BISKRA, DEMI-MONDAINE OF THE DESERT
Facing each other, though separated by four thousand miles of African
desert, jungle, and veldt, stand two of the most significant and
inspiring statues in the world.
From a little triangle of green set in the middle of the Rue Berthe, the
principal street of Biskra, rises in marble the commanding figure of a
priest, a bearded, vigorous, eagle-eyed man in the flowing vestments
and pointed miter of an archbishop, who holds a primate’s cross aloft
in one hand and with the other confers an apostolic benediction as he
strides southward into Africa. Charles Martial Allemand Lavigerie was
the priest’s name, cardinal-archbishop of Carthage and Algeria, primate
of All Africa, founder of the Order of the White Fathers. His fairness,
tact, and statesmanship in handling thorny native questions won for
France the confidence and friendship of the warlike border tribes; he was
largely instrumental in putting an end to the trans-Saharan slave-trade;
and he and his _Pères Blancs_ did more than all the French military
leaders put together to carry the tricolor beyond the Great Sahara.
[Illustration: THE START FROM TOUGGOURT
Mrs. Powell embarks on a ship of the desert
But Miss Powell prefers her Arab steed]
At the other end of the continent, in Bulawayo, in the dusty, sun-baked
thoroughfare known as Main Street, stands another statue—the bronze
image of a short, thick-set, carelessly clad man, his hands clasped
behind him, his feet planted firmly apart, as he stares in profound
meditation northward over Africa. The name of the dreamer was Cecil John
Rhodes, and in his vision he saw twin lines of steel stretching from the
Cape of Good Hope straight away to the shores of the Mediterranean; a
railway, to use his own words, “cutting Africa through the center and
picking up trade all the way.” Though the stupendous project which he
envisioned is yet to be completed, it is due to him, more than to any
single individual, that the eastern and southern portions of the map of
Africa are painted red.
No two men were ever more unlike than Lavigerie and Rhodes. Both
empire-builders, both apostles of civilization, one gained his
ends by tactfulness, the other by ruthlessness; one stood for the
mission-station, the other for the machine-gun; one relied on the power
of prayer and proselytism, the other on the pick and the pound sterling.
The _Pères Blancs_ organized by Lavigerie carried the cross and the
tricolor southward to the Ubanghi; the engineers employed by Rhodes
carried the railway and the Union Jack northward to the Congo. As far as
the poles apart in character and methods, they yet had this in common:
both were inspired by deep patriotism, both were possessed of boundless
imagination and inexhaustible enthusiasm. Between them they opened up a
continent to civilization.
* * * * *
Whoever had the placing of the great missionary-statesman’s statue in
Biskra must have known the man. For the eyes gaze eagerly out into the
clean, wind-swept spaces of the desert, while the back is turned in
contempt and aversion upon the gaming-houses, the dance-halls, and the
brothels of the town. Perhaps because they are so avid for the extremely
dubious entertainments which the place has to offer, the thousands of
tourists who flock to Biskra every winter find time to bestow on the rapt
white figure no more than a cursory glance. To most of these the name
of Lavigerie means less than nothing, whereas that of Robert Hichens is
familiar to them all!
In the old days, before the railway and the tourists came, before Hichens
wrote “The Garden of Allah,” Biskra was no better and no worse than other
desert towns. But the hordes of winter visitors which soon began to
descend upon the place clamored for the Oriental forms of entertainment
which the English author painted so alluringly, and these the avaricious
Arabs, who always have an eye out for the main chance, were only too
willing to provide, so that to-day Biskra spreads before her guests
every form of vice to be found in Europe, and some varieties of which
Europe never dreamed. Sensual, provocative, hot with desire, painted of
face and barbaric of attire, she beckons from beneath her palm-trees, a
demi-mondaine of the desert, a siren of the sands.
Biskra is the capital of the Ziban, or the country of the Zab, a people
of mixed Arab and Berber stock, whose villages of sun-hardened mud,
nestling amid groves of date-palms and fruit-trees and waving fields of
grain, dot that portion of the desert lying between the Shat Melrir and
the southern slopes of the Aurés. The water which keeps the oasis green,
except a certain amount from wells, all comes from a single stream, the
Oued Biskra, which, coming down through the Gorge of El Kantara, forty
miles to the north, carries the melting snows of the Atlas to the Sahara
and finally drops from sight amid the sands. Biskra itself consists of
half a dozen villages, separated by large plantations of palm and olive
trees, scattered through an oasis three miles in length by less than
a mile in breadth. The native houses are of the usual Saharan type,
earth-brown, thick-walled, and flat of roof; but dwelling in black
tents along the outer edges of the oasis is a considerable transient
population—nomads who have come in from the outer desert to refit
themselves for another voyage, for Biskra is, in its way, as much a port
as Algiers.
Strongly garrisoned and further strengthened by the fort of St. Germain,
Biskra is a place of great strategic importance; the end of one of the
fingers, as it were, with which France maintains her grip on the desert.
Colomb-Béchar, the present terminus of the railway running south from
Oran, is another. So are Gabés, and Tozeur, and Touggourt. Thanks to the
chain of outposts which she has flung along the southern frontiers of
Barbary from Libya to the Atlantic, France’s hold on the desert is now
tolerably secure, but the French have not been lulled into a feeling of
false security. They are fully alive to the possibility of one of those
general conflagrations which sweep across these fiery regions with the
suddenness and violence of a sand-storm, as is denoted by the significant
number of uniforms—legionaries, _tirailleurs_, colonial infantry, spahis,
_méharistes_, _chasseurs d’Afrique_—which fill the streets of Biskra with
color. They are firemen, ever on the alert for an alarm.
The foreign settlement of Biskra, _la ville européene_, is toward the
northern end of the oasis. Barring the Arabs and the camels, it does
not differ materially from scores of other winter resorts in the south
of France. In the center of the town is a beautiful public garden on
which front cafés, restaurants, and small arcaded shops for the sale of
post-cards, photographs, native curios, and European goods. Set well back
from the broad, rather dusty main thoroughfare, the Rue Berthe, are
several luxurious hotels, a pretentious casino in pseudo-Moorish style,
where visitors may dance, drink, and engage in various games of chance,
and numerous white villas embowered in flowering vines and surrounded by
gorgeous gardens. During the season the town is gay with color and music
and laughter. Long strings of stately camels stalk slowly through the
crowded streets; on the pavements before the native coffee-houses groups
of turbaned Arabs chat and smoke; _hiverneurs_ from America and half the
European countries lounge on the terraces of the hotels, lean over the
green tables of the casino, or rub shoulders in the curio-shops; young
men and girls in vivid sport-clothes dash madly about the tennis-courts
or canter by on well-groomed ponies; lovely ladies, gowned in the height
of the Paris fashion, saunter beside cavalry officers gorgeous in
wasp-waisted jackets of sky blue and scarlet riding-breeches; from the
_cafés arabes_ come strains of the weird and plaintive music the desert
people love; in the afternoons the band of the _tirailleurs_ plays Sousa
marches and Irving Berlin jazz in the public gardens.
In the crystal clearness of its air, the vivid blueness of its skies,
the brilliancy of its sunlight, and the unbroken sweep of the encircling
desert, Biskra reminds one of an Upper Nile town, such as Luxor, if one
can imagine Luxor without the river and without the temples at Thebes.
From November to April its climate is, generally speaking, delightful,
but in the summer the thermometer often registers 110 in the shade during
the day and 90 at night, though the absence of humidity makes even such
excessive heat endurable. Yet Biskra can hardly be recommended for those
who are actually ill, for its glorious winter climate is marred by high,
bitterly cold winds which frequently bring the mercury down to the
freezing-point and cause the shivering tourists to curse the person who
assured them that the Sahara and heat are synonymous.
[Illustration: THE STRANGE CAPITAL OF A STRANGE PEOPLE
Chalk-white beneath the sun of Africa, the square, flat-roofed buildings
of Ghardaia, the city of the Beni-Mzab, a Berber tribe of the Algerian
Sahara, rise in terraces, like those of the pyramid-pueblo at Taos, to
the _kasbah_, above whose massive walls the minaret of the Great Mosque
soars skyward, like a finger pointing toward heaven]
I find it somewhat difficult to analyze the charm of Biskra. That it has
great charm is undeniable, but its charm does not lie altogether in the
brilliance of its sunshine, the richness of its colors, or the novelty
of its setting. It has no monopoly of these. I think that its peculiar
appeal is to be found, rather, in its innate barbarism, for, beneath its
thin coating of civilization, it is African to the core. This may seem
rather far-fetched when one remembers that it is reached from the north
by comfortable trains with _wagons-lits_ and dining-cars; that its larger
hotels compare very favorably with the great hostelries of Florida and
the Riviera; that its casino is crowded nightly with men and women in
evening-dress risking their money at _petits chevaux_ or roulette. Yet
the barbaric note is never wholly absent; it rings more shrill by force
of contrast; one has the uneasy feeling that the veneer of civilization
is none too thick, that one is walking on a perilously thin crust. The
caravans which slip in so silently from the great wastes and steal out
again with equal mysteriousness bound for God knows where; the hooded
figures which crouch motionless in the dimly lit interiors of the native
cafés; the tattooed harlots who flaunt themselves in the narrow streets
of the Ouled-Naïl quarter; the wild-looking, sullen-eyed men from the
depths of the desert who furtively whisper together in the market-place;
the momentary flash of a steel blade as a burnous is carelessly thrown
back; the eery wail of flutes and the muffled throb of drums; the
moonlight gleaming on the bayonets of night patrols—all these combine to
remind us that we are in Africa, a tiny island of white men amid a sea
of mysterious, fanatical, menacing brown ones; and that out there in the
brooding desert, under cover of the darkness, who knows what ominous
plans are hatching. As in other places on the edge of the unknown, one is
constantly oppressed by an undefinable sense of lurking peril, the uneasy
feeling that something is about to happen.
Biskra, as every reader of modern fiction knows, is the Beni-Mora of
Robert Hichens’s “Garden of Allah,” and to leave there without visiting
the gardens of the Villa Landon which the novelist so graphically
describes would be as unthinkable as to leave Versailles without seeing
the Trianon. For the setting of his story Hichens chose the beautiful
estate of Count Landon, a French nobleman who has devoted his life to a
study of Arab life, which lies in the extreme outskirts of the oasis,
on the very margin of the desert, its walls rising abruptly from the
illimitable sea of sand.
The creators of northern gardens strive primarily for color; here, amid
the glare of the sun and the desert, the chief object sought is _shade_.
Almost wholly absent are the velvety stretches of close-cropped lawn, the
brilliant “flower-beds,” the formal avenues and exactly trimmed hedges
to which we are accustomed. There are flowers, of course—great clumps of
geranium, hedges of red and white hibiscus, cascades of bougainvillea,
purple and crimson, clambering roses, and unfamiliar plants and vines
with gorgeous blooms—but instead of being set out in formal rows or
geometrical designs, as European gardeners are so fond of doing, they
peep out unexpectedly from amid a bewildering tangle of bamboos, palms
of every known variety, and citrus-trees, for in that fierce heat they
can exist only by taking advantage of the shade. Winding through the
wilderness of verdure go broad white walks, stamped and rolled until
they are as smooth as asphalt and then sprinkled with a thin layer of
sand. Everywhere bare-legged Arab gardeners are at work preserving the
immaculate tidiness of the gardens. So conscientious are they that a
footprint on the sanded walks is instantly erased, not a dead leaf is to
be seen.
Entering the cool green tunnels from the intolerable glare and heat of
the sun, hearing the pleasant splash and gurgle of water coursing through
the network of leafy channels, lounging beneath pergolas smothered in
jasmine and bougainvillea, or from the outer promenade gazing across
the illimitable sea of sand whose yellow waves break impotently against
the retaining-walls of the garden, one marvels at the miracle which has
wrought such surpassing beauty from a region so discouraging. Nowhere
else have I seen such bold and successful defiance of the desert; here
“the wilderness becomes like Eden, and the desert like the garden of the
Lord.” The wonder and fascination of the place grow on the visitor hour
by hour.
Hidden away in the heart of the gardens is the owner’s villa, a rambling,
one-story building which lays no claim to architectural pretensions.
The interior is a curious _mélange_ of Moorish and mid-Victorian, the
Oriental rugs and hangings, the marbles and paintings, the ornate crystal
chandeliers, the broad divans piled high with embroidered cushions,
the Empire tables and over-stuffed chairs upholstered in brocaded
satin combining the unbridled opulence of the East with the dignity
and restraint of the West. Not far away is a charming little pavilion,
furnished in the Oriental style, where Count Landon takes his guests
after dinner for coffee and cigarettes.
Reclining on a grassy bank before the pavilion was an Arab in a
plum-colored burnous, a scarlet hibiscus-blossom thrust behind his ear,
pensively engaged in the extraction of mournful music from a flute. We
did not need to be told that this was the Larbi described by Hichens. He
is a born actor and, if the stories one hears are to be believed, he has
been highly successful in capitalizing the fame brought him by the book,
for every English and American visitor to the gardens asks to see him and
for the plaintive love-airs which he draws from his little reed rewards
him generously.
In a charming glade beside a vine-clad kiosk we found another Arab, who
offered, for a small consideration, to tell our fortunes in the sand.
Ordinarily I should have passed him by, but the atmosphere of the Jardin
Landon encourages such tomfoolery, and, at my daughter’s insistence, I
told him to try his hand at prophecy. Drawing the hood of his burnous
over his head, he spread white sand evenly upon the ground, traced
cabalistic designs in it with a pointed stick, blew upon it, and, after
a few moments spent in scrutinizing the result, informed me that I was
about to undertake a long journey—a safe prophecy under the circumstances
and, as it happened, a correct one. He did not prove such a good guesser
in my daughter’s case, however, for, after the customary shibboleth, he
announced that she was being pursued by a tall dark man who came from
out of the South. This had the effect of shaking our confidence in the
infallibility of the sand-diviner, for the youth who had pursued her
across half North Africa in his big Minerva was a Belgian nobleman,
short, fair-haired, and blond!
The gardens of the Villa Landon are intensely theatrical and one always
has the feeling that he has inadvertently wandered upon a stage set for a
play, which, to my way of thinking, adds enormously to their charm. They
evidently did not make the same appeal to all my country-people that they
did to me, however, for, while seated beneath a pergola, I heard a voice,
with the unmistakable accent of the Middle West, coming from beyond the
screen of shrubbery.
“This ain’t half bad,” the unseen speaker remarked condescendingly, “but
saay, you just oughta see our back yard in Topeka when the sunflowers and
the hollyhocks are out.”
[Illustration: DESERT DAMSELS, OLD AND YOUNG
In the mountains of southernmost Algeria dwell the Ouled-Naïl, a tribe
which supplies the dancing-girls for half North Africa. When in their
early teens they are charming, with soft brown skins and sparkling eyes,
but the life soon coarsens and hardens them, and by the time they have
reached their twenties the merry eyes are cold and calculating and the
smiling lips are tight and grim]
In the desert, a dozen miles southeast of Biskra, is the town of Sidi
Okba, the religious center, as Biskra is the commercial capital, of the
Ziban. It owes its sanctity, which draws pilgrims from all parts of
Moslem Africa, to the fact that its great mosque contains the tomb of
Okba ibn Nefi, the soldier-saint of Islam, who, in the first century of
the Hegira, conquered Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic and fell in
battle with the Berbers near this place in A.D. 682.
It took the Atlantic Ocean to check Okba’s furious onsweep to the
West. When he reached its shores he is said to have spurred his horse
girth-deep into its waters and, raising his simitar to heaven, exclaimed,
“Great God, if my course were not stopped by that sea I would still go on
to the unknown kingdoms of the West, preaching the unity of Thy holy name
and putting to the sword the rebellious nations who worship any other
god than Thee!” He was a mighty soldier, and, had it not been for the
providential interposition of the Atlantic, America might be Mohammedan
to-day.
The last chapter of Okba’s stormy life was marked by one of those
chivalrous episodes so common in Arab chronicles. While he was meditating
on some plan for circumventing the Atlantic, the Berber tribes he had
conquered on his westward march were rising in his rear. Finding his
position hopeless, he sent for one of his chiefs, a man whom he had
imprisoned for attempting to incite a mutiny in the army. Okba released
him and advised him to fly while there was yet time. But the mutineer
replied that he preferred to die by his leader’s side. So, embracing as
friends, they drew their simitars, broke the scabbards, and turned to
face the onslaught of the foe, falling at last, back to back, amid a ring
of the Berbers they had slain.
To-day the great conqueror lies buried, not far from where he made his
gallant final stand, beneath a splendid shrine within the precincts of
the imposing mosque which bears his name. Carved on the sepulcher in
Cufic characters is the simple but pregnant inscription: “This is the
tomb of Okba, son of Nefi. May God have mercy upon him.” No older Arabic
structure is known to exist in Africa.
* * * * *
In the minds of the tourist, Biskra is always associated with the women
of the Ouled-Naïl, those dusky damsels of easy virtue who perform their
strange sensual dances and ply their age-old trade in the cafés and
brothels which line the narrow, dim-lit thoroughfare named, perhaps with
a touch of sarcasm, the Rue Sainte. They are the daughters of a tribe
which inhabits the mountains of the Ouled-Naïl, a wild, inaccessible,
almost unexplored range which stretches from the western end of the Ziban
to the vicinity of Djelfa.
From earliest childhood they are trained for a life of immorality very
much as a promising colt is trained for the race-course. A girl is
scarcely out of her cradle before, under the tutelage of her mother,
who has herself been a _danseuse_ in her time, she begins the arduous
course of gymnastics and muscle training which is the foundation of their
suggestive _danses du ventre_. Morning, noon, and night, day after
day, year after year, the muscles of her chest, her back, her hips, her
thighs, her abdomen are developed and suppled and trained until they will
respond to her wishes as readily as her slender, henna-stained fingers.
Her lustrous blue-black hair is brushed and combed and oiled and brushed
again; she is taught to play the hautboy, the zither, and the flute and
to sing the haunting love-songs of the desert people; to make the thick
black native coffee and with inimitable dexterity to roll a cigarette. By
the time she has entered her teens she is ready to make her début in the
dance-hall of some Algerian town, a mistress of all the peculiar arts and
accomplishments which make the successful courtezan.
After half a dozen years or so of a life which knows no moral scruples,
during which she carefully hoards the money bestowed on her by her
admirers, she returns, a-clank with gold pieces and jewelry, to the
mud-walled mountain village from which she came, to marry some well-to-do
man of the tribe and to bear him children, who, if they are boys, will
perhaps don the scarlet burnous and white turban of the spahis and
serve in the armies of France, or, if they are girls, will live the
life of their mother all over again. The profession is, in fact, a
hereditary one, which a very large proportion of the women of the tribe
pursue without the slightest blemish to their reputations. It is an
extraordinary custom, and one to which no other country, so far as I am
aware, offers a parallel, for whereas the geishas of Japan, the nautches
of India, and the _ghawazi_ of Egypt are but classes, the Ouled-Naïl are
a race, as distinct in features and characteristics as the Touareg, the
Kabyles, or the Riffi.[3]
European writers have been prone to envelop these demi-mondaines of the
desert in a rosy veil of romance, which is, however, not wholly justified
by the facts. Many of them, as I have just said, after earning their
dowries in the dance-halls, return to their people in the mountains,
marry a respectable young man of the tribe, and ever after lead strictly
moral lives; but others, judging from their appearances, have been in no
great hurry to reform and settle down.
The Ouled-Naïl, be it understood, are not common to Biskra alone, for
they frequently make their way to Constantine and to Algiers, yes, and
to Tunis in the east and to Tangier in the west, for they appear to be
as popular with the Berbers and the Moors as with the Arabs. Though some
of the younger ones are really pretty in a dark, barbaric fashion, with
slim, supple bodies, hands and feet that are small and perfectly molded,
piquant features, and eyes as large and lustrous as those of a gazelle,
their beauty is evanescent, and by the time they have reached their
early twenties they have become painted, leering harridans with mouths
like steel traps and steely, calculating eyes. Yet, even after their
youthful bloom has vanished, their dances continue to arouse the ardor of
their native admirers, they are sometimes the objects of extraordinary
munificence, and they often provoke furious jealousies which flare up in
violent quarrels and not infrequently terminate in bloodshed and death.
That is why the Rue Sainte echoes throughout the night to the measured
tramp of _tirailleur_ patrols.
The _cafés maures_ which are the scene of the Ouled-Naïl dances are for
the most part resorts of the most unsavory description, low-ceilinged,
dimly lighted, and foul with smoke. The dancers give their performance
on a small raised platform to the shrill of reeds, the clash of cymbals,
and the incessant throb of drums played by Arab or negro musicians who
squat in a semicircle on the earthen floor. There is no fixed charge for
admission, but during the frequent intermissions one of the music-makers,
or, perhaps, a dancing-girl herself, will pass among the spectators
soliciting contributions.
In their dress, if in little else, the Ouled-Naïl have nothing in
common with the Jewish and Moresque courtezans who on the stages of
certain extremely disreputable dance-halls in the _kasbah_ quarter of
Algiers prance in a state of almost complete nudity for the delectation
of visitors from the tourist steamers. Their costumes would, on the
contrary, be considered actually prudish by the patrons of the Winter
Garden and the Vanities, for, barring the exposure of a narrow band
of flesh around the waist, they are so completely enveloped in loose
flowing garments that virtually nothing of their figures can be seen.
Past mistresses in the art of seduction, they have learned that sexual
passion is aroused by suggestion rather than by revelation. The excessive
modesty of their costumes is more than counterbalanced, however, by the
licentiousness of their dances, which are the very essence of Oriental
depravity, an unrestrained appeal to sexual desire. Yet every night the
dance-halls of the Rue Sainte are crowded to the doors with European
tourists—sober, self-respecting business men, staid matrons, yes,
and young, carefully reared girls who view the scene in embarrassed
fascination, only half comprehending what the dances mean.
* * * * *
In a narrow street at the back of the Rue Sainte is a _zaouia_ where
those visitors whose curiosity is strong enough to overcome their
feelings of horror and repulsion may witness the terrible rites of the
Aïssaoua sect. This fanatical order of dervishes takes its name from the
Marabout Aïssa, a native of Morocco. Lost in the desert, he would have
perished from starvation, so the tradition goes, had not the miraculous
powers with which he was endowed enabled him to sustain himself on such
unusual forms of food as fire, snakes, scorpions, and the spiny leaves
of the prickly pear. The members of the sect imitate him, or pretend to
imitate him to this day, even improving upon the traditional performances
of their founder by eating broken glass, driving knives and skewers
through their flesh, and undergoing other self-inflicted tortures.
Whether the alleged “holy men” who stage their revolting performance
nightly in the back street of Biskra are actually members of the Aïssaoua
order is open to some question; certainly their exhibition is mere
child’s play to some that I have seen in Inner Asia. Yet they are hideous
and disgusting enough, heaven knows, and one wonders how Europeans,
particularly European women, can sit through them. Numbers do, however,
and become so fascinated that they forget to be horrified or to feel sick
until they get home.
The performance takes place in a long, low room, its atmosphere heavy
with tobacco-smoke, the fumes of incense, the reek of lamps, and the
odor of human perspiration. Ranged against the walls are wooden benches
for the accommodation of the European spectators, most of whom appear
distinctly ill at ease and rather white about the gills, while the native
onlookers seat themselves cross-legged on the floor. At the far end of
the room are gathered the performers: some hollow-eyed, lean-framed,
wild-looking fanatics of the true dervish stamp; others unbalanced,
half-crazy individuals such as are to be found about the mosques and
bazaars of every Moslem city; the rest perfectly normal men—butchers,
porters, scavengers, and the like—who are always willing to endure a
little pain for the sake of profit. These last are indubitably impostors;
but of the others it is hard to determine just where religious frenzy
ends and simulation begins. Music, if such it can be called, is provided
by a trio of negro drummers, who thump their barbaric instruments—_roum,
roum, roum ... roum, roum, roum ... roum, roum, roum_—until the fetid air
of the place pulses with the sound.
The performance is in charge of a marabout, a dignified,
patriarchal-looking Arab in a high thimble-shaped turban and a burnous
of brown camel’s-hair, who acts as a sort of stage-director. Calling
up the performers, one by one, he enfolds each in his arms and makes a
few passes about him, whereupon the dervishes and the demented proceed
to work themselves into an authentic frenzy of religious exaltation,
rolling their eyeballs in their sockets, foaming at the lips, twitching
their limbs, and shaking as though afflicted with palsy, while their
confederates, employed for the occasion, imitate them with an attempt at
realism which is not wholly convincing. Faster and faster the frenzied
figures reel about the room, louder and faster throb the drums, while the
“_Al-lah! Al-lah! Al-lah!_” of the native spectators, who rock themselves
backward and forward in time with the chant, adds to the infernal din.
A few minutes of this and, at a signal from the marabout, the racket
ceases as abruptly as it began. A word from the leader, and there
staggers into the center of the circle a wild-looking, long-haired figure
clad only in a breech-clout; his eyes are glazed, and he is thin to
the point of emaciation. From a brazier he lifts between his thumb and
forefinger a glowing coal the size of a large marble, places it upon his
tongue, swallows it as though it were a bon-bon. In the air is the horrid
odor of burning flesh; an American spectator gives an exclamation of
disgust; a woman utters a faint scream; the natives emit a long-drawn
“_Ah-h-h_” of gratification.
The next number on the program was even more revolting. A pseudo-dervish,
who by day is a street-sweeper in the Rue Berthe, so I was informed,
plunged his hand into a basket and withdrew a live green snake, perhaps
eighteen inches long. The silence in the room was so intense that we
could hear the serpent hissing. Holding the wriggling thing firmly, he
inserted its head into his mouth ... his throat worked convulsively for
a moment ... and it was gone! The florid American beside me mopped his
forehead with a handkerchief. There was a little commotion among the
spectators gathered near the door; the woman who had screamed was going
out.
Now came the apogee of the evening’s entertainment. This time the actor
was no neophyte but a real dyed-in-the-wool fanatic such as I had seen
in the dervish monasteries of Anatolia and Persia. Him I recognized
as the real thing. His eyes glowed with the fires of fanaticism, his
nostrils quivered like a race-horse’s, little streams of saliva trickled
from the outer corners of his lips. It was plain that he was at the very
height of religious frenzy; a man in that condition might do anything
to himself—or to others. But when the marabout made a few passes about
him and whispered in his ear he quieted like an excited dog which hears
its master’s voice. From the folds of his garments the marabout produced
a number of steel skewers, about the length of hat-pins. Opening his
mouth, the dervish drove one of the steels through the fleshy part of his
cheek until a good four inches of it protruded from his face. A second
skewer he forced through the muscles of his upper arm; a third through
his thigh; two more through his breasts. In scarcely more time than it
takes to tell about it the man was a human pin-cushion. Little rivulets
of blood, welling from the wounds, coursed down his naked body to form a
crimson pool upon the floor. By now the other performers and the native
spectators had worked themselves up to a very high pitch of excitement.
“_Al-lah! Al-lah! Al-lah!_” they howled, rocking like automatons and
beating themselves upon the breast. The drums boomed and thundered until
it seemed as though the wave of sound would lift the roof.
[Illustration: WHAT THE PIOUS MOSLEM EXPECTS TO FIND IN PARADISE
Some of the maidens, particularly in the South, are very lovely, with
slim, supple, full-breasted figures, and skins of brown satin shot
with rose, and blue-black hair, and lustrous, seductive eyes. But the
Moors prefer them fat, and unless nature provides them with the desired
embonpoint they are systematically stuffed like Strasbourg geese until
they are waddling mountains of flesh]
The dervish wrenched out the skewers and dropped, panting, on a mat.
Two superbly developed negroes, all but naked, took his place. Beneath
the light from the guttering lamps their brown-black skins gleamed like
bronzes in a museum. They approached each other on all fours, crouching,
circling, snarling, purring. This was the panther dance, an all too
realistic representation of the amorous relations of two great jungle
cats. Now the religious ecstasy which had provided a pretext for the
preceding performances was at an end; this was sheer animalism, frankly
obscene and wholly unashamed.
“I’ve had enough of this,” I said to my companion. “I think that I’ll go
back to the hotel and take a bath and try to feel clean again.”
We went out into the soft African night. As we strode northward through
the Rue Berthe toward the European quarter we could hear behind us
the clash of cymbals and the wail of reeds from the cafés where the
Ouled-Naïl were dancing, the throbbing of the negro drums. But from the
desert a clean and gentle wind was blowing, and the stars shone very
bright.