_I.--Arabia Deserta_
Pierre Loti, whose real name is Louis Marie Julien Viaud,
and who has made his whole career in the French navy, was
born at Rochefort on January 14, 1850. Distinguished
though his naval activities have been, it is as a man of
letters that Pierre Loti is known to the world. His first
production, "Aziyade," appeared in 1876, and gave ample
promise of that style, borrowed from no one and entirely
his own, which has since characterized all his works. "The
Desert," published in 1894, is a masterpiece of a
peculiarly modern kind. Loti leaves to other writers the
task of depicting the Bedouin. The spectacle of nature in
her wildest and severest mood was what he went out to see;
and he employs all the resources of his incomparable
genius for description in painting the vacant immensity of
the Arabian wilderness. Tired and distracted by the whirl
and fever of life in Paris, Loti set out, like Tancred, in
Beaconsfield's romance on a pilgrimage from Sinai to
Calvary to recover the faith he had lost in civilisation.
_February 22, 1894._ All about us was the empty infinitude; the twilight
desert swept by a great cold wind; the desert that rolled, in dull, dead
colours, under a still more sombre sky which, on the circular horizon,
seemed to fall on it and crush it.
Sitting under the palm-tree of the Oasis of Moses, half an hour's march
from the Red Sea, surrounded by our camels and camel-men, we stared at
the desert, and the emotion and the ecstasy of solitude came over us. We
longed to plunge headlong into the dim, luring immensity, to run with
the wind blowing over the desolate dunes. So we ran, and reaching the
heights, we looked down on a larger wilderness, over which trailed a
dying gleam of daylight, fallen from the yellow sky through a rent made
by the wind in the cloudy veil. But so sinister was the desert in the
winter wind, that from some remote, ancestral source of feeling a
strange melancholy welled up and mingled with our desire for the
solitude. In it was the instinctive fear which makes the sheep and
cattle of the green lands retrace their steps at the sight of regions
over which hangs the shadow of death.
But under our tent, lighted and sheltered from the wind, we recovered
our gaiety of mood. There was the novelty of our first meal in the
desert to excite us, and the pleasure of packing up our ridiculous
European costumes, and dressing ourselves in the more useful and far
more decorative burnous and veils of the sheiks of Arabia.
All the next three days we travelled through a waterless waste,
following a vague trace which, in the course of ages, men and beasts
have made in the dry sand. Far in front the sky-line danced in the heat.
The sand around was strewn with greyish stones; everything was grey,
grey-red or grey-yellow. Here and there was a plant of a pale green,
with an imperceptible flower, and the long necks of the camels bent and
stretched trying to crop it.
Little by little one's mind grows drowsy, lulled by the monotony of the
slow, swinging movement of the tall, indefatigable camel. In the
foreground of the grey scene, one's sleepy, lowered eyes see at last
nothing but the continual undulation of its neck, of the same
grey-yellow as the sand, and the back of its shaggy head, similar to the
little head of a lion, encircled with a barbaric ornament of white
shells and blue pearls, with hangings of black wool.
As we go on, the last signs of life disappear. There is not a bird, not
an insect; even the flies which exist in all the lands of the earth are
not found. While the deserts of the sea contain vital wealth in
profusion, here are sterility and death. Yet one is intoxicated with
the stillness and lifelessness of it all, and the air is pure and
virginal, blowing from the world before the creation.
The wind drops, and in an atmosphere of an absolute purity the sun
mounts and burns with a white fire. Under the dazzling light, one shuts
one's eyes in spite of oneself for long periods. When one opens them,
the horizon seems a black circle breaking on the brightness of the
heavens, while the precise spot in which one is remains astonishingly
white. Nothing sings, nothing flies, nothing stirs. The immense silence
is dully broken only by the incessant, monotonous tread of our slow,
swinging camels.
On the fourth day we leave the plain and strike into the mountainous
solitudes of the Sinai peninsula.... As we ascend, vast new tracts are
unrolled on all sides beneath our eyes, and the impression of the desert
becomes more distressing by reason of this visible affirmation of its
illimitableness. It is terrifying in its magnificence! The limpidity of
the air gives an extraordinary depth to the perspectives, and in the
clear and far-receding distances the chains of mountains are interlaced
and overlaid in regular forms which, from the beginning of the world,
have been untouched by the hand of man, and with hard, dry contours
which no vegetation has ever softened or changed. In the foreground they
are of a reddish brown; then in their flight to the sky-line they pass
into a wonderful tone of violet, which grows bluer and bluer until it
melts into the pure indigo of the extreme distance. And all this is
empty, silent, and dead. It is the splendour of an invariable region,
from which is absent the ephemeral beauty of forest, verdure, or
herbage; the splendour of eternal matter, affranchised from all the
instability of life; the geological splendour of the world before the
creation.
Oh, the sunset this evening! Never have we seen so much gold poured out
for us alone around our lonely camp. Our camels, wandering beyond our
tents, and strangely enlarged against the vacant horizon, have gold on
their heads, on their legs, on their long necks; they are all edged with
gold.
And then night comes, the limpid night with its stillness. If at this
moment one goes away from the camp and loses sight of it, or even
separates oneself from the little handful of living creatures strayed in
the midst of dead space, in order to feel more absolutely alone in the
nocturnal vacancy, one has an impression of terror in which there is
something religious. Less distant, less inaccessible than elsewhere, the
stars blaze in the depths of the cosmic abysses; and in this desert,
unchangeable and untouched by time, from which one looks at them, one
feels oneself nearer to conceiving their inconceivable infinity; one has
almost the illusion of sharing in their starry duration, their starry
impassibility.
_II.--The Habitation of Solitude_
_March 1._ After climbing two days in snow, thunder, and tempest, we see
at last, amid the dim, cloudy peaks of granite, the tall ramparts and
the cypress trees of the convent of Sinai. Alas! how silent, sinister,
and chill appears the holy mountain, whose name alone still flames for
us in the distance. It is as empty as the sky above our heads.
Trembling with the cold in our thin, wet burnous, we alight from our
camels, that suffer and complain, disquieted by the white obscurity, the
lashing wind, the strange, wild altitude. For twenty minutes we clamber
by lantern light among blocks and falls of granite, with bare feet that
slip at every step on the snow. Then we reach a gigantic wall, the
summit of which is lost in darkness, and a little low door, covered with
iron, opens. We pass in. Two more doors of a smaller kind lead through a
vaulted tunnel in the rampart. They close behind us with the clang of
armour, and we creep up some flights of rough, broken stairs, hewed out
of the rock, to a hostel for pilgrims at the top of the great fortress.
Some hospitable monks in black robes, and with long hair like women,
hasten to cheer us with a little hot coffee and a little lighted
charcoal, carried in a copper vase. Everything has an air of nonchalant
wretchedness and Oriental dilapidation in this convent built by the
Emperor Justinian fourteen centuries ago. Our bare, whitewashed bedrooms
are like the humblest of Turkish dwellings, save for the modest icon
above the divan, with a night-light burning before it. The little
chamber is covered with the names of pilgrims gathered from the ends of
the earth; Russian, Arabian, and Greek inscriptions predominate.
Aroused by a jet of clear sunlight, and surprised by the strangeness of
the place, I ran to the balcony; there I still marvelled to find the
fantastic things seen by glimpses last night, standing real and
curiously distinct in the implacable white light, but arranged in an
unreal way, as if inset into each other without perspective, so pure is
the atmosphere--and all silent, silent as if they were dead of their
extreme old age. A Byzantine church, a mosque, cots, cloisters, an
entanglement of stairways, galleries, and arches falling to the
precipices below: all this in miniature; built up in a tiny space; all
this encompassed with formidable ramparts, and hooked on to the flanks
of gigantic Sinai! From the sharpness and thinness of the air, we know
that we are at an excessive height, and yet we seem to be at the bottom
of a well. On every side the extreme peaks of Sinai enclose us, as they
mount and scale the sky; their titanic walls, all of blood-red granite
without stain or shadow, are so vertical and so high that they dizzy and
appal. Only a fragment of the sky is visible, but its blueness is of a
profound transparency, and the sun is magnificent. And still the same
eerie silence envelops the phantom-like monastery, whose antiquity is
accentuated under the cold, dazzling sunlight and the sparkling snow.
One feels that it is verily "the habitation of solitude," encompassed by
the great wildernesses.
Its situation has preserved it from the revolutions, the wars, and the
changing fashions of the world. Almost everything remains just as it was
built in 550 by Justinian. And when one of the long-haired monks shows
us the marvellous treasures of the basilica--a dim, richly barbaric
structure, filled with priceless offerings from the ancient kings of the
earth--we no longer wonder at the enormous height and thickness of the
ramparts which protect the convent from the Bedouins.
Behind the tabernacle of the basilica is the holy place of Sinai--the
crypt of the "Burning Bush." It is a sombre cavern lined with antique
tiles of a dim blue-green, which are hidden under the icons of gold and
precious stone attached to the walls, and under the profusion of gold
and silver lamps hanging from the low roof. Rigid saints in vermilion
robes, whose faces are concealed in the dark shadow of their barbaric
glistening crowns, looked at us as we entered. We stepped in reverently,
on bare feet, and never, in any place, did we have so entire an
impression of a recoil into the long past ages of the world.
Peoples and empires have passed away, while these precious things slowly
tarnished in this dim crypt. Even the monk who accompanies us resembles,
with his long red hair falling over his shoulders, and the pale beauty
of his ascetic face, the mystics of the early ages; and his thoughts are
infinitely removed from ours. And the vague reflection of sunlight which
arrives through a single, little window in the thick wall, and falls in
a circle of ghostly radiance on the icons and mosaics, seems to be some
gleam from an ancient day, some gleam from an age far different from the
sordid, impious century in which we live.
A kind of lodge, paved with chiselled silver, and hung with lighted
lamps, rises in the depth of the crypt; it is there that, according to
the venerated tradition, the _Angel of the Eternal_ appeared to Moses in
the midst of the burning bush.
_III.--Where Nothing Changes_
_March 16._ We have now left the blue lonely waters and the red granite
cliffs of the Gulf of Akaba, and entered the great desert of Tih, the
solitudes of which, our camel-men say, are as immense and as flat as the
sea, and the scene of incessant mirages. It is peopled by a few tribes
of savage Bedouins, descended from the Amalekites. This is the land in
which nothing changes: the true Orient, immutable in its dust and its
dreams. Behind the barren hill on which we have camped, Arabia Deserta
unrolls the infinite tract of its red desolation. On our right is the
wild wilderness of Petra and the sinister mountains of the land of Edom.
In front stretches the gloomier waste of the plateau of Tih.
From the spot on which we stand, light tracks, made by the regular
movement of caravans, run out into the distance, innumerable as the
threads in a weaver's loom. They form two rays: one dies away into the
west, the other into the north. The first is the route of the believers
coming from Egypt and Morocco; the second, which we are about to follow,
is the path of the pilgrims from Syria to Palestine. This wild crossway
of the desert, along which pass every year crowds of twenty or thirty
thousand men marching to the holy city of Mecca, is now empty,
infinitely empty, and the mournful, vacant grandeur which it wears under
the sombre sky is terrible. The habitual halting-place of multitudes, it
is strewn with tombstones, little rough, unhewn blocks, one at the head,
the other at the feet--places in which the pious pilgrims who passed by
have laid down to rest for eternity.
Our dromedaries, excited by the wide, open space in front of them, raise
their heads and scent the wind, and then change their languid gait into
something that becomes almost a race. It is of a mud-grey colour, this
desert that calls to them, and as even as a lawn. As far as the eye can
reach, no change is seen in it, and it is gloomy under a still gloomier
sky. It has almost the shimmer of something humid, but its immense
surface is all made of dry mud, broken and marked like crackled
porcelain.
The next day the colour of the wilderness changes from muddy grey to
deep black, and the sun soared up, white-hot, in a clear blue sky. The
empty, level distances trembled in the heat, and seemed to be preparing
for all sorts of visions and mirages.
"Gazal! Gazal!" (gazelles) cried the sheik. They were passing in an
opposite course to ours, like a whirl of sand, little creatures
slenderly fine, little creatures timid and quick in flight. But the
moving, troubled air altered their images and juggled them away from our
defeated eyes.
Then the first phantom lake appeared, and deceived even the Bedouin
chief--the water was so blue, and the shadows of a border of palm-trees
seemed to be reflected in it. And very soon the tempting waters show on
all sides, retreating before us, changing their shapes, spreading out,
going away, coming back; large lakes or winding rivers or little ponds
edged with imaginary reeds. Every minute they increase, and it seems
like a sea which little by little gains on us--a disquieting sea that
trembles. But at noon all this blue phantasmagoria vanishes abruptly, as
if it were blown away at a breath. There is nothing but dried sands.
Clear, real, implacable, reappears the land of thirst and death.
_Easter Sunday, March 25, 1894._ We were awakened this morning by the
singing of the larks. After travelling for three hours, look, here are
some trees--the first we have seen--a long valley full of trees; and
there, on the far sky-line, is the blue edge of the sea. And at last
Gaza, with its white minarets and grey houses; Gaza, in the midst of its
gardens and its woods; Gaza, that seems a sumptuous city to us poor
wanderers of the desert!
The moon is high. It is the hour that our Bedouins depart. Seated on
their tall swinging beasts, the sheiks go by, and wave to us a friendly
farewell. They are returning to the terrible land where they were born
and where they love to live, and their departure brings to an end our
dream of the desert. To-morrow, at break of day, we shall ascend towards
Jerusalem.