only the generator and fosterer of the desert

soul in its spiritual attitude, its practices and processes, by

the larger and universal elements in the environment, but in more

detailed ways it provides the atmosphere of life. It is strangely

sympathetic with the dweller upon its sands. He is a nomad; and the

desert is itself nomadic. The landscape is a shifting world. The

dunes travel. The scene dissolves and rebuilds. The sand-hills lift

a sculptured mountain edge upon the blue, swells like the bosom

of a wave, precipices and hollows like mountain defiles, outlooks,

and hiding-places in the valleys, and the surface shall be finely

mottled and delicately printed and patterned with lace-work as

far as the eye can see. The wind erases it in a night, hollows the

hills and fills the hollows; it is gone. The oases disappear; they

are like islands sinking in the sea of driving sands; you see their

half-sunken trees like ruins buried beneath the wave, still visible

in the depths. The face of the land is ephemeral; to leave the route

is to be lost. And after the wind, the light begins its play. The

lakes of salt and saltpetre, the lifeless lands, the irremediable

waste—ruins of some more ancient and primordial desolation, the

region cursed before its time with planetary death—change, glitter,

disclose placid reaches of palm-fringed water, island-paradises,

mirage beyond mirage in the far-reaching enchantment, strips

of fertility like lagoons on the mineral mud as when one sees a

valley-land through clouds. The heat gives witchcraft to the air;

size and distance are transformed; what is small seems gigantic,

what is far seems beside you; a flock of goats is a cavalcade, a bush

is a strange monster. To the nomad in those moving sands, in that

air of illusion and vision, in those imprecise horizons, the solid

earth might seem the stuff that dreams are made on. The desert is

a paradox; immutable, it presents the spectacle of continuous change.

Nowhere is the transitory so suggested, set forth, and embodied. Here

is the complete type of human existence, permeated with impermanence,

the illusory, and oblivion, yet immutable; the generations are

erased, but humanity abides with the same general aspects. The

land is a type, too, of the desert past—its tribes globing

into hosts and dispersed, its dynasties that crumble and leave

not a ruin behind, its inconsecutiveness in history, wars like

sand-storms, peace without fruition. It is on this life, and

issuing from its mortal senses, that there falls the impalpable

melancholy and intimate sadness of the desert. The formlessness of

the vague envelops all there; it is the path of the unfinished,

the illimitable; it is the bosom of the infinite where life

is a momentary foam. Mystery is continuous there, a perpetual

presence. Its human counterpart, its image in the soul, is _la

rêve_, the dream, reverie, as changeful, as illusory, that takes

no root, fades, and vanishes. It is not a merely contemplative

sadness; it is a physical melancholy. The oases are full of fever,

of the incredible languors of the heat—breath is a weight upon

the lungs, blood is weariness in the veins, life is an oppression

and an exhaustion. It revives, but it remembers. There is a swift

spring-time of life, a resilience, a jet, of the eternal force,

and age comes like night with a stride. Death is the striking of the

tent. It is quickly over. You shall see four men passing rapidly with

the bier, a wide frame on which the body lies, wrapped in white; in

the barren place of the dead they dig with haste a shallow hollow in

the sand; they stand a moment in the last prayer; they have covered

the grave swiftly and stuck three palm twigs in the loose sand,

and are gone. A change of day and night, of winter and summer, of

birth and death, and at the centre the wind-blown desert and the

frail nomad tent; and then, three palm twigs in the nameless sand.

The desert gives new values to life. It is a rejuvenation of the

senses, a perpetual renaissance. The fewness of objects and their

isolation on the great scene increase their worth to the eye, and in

the simple life all trifles gain in meaning through receiving more

attention; the pure and bracing air invigorates the whole body in

all its functions, and the light is, in particular, a stimulant to

the eye. The intensification of the pleasures of the senses is due

also to the austerities and hardships of life in the waste and the

change from suffering to ease. To the nomad, after the rigors of the

sands, heat and thirst and glare, all vegetation has the freshness

of spring-time; the oasis, welcoming his eyes, is, in truth, an

opening paradise. The toiling caravan, the French column, know what

it means. The long, black-green lines of the oasis over the sands is

like the breaking of light in the east; the sound of running water

is a music that reverberates in all their nerves; fruits hanging in

cool shadows, flowers, groves—it is _la vie_, the great miracle,

again dreaming the beautiful dream in the void. After the hamada,

the desert route, it is paradise. It is impossible to conceive

of the sensual intensity of this delight, of its merely bodily

effervescence. The Arabs are a sensual race, and the desert has

double charged their joys with health and hardship; their poverty

of thought is partly recompensed by fulness of sensation. The oases

are not gardens in the European sense; they are rude and arid groves

and orchards and fields, with a roughness of untamed nature in the

aspect of the soil; and the desert everywhere is savage in look,

with the uncared-for reality, the nakedness, and the wild glory of

primeval things. Yet I have never known habitually such delicacy and

poignancy of sensation. The wind does not merely blow, it caresses;

the landscape does not smile, it mirrors and gives back delight;

odors and flavors are penetrating; warmth and moisture bathe and

cool; there is something intimate in the touch of life. There is a

universal caress in nature, a drawing near—something soothing,

lulling, cadenced—felt in the blood and along the nerves,

a _volupté_ diffused and physical; for there is a flower of

the senses, as there is a flower of the mind, as refined in its

exhalation, in the peace of vague horizons, in wafted fragrances of

the night, in luminosities of the atmosphere, in floating vapors

of morning, in the dry bed of the oued under the moon, in the

pomegranate blossom, in the plume of the date-palm flower, in all

evanescence, the companionship of some little thing of charm, the

passing of a singing voice. The desert is rich in those mysteries

of sensation that remain in their own realm of touch and eye and

ear, reverie and dream. It is a garden of the senses; and the wild

flavor of the garden gives a strange poignancy to its delights.

This sensuality prolongs its life in the higher faculties; it

penetrates and impregnates the mental consciousness; memory and

imagination are strongly physical; the soul-life itself is deeply

sensuous. It is, in this primitive psychology, as if one should see

the coral insects building up beneath the wave the reef that should

emerge on a clear-skied world. The desert music reveals this most

clearly. Sensation, as has been often said, enters into the arts

in varying degrees. Literature is the most disembodied of the arts;

its images are most purely mental and free from physical incarnation;

then, in order, painting, sculpture, music include greater actuality

of sensation by virtue of which æsthetic pleasure, as it arises

from them, is more deeply drenched in physical reality. The senses

are preliminary to the intellect; that is why the arts precede the

sciences in human evolution. The desert dweller has no sciences,

and his only art is music, which itself is in a primitive stage,

being still characteristically joined with the dance in its original

prehistoric union. The Arabs sit, banked on their benches, apathetic,

gazing, listening, while the monotonous rhythm of the dance and

the instruments rises, sways, and terminates, and begins again

interminably. What is their state? It is an obsession, more or less

profound, of memory and imagination, retrospective or prospective

experience, felt with physical vagueness, defined, vivified, and

made momentarily present by the swaying dancer in the emotional

nimbus of the music. It is the audience at only one remove from

participation in the dance, contemplative but still physically

reminiscent of it. The dances are of two general types: that of the

negroes, a physical hysteria, full of violent gesture, leaping, and

loud cries, the barbaric paroxysm; the other that of Arab origin, a

voluptuous cadencing to a monotonously responsive accompaniment. The

desert dweller is a realist; his emotions, his desires have not

transcended the facts of life; his poetry, so far as it exists, and

there is a considerable amount of it, is one of simple and positive

images. Mysticism, in the intellectual sense, the transformation

of the senses into the spirit, does not exist for him; not nearer

than Persia is the mystic path which leads to the ecstasy of the

soul’s union with the divine, of the Bride with the Bridegroom;

the desert knows nothing of that Aryan dream. Sensation remains

here in its own realm; and its summary artistic form is music,

itself so physically penetrating in its method and appeal. The

music of the desert is to me very attractive; it engages me with

its simple and direct cling; snatches of carolled song, the humble

notes of its flutes, the insistence of its instruments fascinate

and excite me. It is the music of the senses.

The sensuality of the Arabs also found other climaxes, in love and

war. It is the intensity of their passion and of their fighting

which has charged their history, as a race, with its greatest

brilliancy; and at their points of highest achievement a luxurious

temperament has characterized them, which has made an Arabian

dream the synonym for all strange and soft delights. The desert

in its degree has this _mollesse_, physical languors, exhaustion;

but its home is in the oasis-villages. The true nomad contemns the

oasis-dwellers as a softened, debilitated, and corrupt race; the

life of the nomad is purer, hardier, manlier; he is the master; the

oasis pays him tribute. The life of the senses, however, in either

form, passes away; vitality ebbs the more swiftly because of its

rapid and intense play; pallor falls on the sensations, they fade,

and joy is gone. Melancholy from its deepest source supervenes;

in the desert—age in its abandonment, decay, and poverty; in

the oasis—life somnolent, effeminate, drugged. The wheel comes

full circle in the end for all. Meanwhile the vision of life is

whole, and goes ever on. Youth is always there in its beauty and

freshness. There is always love and fighting. Nature does not lose

her universal caress. The desert soul still adores the only God

in his singleness. There is great freedom. The route calls. It is

human life, brave, picturesque, mysterious—beset by the sands,

but before it always the infinite.

Yet, fascinated though I was, I was aware of some detachment. Sweet

was the renaissance of the senses—what brilliancy and joy in

their play—merely to look, to breathe, to be! To have come into

one of the titanic solitudes of nature, comparable only to ocean

wastes and amplitudes of the sky, and to dwell there, far from the

mechanic chaos, the unbridled egotism, the competitive din—what a

recovery of the soul was there, of human dignity, of true being! and

to find there a race still in a primitive simplicity, unburdened

by thought, not at warfare with its mortal nature, the two poles of

the spirit and the body married in one sphere—and to feel the rude

shepherding of nature round their nomad lives, inured to hardship,

but swiftly responsive with almost animal vitality to her rare

kindlier moods and touches—it was a discovery of the early world,

of ancestral, primeval ways. It was a refreshment, a disburdenment,

an enfranchisement; and it was a holiday delight. Yet over these

simplicities, austerities, and wild flavors there still hung a moral

distance, something Theocritean, the mood of the city-dweller before

pastoral charm. To sit in the café in the throng of Arabs with the

coffee and the dance, to muse and dream on the mat alone, to lie

apart in the garden and be content—it was a real participation;

but in the background behind, in the shadow of my heart, was the old

European though eluded. This life had the quality of escapade—to

see things lying crumbled and fallen with none to care, to be free

of the eternal salvage of dead shells of life and thought—a world

so little encumbered with the heritage of civilization! How many

years had I spent, as it were, in a museum of things artificially

preserved in books, like jars—in the laboratory of the intellectual

charnel-house! The scholar, accumulating the endless history of

human error, has no time to serve truth by advancing it in his

own age; he lives so much with what was that he cannot himself be;

his inheritance eats him up. The crown of Western culture is apt

to be an encyclopædia. There was no library in the desert. And

religion—how much of it comes to us moderns in a dead form! Surely

religion is a revelation _of_ the soul, not _to_ it. This is a

doctrine of immanence. If the divine be not immanent in the soul,

man can have no knowledge of it. Religion is an aura of the soul,

a materialization of spiritual consciousness, varying in intensity

of light and tones of color from race to race, from age to age,

and, indeed, from man to man; it is the soul’s consciousness made

visible. It is not to me interesting as scientific truth is, a thing

of worth in the realm of the abstract, but rather as artistic truth

is, a vital expression, something lived. What a reality it had here

in the desert soul—its effluence, almost its substance, giving back

the spiritual image of nature in humanity, a condensation of the

vast spaces, the vague horizons, the monotony, the mortal burden,

in a prayer! It is a new baptism into nature, if not unto God,

only to see this aura of the soul in the desert. The scene in all

its phases—landscape and men—was to me an evocation of the long

ago. But the soul does not return upon its track. The simple life

is only for the simple soul. The soul of the old European is not

simple. Yet if the leopard could change his spots, if one could lay

off the burden of thought, lay staff and scrip aside, and end the

eternal quest, nowhere else could he better make the great refusal

and set up an abiding-place as in this nomad world. Its last word

is resignation; peace is its last desire.

The desert world is a dying world. That is the sadly shadowing,

slowly mounting, fatally overwhelming impression that grows on the

mind and fills it. Death is the aspect of the scene; sterility,

blankness, indifference to life. Inhospitality is its universal

trait and feature. It is as hostile to animal and vegetable as

to human life—its skeleton lakes without fishes, its drifting

valleys without birds, its steppes without roving herds. Its oases

are provisioned with water and bastioned with ramparts against

the eternal siege of the sands; to preserve them is like holding

Holland against the sea. The mere presence of man, too—what

is human—shares in this aspect of death. I have mentioned the

cemeteries, mere plots of extinction, anonymous, without dates,

leaving nothing of degradation to be added to the sense of

hopelessness, futility, and oblivion. The dwelling-places of the

living are hardly more raised above the soil or distinguishable

from the earth they crumble into—typically seen in those ksour

of the south, cracked, with gap and rift, dissolving in ageless

decay and abandonment, mere heaps over the underground darkness

of passages and cells—or here embosomed in a great silence, full

of solitude and secrecy, the life of the palm garden, of the great

heats, of the frigid nights; always and everywhere with the sense

of an immense desolation, denudation, and deprivation. The life

of the tent is one of sunshine and vitality by comparison; humble

and rugged, it has no decadence in its look; in the villages the

decadence seems almost of the soil itself. One goes out into the

desert to escape the oppression of this universal mortal decay;

and there is no life there, only a passage of life, of which the

skeleton of the camel in the sands is the epitaph.

A dying world and a race submissive to its fate. In that nomad world,

where everything is passing away, there is nothing fixed but the

will of Allah. It is not strange to find fatality the last word of

Islam. In the desert world the will of nature appears with extreme

nakedness; the fortune of man is brief, scant, and unstable; the

struggle is against infinite odds, a meagre subsistence is gained,

if at all; and the blow of adversity is sudden and decisive. Patience

everywhere is the virtue of the poor, resignation the best philosophy

of the unfortunate, and defeat, as well as victory, and perhaps more

often, brings peace. These are great words of Islam, and nowhere

have they sunk deeper into life than in the desert-soul. They are

all forms of that fatality which the desert seems almost to embody

in nature, to exercise in the lives of its children, and to implant

in their bosoms as the fundamental fact of being. Fatality is in the

outer aspect of things and exhales from the inward course of life;

melancholy, impotence, immobility accumulate with the passage of

years; effortless waiting, indolence, prayer, contemplation—these

are the shadows in which is the end. This mood of the despair of

life has nowhere more lulling cadences of death. The desert is

a magnificent setting for the scene—its strong coloring, its

vast expanses, its unfathomable silences; its desolate grandeurs,

its sublime austerities, its wild glory—godlike indifference to

mankind; its salt chotts, immense as river valleys, tufts of the

sand-sunken palms—premonitions of the disappearance of life from

the earth, the final extinction of that vital spark which was the

wildfire of the planet, the thin frost work on the flaking rock, the

little momentary breath of love and war and prayer. Here life takes

on its true proportions at the end—all life; it is an incident,

a little thing in the great scene. A dying world, a dying race, a

dying civilization, truly; but the old European, the wise pessimist

in the shadow, has seen much death; to him it is but another notch

on the stick. To me, personally near to it and fascinated in my

senses still, it is _très humain_, exciting, engaging; and the

melancholy that penetrates it ever more deeply and mysteriously does

not interfere with its charm, its blend of delicacy and hardiness,

of spirit and sense, of freedom and fate. I have a touch of the heart

of the desert-born. “If love of country should perish from the

earth,” said my soldier-poet, “it would be found again in the

heart of the Bedouin.” No race is more attached to the soil, or

so consumed with home-sickness for it. The Bedouin loves the desert.