BISKRA AND THE DESERT BEYOND
_Biskra, tout le monde descend! ouf!_ It might be Jersey City or
Chicago; one experiences at last that sense of having reached a
journey's end. At least it will seem so to most who come to the desert's
edge by train from Constantine or Algiers, after two days of as rocky,
uncomfortable railway travelling as one can imagine in these progressive
days.
Biskra is commonly reputed the ideal of a desert oasis, but indeed as an
oasis it is no more delightful than that at El Kantara. Not every one
will find his "Garden of Allah" at Biskra. Biskra is by no means all
things to all men. Leaving out the silly sentiment, which has been
propagated by a school of writers who take themselves too seriously,
there is nothing at Biskra which is not better elsewhere.
It is truly, though, a typical desert oasis, and the town which has
grown up around it is but the natural outcome of trade following the
flag, for Biskra is the commercial and military gateway to the
Sud-Constantinois.
[Illustration: BISKRA
_Its Arab Villages_]
Biskra is not without its distinctive character. Its native life, its
market, and its Moorish coffee-house, are all typical; but in a way they
have become contaminated with the influx from the outside world and much
of their colour has paled.
One of the curses Biskra bestows upon the stranger within her gates is
that of an innumerable and importunate crew of guides,--of all colours
and shades, of all grades of intelligence, and of all degrees of
proficiency in French. The guides of Biskra wear turbans, coifs, and
fezes. They look as though they belonged to every Mohammedan tribe of
the universe. Those who wear bowler hats are harder to place; one rather
suspects that they are Jews.
"Get a guide to keep off the other guides," is the best advice one can
give the stranger to Biskra. What makes this state of affairs? Too much
exploitation, and too many lavish and foolish English and Americans. In
this respect Biskra is not as bad as Cairo, but it is getting that way.
Biskra's attractions for the visitor are many of them artificial. There
are the great hotels, with their "halls," "smoking-rooms,"
"reading-rooms," and "bars," and the incipient
[Illustration: _The Courtyard of the Hôtel des Ziban, Biskra_]
Casino with its music and "distractions;" and there is the Café Glacier
with its cool drinks at Paris prices. Everything at Biskra is good in
quality, but lacking character. One hotel stands out above all others
for excellence and distinctive features. It is the Hôtel des Ziban. It
has a distinctive clientèle, made up largely of personages such as the
officers of the garrison, a great Sheik or Caïd of a southern tribe, a
grim, taciturn individual with a dozen decorations on his breast, a
government official, a minister, perhaps, and so on. And of course
tourists as well, for tourists are everywhere at Biskra, even in the Rue
Sainte, where they ought not to be,--at least not after dark.
Biskra's chief tourist "sights," after the palm-tree oases of old Biskra
and the Jardin Landon, are the Moorish cafés, and the _naylettes_, or
Ouled-Naïl dancers, of the Rue Sainte. One need not affect this sort of
thing if he doesn't want to; but, aside from playing bridge in the hotel
parlours, or drinking beer in the Café Glacier and listing to "la
musique" of "les artistes Parisiennes," there is not much else to do at
night except doze in the hotel smoking-room or _salon_, with scores of
other fat old ladies and gentlemen.
The _café maure_ or Moorish coffee-shop of North Africa has no distinct
form of architecture. It may be a transformed shop in the European
quarter; the vestibule of a Moorish habitation, or of a mosque; a stone
or mud hut by the roadside overhung by a great waving banana plant or
palm; or it may be a striped lean-to tent. The interior fittings vary
also. In the towns the oven is built up of blue and yellow tiles, and
the pots and cups are kept on a great slab of marble or tile. By the
roadside there are the cups and a tin or copper pot; but the supplies
are invariably kept in an unsoldered five-gallon kerosene can. These
come out from Philadelphia by the hundreds of thousands, and find their
way to all the corners of the earth. The Japanese and the Chinese use
them to roof their huts with; the Singapore boatmen to carry their
water-supply; and the Arab as cooking utensils, and very useful they
are. They are a by-product and cost nothing, except to the Standard Oil
Company, the original shippers.
The Moorish cafés of Biskra are as typical of their class as any seen in
the towns, even though they are tourist "sights."
The whole establishment is gaudy and crude, with its plastered walls,
its rough, unpainted furnishings, its seats and benches all
smoke-coloured, as if they were centuries old,--though probably they are
not. In the rear, always in plain view, is the _oudjak_, the vaulted
oven or heater, where the thick, syrupy coffee is brewed and kept hot.
The chief notes of colour are the little wine-glasses, the cups, the
water-bottles, the tiled backgrounds, and the head-gear of the habitués,
and the parrot--always a parrot, in his crudely built cage. The
establishments of Biskra are typical _cafés maures_, and might well be
on the edge or middle of the desert itself, instead of in a very
Frenchified Algerian city of eight thousand inhabitants.
Here are congregated all that queer _mélange_ of North African peoples:
nomads and Arabs of the desert; half-bred, blue-eyed men of the coast;
the delicately featured Kabyles; Moroccans; some Spahis; a negro or two,
black as night; and even Makhazni from the interior, who are at home
wherever their horse and saddle may be. All these and more--the whole
gamut of the cosmopolitan population of the Mediterranean--are here.
In the Moorish cafés and the "Black Tents" alike, Makhazni and Spahis
play the Spanish "ronda" or dominoes with all the devotion of lovers of
sedentary amusements elsewhere.
The Spahi and the negro will play together all day and half the night,
shuffling the cards and juggling the dominoes, and only a savage grunt,
or cry, periodically breaks their silence. Their emotions are mostly
expressed by indeterminable, leery grins.
Night falls, and one street alone in Biskra retains the activities and
life of the daytime. It is the street of cafés, where, behind closed
doors, dance the Ouleds-Naïls for the delectation of the Arab, the
profit of the patron, and for the curious from overseas to speculate
upon.
The performance of the Moorish cafés of Biskra, Constantine, and Tunis
are amusing and instructive, if not edifying, no doubt. But those who
expect the conventional "musical evening" will be disappointed. Painted
sequin-bedecked women depend more upon their physical charms to appeal
to the Arab _bourgeoisie_ and the Zouaves, Spahis and Turcos, who mostly
make up their audiences, than to the rhythm of the accompanying
orchestra, which many a time is drowned out by the free and easy
uproar.
The music of the _indigènes_ may be soothing, but one must be an
_indigène_ to feel that way about it. There is nothing very soothing to
the Anglo-Saxon about the incessant beating of a tambourine, or the
prolonged shrill squeak of a reed pipe, the combination made hideous by
the persistent whining of the renegade desert Arab who "bosses the job,"
the only occupation at which he can work while sitting down and drinking
coffee for twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four. His profits must all
go for coffee. A hundred cups a day and as many more in a night does not
seem to jaundice his eye or dull his energies, such as they are. Coffee
and tobacco--of any old kind--will keep an Arab musician going, whereas
a Spaniard with a guitar, an Italian with a mandolin, or a German with a
trombone, would want some solid food and alcoholic refreshment as well.
From this one gathers that the Arab is temperate; and he is in most
things, except coffee, cigarettes, and music.
If one is a serious, thorough, vagabond traveller, and would study the
Ouled-Naïls and their histories, all well and good; there's something in
it. But if one goes to prowling around Biskra's Rue Sainte merely for
adventure, he is liable to get it, and of a costly kind, and he will
learn nothing about the Ouled-Naïls from an ethnological point of view.
The sentimental writers have drawn altogether too sentimental a picture
of this plague-spot. In truth the Ouled-Naïls are a race of girls and
women quite apart from those other Algerian tribes. They come to Biskra,
to Constantine, and to Algiers, and live the lives of other
free-and-easy women of the world. They dance in the Moorish cafés for
the delectation of Arabs, Turks, and strangers, and they carry on a
considerably less moral traffic as well, gaining _sous_, _francs_, and
_louis_ meanwhile. When she has enough golden sequins to link together
in a kind of a _cuirasse_, which hangs from her velvet brown neck down
over her chest in an amulet half a yard square, the Ouled-Naïl
_danseuse_ retires from business. She goes back to her tribe in the
southwest, becomes virtuous, makes some Arab sheep-herder or
camel-trader happy, and raises a family, the girls of which in time go
through the same proceedings. The game is an hereditary one, and it is
played desperately and, apparently, with less ill effects than one would
suppose. For the women are accredited as living moral lives ever
after,--once they get back to their homes. It is the contact with
civilization, or semicivilization, which does them harm.
The Casino at Biskra offers as one of its attractions the sight of these
dancing women of the Ouled-Naïls without the necessity of contaminating
oneself by going down into their quarter and seeing the real thing. The
contamination is just as great in the gilded halls of the Casino as in
some dingy, smoky _café maure_, but the local colour is wanting.
The excursions to be made from Biskra are not as many, nor so enjoyable,
as those from El Kantara. The round of Old Biskra and its villages is
readily made on foot or by carriages; and one may even continue farther
afield to the sandy, wavy dunes of the desert, and to the "Fontaine
Chaude," or to the Shrine of Sidi-Okba, twenty kilometres out over the
camel trail of the open desert. This excursion to Sidi-Okba is classic.
Sidi-Okba sits in the midst of a fine oasis of some seventy thousand
date-growing palms. It is a miserable, unlovely enough little village,
but the memory of the Arab conqueror, Okba-ben-Nofi, has made it famous.
"You will find nothing to eat at Sidi-Okba," say the guide-books. "You
must carry your provisions." It all depends on what you want to eat. If
it is simple refreshment only, you will find it here at Sidi-Okba--the
tomb of the founder of Kairouan--in a veritable _guinguette_ such as one
sees in suburban Paris, with arbours, trellised vines, and glittering
coloured balls of glass suspended from the trees. It is a little bit of
transplanted France, dull, tawdry, and uninteresting enough. But still,
there it is,--a café-restaurant sitting tight in a little Arab village,
before the tomb of the great Sidi-Okba, which attracts pilgrims all
through the year from among the Mussulman population of all North
Africa. The mosque, where repose the sainted man's remains, is the most
ancient monument of Islam in Algeria.
The tomb, the mosque, the Medersa, or Arab school, and the
afore-mentioned _guinguette_, are all there are at Sidi-Okba; but it
should be omitted from no man's, or woman's, itinerary in these parts.
Back again over the same route one gains Biskra after a hard day's round
_en voiture_, or on the back of a donkey, or a mulet, as he chooses. The
only things you see _en route_ are an occasional solitary _gourbi_; a
mud hut or two; or perhaps a simple tomb or _kouba_ rising away in the
distance,--a white silhouette against a background of yellow sand and
blue sky.
These little punctuating notes dot the landscape all through Tunisia and
Algeria. Frequently you will find scattered about the _kouba_ numerous
detached tombs, still distinguishable, though half buried in the sand.
These detached shrines and cemeteries, often half submerged in great
waves of sand, are met with on the outskirts of nearly all Algerian
towns and cities; and one is no more surprised at coming upon one beside
the road than he is at the sight of a kilometre stone.
Southwest from Biskra is the region of the Ziban, a zone of steppes,
planted here and there with verdant oases.
Topographically the features of the Ziban are mountainous, though ranges
of the Zab slope and taper off imperceptibly into the dunes of the
desert.
The inhabitants of the Ziban are of a race differing considerably from
the Kabyle and the Arab, favouring the former more than the latter. The
plaited hair of the women, their general barbaric love of jewelry and
personal adornment, their complexion, their chains, bracelets, and
collarettes all point to the fact that they are an immigrant race, the
development of a stock originally brought from afar, and not descended
from the desert nomad.
Throughout Algeria the nomad Arab is he who comes from the Sahara and
its closer confines during the summer, returning with his herds in the
winter to the desert, or to the great tents of his father's tribe. The
Arab peasant, or labourer, is a native of the Tell region, and is
manifestly not of the same purity of type as the desert Arab who speaks
the pure idiom of the Koran. The Kabyle is another race apart. The
distinctive characteristics of the three peoples are easily recognized
when you are once familiar with them.
Bordering upon the Monts du Zab (the Ziban) are the Monts des
Ouled-Naïls, the home of the curiously distinct tribe before mentioned,
who are more like degenerate Kabyles than they are like the desert Arab
tribes.
Still farther in the southwest is a sad, gloomy land, half desert and
half mountain, not wholly Saharan, and yet not wholly Algerian, either
in topographical characteristics or in the characteristics of its
people. It is the region of the M'zabs, wild savage children of
an uncivilized land, fanatically religious and veritable
_débauchés_,--which the Berber tribes are not. Their houses are poor,
but their purses are well lined, and, since France has taken over
Algeria, they are also French, though they might be Martians for all
they resemble the French.
"It takes five Arabs to get the best of an Algerian Jew," says a proverb
of the Sud, "and five Jews to master a M'zabite." In origin the people
are supposed to be a mixture of the ancient Phoenicians and Numidians.
Members of the tribe swarm all over Algeria, and are found even in
Marseilles, as ambulant merchants, but they invariably return to their
native land, for, it seems, it is a tenet of their religion not to
remain away more than two years.
Among them are four orthodox sects of Mussulmans, and still another
peculiar to themselves, whose chief characteristic seems to consist of
interminable praying; whereas the conventional Mohammedan is contented
with exhorting his God five times a day.
Their towns rank as veritable holy cities in their creed, with Ghardaïa
as the capital. The satellite _villes saintes_ are Melika, Ben-Izguen,
Bou Noura, El Ateuf, Beryan, and Guerrara. In all their population
numbers between thirty and forty thousand.
The general aspect of the land is one of melancholy, because of the
numbers of their burial-grounds, three or four surrounding each town.
The cemeteries are "places of prayer" with the M'zabites, and their
population of weeping, wailing, praying faithful is always numerically
greater than the dead. When the M'zabite is not selling something he is
praying.
Quite the most varied ethnographic and topographic changes to be
observed in North Africa are those south of Biskra, within the limits of
El Kantara on the north and Oued-Souf in the south.
The religious tribes and sects are numerous, each having its own
supplementary creeds and customs; the Ziban differing from those of the
Ramaya, the Zogga, the Sidi-Okba, and the Oued B'hir. Still other oases
passed _en route_ have their _zaouyas_ or brotherhoods of professing
coreligionists, not differing greatly from each other in general
principles, but still possessed of variants as wide apart as the
Methodists and Universalists of the Christian world.
Throughout all this region the marabouts, or holy men, are most
hospitable, and are as appreciative of little attentions--gifts of
chocolate, of candles, or even matches--as could possibly be imagined.
In many cases they are veritable hermits, whose only intercourse with
the outside world is with passing strangers,--who are few.