them, so violently do they impress him with the negation of time. It is
said that in certain abnormal moods things infinitely great and
infinitely little are present together in the mind: that vast spaces of
the imagination and minute contacts of the finger-tips are each figured
in the brain, the one not driving out the other. In such moods (it is
said) proportion and reality grow faint, and the unity and poise of our
limited human powers are in peril. Into such a mood is a man thrown by
Timgad, and especially by these two pillars of white stone. They proceed
so plainly from the high conceptions of man: so much were their
sculptors what we are in every western character: so fully do they
satisfy us: so recent and clean is the mark of the tool upon them that
they fill a man with society and leave him ready to meet at once a
living city full of his fellows. It only needs a spoken word or the
clack of a sandal to be back into the moment when all these things were
alive. And meanwhile, with that impression overpowering one’s sense,
there, physically present, is a desolation so complete that measure
fails it. No oxen moving: no smoke: no roof among the rare trees of the
horizon: no gleam of water and no sound. It is as though not certain
centuries but an incalculable space of days coexisted with the present,
and as though, for one eternal moment, a vision of the absolute in which
time is not were permitted—for no good—to the yet embodied soul.
[Sidenote: The Stranger]
I do not know what was the hour in which I turned and left this sight,
and leaving by the southern gate made for the mountain range of Aurès.
But it was yet early afternoon, and the track had risen but little into
the hills when I saw, some little way off, seated upon a great squared
stone which had lain there since the departure of our people, a man of a
kind I had not met in Africa before.
By his dress he was rather a colonist than a native, for he wore no
turban—indeed his head was bare; but his long cloak was cut in an
unusual shape, covering him almost entirely; it was dark and made of
some stuff that had certainly not been woven in a modern loom. He
saluted me as I came.
When I approached him and saluted him in return, his face could be seen
inspired with a peculiar power, which, at a distance, his attitude alone
had discovered. It was not easy to be sure whether its lines were drawn
from Italy or from those rare exceptions wherein the east seems
sometimes to surpass our own race in force and dignity. His forehead was
low and very broad, his hair short, crisp, strong, and of the colour of
steel; his lips, which were thin and controlled, had in their firm
outline something of a high sadness, and his whole features recalled
those which tradition gives to the makers and destroyers of religions.
But it was his eyes that gave him so singular and (as I can still
believe though the adventure is now long past) so magical an influence.
These were in colour like the sea in March, grey-green and full of
light, or like some mountain stones which when they are polished show
the same translucent and natural hue, shining from within with vivid
changes; but, much more than their luminous colour, their expression
arrested me, for it had in it an experience of immense horizons, and
resembled that which may sometimes be caught in the eyes of birds who
have seen the earth from the heights of the sky.
I first spoke and asked him whether I was well upon the path that would
lead me under Aurès, through the pass, to the sandstone hills from whose
summits one could see the desert for which I was bound.
Whether Timgad had disturbed me, or his speech had in it that something
which at the time I feared, I cannot tell; but the very short dialogue
we had together influenced me in my loneliness for a whole day, as a
vivid dream will do. I will therefore write it down.
He rose and answered me that I was on a good path all the way, and that
there was plenty of lodging: that the road was safe, and that my map
would be an ample guide.
“From the other side of Aurès,” he said, “you will see one ridge of red
rocks beyond another. Even the furthest has some scrub upon it upon this
side, but from its summit you will see the desert, and on this side it
is easy to climb.”
MYSELF: “And how is the southern side towards the Sahara?”
HE: “It is all precipice, but from the northern side you can cast about
and find a path which creeps down the end of the ridge to an oasis of
palm-trees. These are very numerous and evident from the height. When
you reach them you will find a large river flowing towards the desert, a
great road and a railway. It is easy to return.”
All this I knew already from my reading, and from my map, but I listened
to him for the sake of the tones of his voice: these had a sort of laugh
in them when he added that I should be glad to get back to water, to
trees and to men.
MYSELF: “But there is, as you say and know, no danger on this road from
the tribes or from beasts.”
HE: “No. Very little.”
MYSELF: “What other danger can there be?”
He answered that many who saw the desert learnt more than they desired
to learn.
I knew very well what he meant for I had heard many men maintain that
what was eternal must be changeless, and that what was changeless must
be dead. And I had noted how men who had travelled widely were more
simple in the Faith if they had chiefly known the sea; but if they had
chiefly known the desert, more subtle and often emptied of the Faith at
last: the Faith dried up out of them as the dews are dried up out of the
sand on the edges of the Sahara in the brazen mornings. But these men,
speaking in Christendom, had affected me little; here, so near the waste
places where men cannot live, alone with such a companion, I felt
afraid.
We walked along together slowly for a few paces; his sentences were
shorter than my replies, and were spoken low, and full of what he and
his call wisdom, but I, despair. We discussed together in these brief
moments the chief business of mankind. It was a power much greater than
his words that put my mind into a turmoil, though his words were careful
and heavy.... He told me that the day was better than the night. The
daylight was a curtain and a cheat, but when it was gone you could see
the dreadful hollow.
MYSELF: “In Sussex, which is my home, if a man were asked which was the
more beneficent, he would say ‘the night.’”
“In Sussex,” he answered gently (as though he knew the Downs) “mists and
kind airs continue the veil of the day.” He said that in the desert the
stars were terrible to man, and as he spoke of the endless distances I
remembered the old knowledge (but this time alive with conviction) how
great nations, as they advance with unbroken records and heap up
experience, and test life by their own past, and grow to judge exactly
the enlarging actions of men, see at last that there is no Person in
destiny, and that purpose is only in themselves. Their Faiths turn to
legend, and at last they enter that shrine whose God has departed and
whose Idol is quite blind.
We had not talked thus for twenty minutes when we stopped at the edge of
a little wood, and, as his way was not mine, he made to return. We both
turned back to look at the plain below us, and the salt dull valley and
the dead town: the broken columns and the long streets of Timgad, made
small by the distance and all in one group together. I looked at him as
he stood there and the fantastic thought half took me that he had known
the city while it was yet loud with men. When he had left me the
oppression of his awful intensity and of his fixed unnatural reason
began to fade. I saw him go into a secchia; I saw him again upon the
further side swinging powerfully down the slope. He crossed another fold
of land, he showed upon the crest beyond, and after that I did not see
him again.
[Sidenote: The Walk to the Desert]
Then I turned and went up into Atlas, and as I went I was in two minds,
but at last tradition conquered and I was safe in my own steadfast
instincts, settling back as settles back with shorter and shorter
oscillations some balanced rock which violence has disturbed. The vast
shoulder of Aurès seemed worthy indeed of awe, but not of terror. I made
a companion of the snow, and I was glad to remember how many living
things moved under the forest trees.
So I continued for three days seeing many things, and drawing them till
I came to the south side where the streams go down to be lost at last in
the sand, and till I saw before me the sandstone ridge red and bare, and
from its summit looked out upon a changing landscape, which dried and
flattened and became the true desert where miles and miles away a line
quite hard and level marked the extreme horizon. On this summit I lay in
the shelter of a rock (for it was bitterly cold and a violent wind blew
off the snows of Aurès) and looked a long time southward upon the
country which is the prison-wall of our race.
[Sidenote: The Sight of the Desert]
The man near Timgad had said truly that the end of the Empire, the
division and the boundary, was abrupt.
A precipice falls sharply right against the midday sun; it is built up
of those red rocks whose colour adds so much to the evil silence of the
Sahara, and the ridge-top of this precipice is here a sharp
dividing-line between living and desert land. Africa the province, the
Maghreb full of towns and men, ends in a coast, as it were, against this
blinding ocean of sand. You look down from its cliffs over a vast space
much more inhuman than the sea. Behind the traveller stretches all the
tableland he has traversed, bare indeed and strange to a northerner, but
very habitable and sown with large cities, living and dead. There are
behind him trees, many animals and rain: all the diversity of a true
climate and a long-cultivated soil. Before him are sharp reefs of stone,
unweathered, without moss, and with harsh unrounded corners split by the
furnace-days and the dreadful frosts of the desert. The rocks emphasise
the wild desert as reefs do the wild of the sea: they rise out of sand
that blows and shifts under the wind.
[Sidenote: The View of the Desert]
On this day, as I took my first long look at the Sahara, Aurès and the
plateau beyond were all piled up with dark clouds, and one could see
showers sweeping like shadowy curtains over the distant forests to the
northward; but southward over the desert there was a sky like a cup of
blue steel, and a dazzling sunlight that made more desperate the
desperate iciness of the gale. When I could tolerate the cold no longer
I began to pick my way carefully downward.
[Sidenote: The Oasis]
I could not find any path such as the man at Timgad had told me of, and
such as my map showed, but what I had to do was clear, for down in the
plain below me a long line of palms marked an oasis and the passage of
that clear river which, as I knew, comes tumbling down from the Atlas to
be lost at last in the Sahara. No feature in the unusual view below me
was more characteristic than this: that green leaves were thus bunched
together, rare, isolated and exceptional, as with us are waste rocks or
heaths, while the wide sweep of the land, which with us is all fields
and trees and boundaries, here is abandoned altogether. It was not the
least part of my wonder in this new place to find myself walking as I
chose over an earth that was quite barren, with no history, no
obstacles, and no owner, towards a patch of human land whose grove
looked as an island looks from the sea. As I neared those palms I found
first the railway, and then the strong high road which the astonishing
French have driven right out here into nothingness.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Arab Riding]
I did not turn to enter the native village. I had no appetite to see
more of the desert than I had seen in my view from the hill. I had then
seen a limit beyond which men of my sort cannot go, and I was content to
leave it to those others who will remain for ever the enemies of our
Europe. I saw one on the road: a true Arab, what the French call “An
Arab of the Great Tent,” not what we and the Algerians are, but a rider
of that race which makes one family from the Persian Gulf to the
Atlantic. He was on a horse going up before me into the hills, with the
snow of Aurès above him, and between us a tall palm. As I watched him
and admired his stately riding, I said to myself: “This is how it will
end: they shall leave us to our vineyards, our statues, and our
harbour-towns, and we will leave them to their desert here beyond the
hills, for it is their native place....
[Sidenote: The Ksar]
Then we shall have reached our goal, for we shall be back where the
Romans were, and the empire will be fully restored. For all things
return at last to their origins, and Europe must return to hers. They
must forget our cities which they ruined, and which we are so painfully
rebuilding, and we will not covet their little glaring _ksours_ which
they build upon crags above the desert, and which are quite white in the
sun.... This is how it will end.”
[Illustration]
When I came to that curious cleft or gorge through which the river, the
road and the railway all make their way together, one above the other,
from the plateau down into the desert plain, I saw a Christian house
after so many miles and days. I went in at once, drank wine, and asked
the hour of the train, for I was tired of this land. I was hurrying to
get back to reasonable shrines, and to smell the sea.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Return]
“Very soon,” I said to myself, “I shall come back to the coast-harbours,
and I shall see again all the business of the shipping and the waves;
and I shall see, rounding the pier-heads, those happy boats which seem
to be part of the mist and of the very early morning.” So it was; for I
came at the close of a bright day through the hills of the Tell to the
sea: here was the Mediterranean, and here were all the sails. I saw
again the little harbour by which I had entered Africa, and I was glad
to find such a choice of ships at the quays, ready, as it seemed, to go
to all parts of the world. So I chose one that was a Spaniard, bound for
Palma in Majorca and I drove a bargain by which I was to go for next to
nothing, provided I stayed on deck, and ate none of their food.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Last Bargain]
When I had driven this bargain, I bought wine, bread and meat ashore,
and came back and took a place right up in the bows from which to watch
the sea. It was the afternoon when we cast off and left the harbour, and
before it was quite dark we had lost the land. I lay there for many
hours in the bows, and thought about my home. And as I went across the
sea I recalled those roofs built for true winters, and those great
fireplaces of my own land. I also thought of the thick, damp woods which
begin by Tay and go on to Roncesvalles, but which north or south of
these are never seen; I remembered Europe well. There were women there
(to whom I was sailing) whose eyes were clear and simple, and whose
foreheads low; I remembered that all their gestures were easy. I
remembered that in the harbours men would meet me kindly; I was to meet
my own people again, and their ritual would not seem to be ritual
because it would be my own, and the air would be full of bells. The ship
also, going eagerly onwards dead north under the stars; she carried me
towards my native things, herself reaching her own country, for nothing
alien to Europe could make or preserve the science that had constructed
such engines and such a hull.
[Sidenote: The Memory of Europe And her Toast]
“In Europe, in the river-valleys,” I thought, “I will rest and look
back, as upon an adventure, towards my journey in this African land. I
shall be free of travel. I shall be back home. I shall come again to
inns and little towns. I shall see railways (of which I am very fond),
and I shall hear and see nothing that the Latin Order has not made.” I
thought about all these things as the ship drove on.
Europe filled me as I looked out over the bows, and I saluted her though
she could not see me nor I her. I considered how she had made us all,
how she was our mother and our author, and how in that authority of hers
and of her religion a man was free. On this account, although I had no
wine (for I had drunk it long before and thrown the bottle overboard), I
drank in my soul to her destiny. I had just come back from the land
which Europe had reconquered, and which, please God, she shall
continually hold, and I said to myself, “Remain for ever.”
“We pass. There is nothing in ourselves that remains. But do you remain
for ever. What happens to this life of ours, which we had from you,
_Salvâ Fide_, I cannot tell: save that it changes and is not taken away.
They say that nations perish and that at last the race itself shall
decline; it is better for us of the faith to believe that you are
preserved, and that your preservation is the standing grace of this
world.”
It was in this watch of the early morning that I called out to her
“_Esto perpetua!_” which means in her undying language: “You shall not
die”; and remembering this I have determined to give my rambling book
that title.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: It Dawns]
In a little while it began to be dawn; but as yet I saw no land. I saw
before me a boundary of waters tumbling all about, but I did not feel
alone upon that sea. I felt rather as a man feels on some lake inland,
knowing well that there is governed country upon every side.
This is the way in which a man leaves Africa and comes back to the shore
which Christendom has never lost.
But all the while as he goes from Africa northwards, steering for the
Balearics and the harbours of Spain, he remembers that other iron
boundary of the Sahara which shuts us in, and the barrier against which
his journey struck and turned. The silence permits him to recall most
vividly the last of the oases under Atlas upon the edge of the wild.
[Sidenote: The End]
There, where the fresh torrent that has nourished the grove is already
sinking, stagnant and brackish, to its end, a little palm-tree lives all
alone and cherishes its life. Beyond it there is nothing whatsoever but
the line of the sand.
[Illustration]
FINIS
Printed by BALLANTYNE & CO., LIMITED
Tavistock Street, London
Transcriber’s Notes
1. Standardized hyphenated words when the same word appeared in the
text as both hyphenated and non-hyphenated.
2. Silently corrected palpable typographical errors; retained
non-standard spellings and dialect.
3. Italic text in the original is delimited by underscores.
4. Bold text in the original is delimited by equals signs.