"You see," said Captain Morhange to me fifteen days later, "you are
much better informed about the ancient routes through the Sahara than
you have been willing to let me suppose, since you know of the
existence of the two Tadekkas. But the one of which you have just
spoken is the Tadekka of Ibn-Batoutah, located by this historian
seventy days from Touat, and placed by Schirmer, very plausibly, in
the unexplored territory of the Aouelimmiden. This is the Tadekka by
which the Sonrhaï caravans passed every year, travelling by Egypt.
"My Tadekka is different, the capital of the veiled people, placed by
Ibn-Khaldoun twenty days south of Wargla, which he calls Tadmekka. It
is towards this Tadmekka that I am headed. I must establish Tadmekka
in the ruins of Es-Souk. The commercial trade route, which in the
ninth century bound the Tunisian Djerid to the bend the Niger makes at
Bourroum, passed by Es-Souk. It is to study the possibility of
reestablishing this ancient thoroughfare that the Ministries gave me
this mission, which has given me the pleasure of your companionship."
"You are probably in for a disappointment," I said. "Everything
indicates that the commerce there is very slight."
"Well, I shall see," he answered composedly.
This was while we were following the unicolored banks of a salt lake.
The great saline stretch shone pale-blue, under the rising sun. The
legs of our five mehara cast on it their moving shadows of a darker
blue. For a moment the only inhabitant of these solitudes, a bird, a
kind of indeterminate heron, rose and hung in the air, as if
suspended from a thread, only to sink back to rest as soon as we had
passed.
I led the way, selecting the route, Morhange followed. Enveloped in a
bernous, his head covered with the straight _chechia_ of the Spahis, a
great chaplet of alternate red and white beads, ending in a cross,
around his neck, he realized perfectly the ideal of Father Lavigerie's
White Fathers.
After a two-days' halt at Temassinin we had just left the road
followed by Flatters, and taken an oblique course to the south. I have
the honor of having antedated Fourcau in demonstrating the importance
of Temassinin as a geometrical point for the passage of caravans, and
of selecting the place where Captain Pein has just now constructed a
fort. The junction for the roads that lead to Touat from Fezzan and
Tibesti, Temassinin is the future seat of a marvellous Intelligence
Department. What I had collected there in two days about the
disposition of our Senoussis enemies was of importance. I noticed that
Morhange let me proceed with my inquiries with complete indifference.
These two days he had passed in conversation with the old Negro
guardian of the turbet, which preserves, under its plaster dome, the
remains of the venerated Sidi-Moussa. The confidences they exchanged,
I am sorry to say that I have forgotten. But from the Negro's amazed
admiration, I realized the ignorance in which I stood to the mysteries
of the desert, and how familiar they were to my companion.
And if you want to get any idea of the extraordinary originality which
Morhange introduced into such surroundings, you who, after all, have a
certain familiarity with the tropics, listen to this. It was exactly
two hundred kilometers from here, in the vicinity of the Great Dune,
in that horrible stretch of six days without water. We had just enough
for two days before reaching the next well, and you know these wells;
as Flatters wrote to his wife, "you have to work for hours before you
can clean them out and succeed in watering beasts and men." By chance
we met a caravan there, which was going east towards Rhadamès, and had
come too far north. The camels' humps, shrunken and shaking, bespoke
the sufferings of the troop. Behind came a little gray ass, a pitiful
burrow, interfering at every step, and lightened of its pack because
the merchants knew that it was going to die. Instinctively, with its
last strength, it followed, knowing that when it could stagger no
longer, the end would come and the flutter of the bald vultures'
wings. I love animals, which I have solid reasons for preferring to
men. But never should I have thought of doing what Morhange did then.
I tell you that our water skins were almost dry, and that our own
camels, without which one is lost in the empty desert, had not been
watered for many hours. Morhange made his kneel, uncocked a skin, and
made the little ass drink. I certainly felt gratification at seeing
the poor bare flanks of the miserable beast pant with satisfaction. But
the responsibility was mine. Also I had seen Bou-Djema's aghast
expression, and the disapproval of the thirsty members of the caravan.
I remarked on it. How it was received! "What have I given," replied
Morhange, "was my own. We will reach El-Biodh to-morrow evening, about
six o'clock. Between here and there I know that I shall not be
thirsty." And that in a tone, in which for the first time he allowed
the authority of a Captain to speak. "That is easy to say," I thought,
ill-humoredly. "He knows that when he wants them, my water-skin, and
Bou-Djema's, are at his service." But I did not yet know Morhange very
well, and it is true that until the evening of the next day when we
reached El-Biodh, refusing our offers with smiling determination, he
drank nothing.
Shades of St. Francis of Assisi! Umbrian hills, so pure under the
rising sun! It was in the light of a like sunrise, by the border of a
pale stream leaping in full cascades from a crescent-shaped niche of
the gray rocks of Egere, that Morhange stopped. The unlooked for
waters rolled upon the sand, and we saw, in the light which mirrored
them, little black fish. Fish in the middle of the Sahara! All three
of us were mute before this paradox of Nature. One of them had strayed
into a little channel of sand. He had to stay there, struggling in
vain, his little white belly exposed to the air.... Morhange picked
him up, looked at him for a moment, and put him back into the little
stream. Shades of St. Francis. Umbrian hills.... But I have sworn not
to break the thread of the story by these untimely digressions.
* * * * *
"You see," Captain Morhange said to me a week later, "that I was right
in advising you to go farther south before making for Shikh-Salah.
Something told me that this highland of Egere was not interesting from
your point of view. While here you have only to stoop to pick up
pebbles which will allow you to establish the volcanic origin of this
region much more certainly than Bou-Derba, des Cloizeaux, and Doctor
Marrés have done."
This was while we were following the western pass of the Tidifest
Mountains, about the 25th degree of northern latitude.
"I should indeed be ungrateful not to thank you," I said.
I shall always remember that instant. We had left our camels and were
collecting fragments of the most characteristic rocks. Morhange
employed himself with a discernment which spoke worlds for his
knowledge of geology, a science he had often professed complete
ignorance of.
Then I asked him the following question:
"May I prove my gratitude by making you a confession?"
He raised his head and looked at me.
"Well then, I don't see the practical value of this trip you have
undertaken."
He smiled.
"Why not? To explore the old caravan route, to demonstrate that a
connection has existed from the most ancient times between the
Mediterranean world, and the country of the Blacks, that seems nothing
in your eyes? The hope of settling once for all the secular disputes
which have divided so many keen minds; d'Anville, Heeren, Berlioux,
Quatremere on the one hand,--on the other Gosselin, Walckenaer,
Tissit, Vivien, de saint-Martin; you think that that is devoid of
interest? A plague upon you for being hard to please."
"I spoke of practical value," I said. "You won't deny that this
controversy is only the affair of cabinet geographers and office
explorers."
Morhange kept on smiling.
"Dear friend, don't wither me. Deign to recall that your mission was
confided to you by the Ministry of War, while I hold mine on behalf of
the Ministry of Public Instruction. A different origin justifies our
different aims. It certainly explains, I readily concede that to you,
why what I am in search of has no practical value."
"You are also authorized by the Ministry of Commerce," I replied,
playing my next card. "By this chief you are instructed to study the
possibility of restoring the old trade route of the ninth century. But
on this point don't attempt to mislead me; with your knowledge of the
history and geography of the Sahara, your mind must have been made up
before you left Paris. The road from Djerid to the Niger is dead,
stone dead. You knew that no important traffic would pass by this
route before you undertook to study the possibility of restoring it."
Morhange looked me full in the face.
"And if that should be so," he said with the most charming attitude,
"if I had before leaving the conviction you say, what do you conclude
from that?"
"I should prefer to have you tell me."
"Simply, my dear boy, that I had less skill than you in finding the
pretext for my voyage, that I furnished less good reasons for the true
motives that brought me here."
"A pretext? I don't see...."
"Be sincere in your turn, if you please. I am sure that you have the
greatest desire to inform the Arabian Office about the practices of
the Senoussis. But admit that the information that you will obtain is
not the sole and innermost aim of your excursion. You are a geologist,
my friend. You have found a chance to gratify your taste in this trip.
No one would think of blaming you because you have known how to
reconcile what is useful to your country and agreeable to yourself.
But, for the love of God, don't deny it; I need no other proof than
your presence here on this side of the Tidifest, a very curious place
from a mineralogical point of view, but some hundred and fifty
kilometers south of your official route."
It was not possible to have countered me with a better grace. I
parried by attacking.
"Am I to conclude from all this that I do not know the real aims of
your trip, and that they have nothing to do with the official
motives?"
I had gone a bit too far. I felt it from the seriousness with which
Morhange's reply was delivered.
"No, my dear friend, you must not conclude just that. I should have no
taste for a lie which was based on fraud towards the estimable
constitutional bodies which have judged me worthy of their confidence
and their support. The ends that they have assigned to me I shall do
my best to attain. But I have no reason for hiding from you that there
is another, quite personal, which is far nearer to my heart. Let us
say, if you will, to use a terminology that is otherwise deplorable,
that this is the end while the others are the means."
"Would there be any indiscretion?...."
"None," replied my companion. "Shikh-Salah is only a few days distant.
He whose first steps you have guided with such solicitude in the
desert should have nothing hidden from you."
We had halted in the valley of a little dry well where a few sickly
plants were growing. A spring near by was circled by a crown of gray
verdure. The camels had been unsaddled for the night, and were seeking
vainly, at every stride, to nibble the spiny tufts of _had_. The black
and polished sides of the Tidifest Mountains rose, almost vertically,
above our heads. Already the blue smoke of the fire on which Bou-Djema
was cooking dinner rose through the motionless air.
Not a sound, not a breath. The smoke mounted straight, straight and
slowly up the pale steps of the firmament.
"Have you ever heard of the _Atlas of Christianity_?" asked Morhange.
"I think so. Isn't it a geographical work published by the
Benedictines under the direction of a certain Dom Granger?"
"Your memory is correct," said Morhange. "Even so let me explain a
little more fully some of the things you have not had as much reason
as I to interest yourself in. The _Atlas of Christianity_ proposes to
establish the boundaries of that great tide of Christianity through
all the ages, and for all parts of the globe. An undertaking worthy of
the Benedictine learning, worthy of such a prodigy of erudition as
Dom Granger himself."
"And it is these boundaries that you have come to determine here, no
doubt," I murmured.
"Just so," replied my companion.
He was silent, and I respected his silence, prepared by now to be
astonished at nothing.
"It is not possible to give confidences by halves, without being
ridiculous," he continued after several minutes of meditation,
speaking gravely, in a voice which held no suggestion of that flashing
humor which had a month before enchanted the young officers at Wargla.
"I have begun on mine. I will tell you everything. Trust my
discretion, however, and do not insist upon certain events of my
private life. If, four years ago, at the close of these events, I
resolve to enter a monastery, it does not concern you to know my
reasons. I can marvel at it myself, that the passage in my life of a
being absolutely devoid of interest should have sufficed to change the
current of that life. I can marvel that a creature whose sole merit
was her beauty should have been permitted by the Creator to swing my
destiny to such an unforeseen direction. The monastery at whose doors
I knocked had the most valid reasons for doubting the stability of my
vocation. What the world loses in such fashion it often calls back as
readily. In short, I cannot blame the Father Abbot for having
forbidden me to apply for my army discharge. By his instructions, I
asked for, and obtained, permission to be placed on the inactive list
for three years. At the end of those three years of consecration it
would be seen whether the world was definitely dead to your servant.
"The first day of my arrival at the cloister I was assigned to Dom
Granger, and placed by him at work on the _Atlas of Christianity_. A
brief examination decided him as to what kind of service I was best
fitted to render. This is how I came to enter the studio devoted to
the cartography of Northern Africa. I did not know one word of Arabic,
but it happened that in garrison at Lyon I had taken at the _Faculté
des Lettres,_ a course with Berlioux,--a very erudite geographer no
doubt, but obsessed by one idea, the influence the Greek and Roman
civilizations had exercised on Africa. This detail of my life was
enough for Dom Granger. He provided me straightway with Berber
vocabularies by Venture, by Delaporte, by Brosselard; with the
_Grammatical Sketch of the Temahaq_ by Stanley Fleeman, and the _Essai
de Grammaire de la langue Temachek_ by Major Hanoteau. At the end of
three months I was able to decipher any inscriptions in Tifinar. You
know that Tifinar is the national writing of the Tuareg, the
expression of this Temachek language which seems to us the most
curious protest of the Targui race against its Mohammedan enemies.
"Dom Granger, in fact, believed that the Tuareg are Christians, dating
from a period which it was necessary to ascertain, but which coincided
no doubt with the splendor of the church of Hippon. Even better than
I, you know that the cross is with them the symbol of fate in
decoration. Duveyrier has claimed that it figures in their alphabet,
on their arms, among the designs of their clothes. The only tattooing
that they wear on the forehead, on the back of the hand, is a cross
with four equal branches; the pummels of their saddles, the handles of
their sabres, of their poignards, are cross-shaped. And is it
necessary to remind you that, although Islam forbids bells as a sign
of Christianity, the harness of Tuareg camels are trimmed with bells?
"Neither Dom Granger nor I attach an exaggerated importance to such
proofs, which resemble too much those which make such a display in the
_Genius of Christianity._ But it is indeed impossible to refuse all
credence to certain theological arguments. Amanai, the God of the
Tuareg, unquestionably the Adonai of the Bible, is unique. They have a
hell, 'Timsi-tan-elekhaft,' the last fire, where reigns Iblis, our
Lucifer. Their Paradise, where they are rewarded for good deeds, is
inhabited by 'andjelousen,' our angels. And do not urge the
resemblance of this theology to the Koran, for I will meet you with
historic arguments and remind you that the Tuareg have struggled all
through the ages at the cost of partial extermination, to maintain
their faith against the encroachments of Mohammedan fanaticism.
"Many times I have studied with Dom Granger that formidable epoch when
the aborigines opposed the conquering Arabs. With him I have seen how
the army of Sidi-Okba, one of the companions of the Prophet, invaded
this desert to reduce the Tuareg tribes and impose on them Mussulman
rules. These tribes were then rich and prosperous. They were the
Ihbggaren, the Imededren, the Ouadelen, the Kel-Gueress, the Kel-Air.
But internal quarrels sapped their strength. Still, it was not until
after a long and cruel war that the Arabians succeeded in getting
possession of the capital of the Berbers, which had proved such a
redoubtable stronghold. They destroyed it after they had massacred the
inhabitants. On the ruins Okba constructed a new city. This city is
Es-Souk. The one that Sidi-Okba destroyed was the Berber Tadmekka.
What Dom Granger asked of me was precisely that I should try to exhume
from the ruins of the Mussulman Es-Souk the ruins of Tadmekka, which
was Berber, and perhaps Christian."
"I understand," I murmured.
"So far, so good," said Morhange. "But what you must grasp now is the
practical sense of these religious men, my masters. You remember that,
even after three years of monastic life, they preserved their doubts
as to the stability of my vocation. They found at the same time means
of testing it once for all, and of adapting official facilities to
their particular purposes. One morning I was called before the Father
Abbot, and this is what he said to me, in the presence of Dom Granger,
who expressed silent approval.
"'Your term of inactive service expires in fifteen days. You will
return to Paris, and apply at the Ministry to be reinstated. With what
you have learned here, and the relationships we have been able to
maintain at Headquarters, you will have no difficulty in being
attached to the Geographical Staff of the army. When you reach the rue
de Grenelle you will receive our instructions.'
"I was astonished at their confidence in my knowledge. When I was
reestablished as Captain again in the Geographical Service I
understood. At the monastery, the daily association with Dom Granger
and his pupils had kept me constantly convinced of the inferiority of
my knowledge. When I came in contact with my military brethren I
realized the superiority of the instruction I had received. I did not
have to concern myself with the details of my mission. The Ministries
invited me to undertake it. My initiative asserted itself on only one
occasion. When I learned that you were going to leave Wargla on the
present expedition, having reason to distrust my practical
qualifications as an explorer, I did my best to retard your departure,
so that I might join you. I hope that you have forgiven me by now."
* * * * *
The light in the west was fading, where the sun had already sunk into
a matchless luxury of violet draperies. We were alone in this
immensity, at the feet of the rigid black rocks. Nothing but
ourselves. Nothing, nothing but ourselves.