_VIRGIN SPAIN_
[Illustration: colophon]
_by WALDO FRANK_
_The Unwelcome Man_
_The Dark Mother_
_Rahab_
_City Block_
_Holiday_
_Chalk Face_
_The Art of The Vieux Colombier_
_Our America_
_Salvos_
_Virgin Spain_
and Introductions to
_Adventures in The Arts, by Marsden Hartley_
_Cane, by Jean Toomer_
_The Plays of Molière_ (_Modern Library_)
_Lucienne, by Jules Romains_.
[Illustration:
VIRGIN SPAIN
SCENES FROM THE SPIRITUAL
DRAMA OF A GREAT PEOPLE
WALDO FRANK
NEW YORK
BONI & LIVERIGHT
1926
]
COPYRIGHT 1926 :: BY
BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
[Illustration: colophon]
First printing, March, 1926
Second printing, June, 1926
_To_
_those brother Americans_
_whose tongues are Spanish and Portuguese_
_whose homes are between the Rio Grande
and Tierra del Fuego_
_but whose America
like mine_
_stretches from the Arctic to the Horn._
OFTEN, MEDITATING ON THE FERVOR WITH WHICH SPAIN HAS EVER DEFENDED
AND PROCLAIMED THE DOCTRINE OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION, I HAVE
THOUGHT THAT IN THE DEPTHS OF THIS DOGMA THERE MUST BE A MYSTERY
AKIN WITH THE MYSTERY OF OUR NATIONAL SOUL: THAT PERHAPS THIS DOGMA
IS A SYMBOL ... OF OUR BEING. ...
ANGEL GANIVET.
_ACKNOWLEDGMENTS_
¶ The wanderer upon the face of the earth will love these lands whose
drama is the burden of my book, if for no other reason for the pure
hospitality of their peoples. To move from the Sahara of the Arabs to
Biscay of the Basques, is to move from hospitable home to hospitable
home: is to be chained forever in the remembrances of kindness. Unto all
my friends, whose names are not too numerous to mention but whose grace
would feel itself abused by public thanks, my thanks, then.
¶ Acknowledgments more intellectual are more easy. Above others, I am
indebted to Federico de Onís, Head of the Department of Spanish
Literature at Columbia University. Professor de Onís, whom I was
fortunate to find in Spain, carried me to his native Salamanca (whence
alas! Unamuno had just been exiled). After my book was written, he took
time to read the proofs and to give me the unstinted, generous,
invaluable aid of his erudition. I must name also José Ortega y Gasset,
the outstanding intellectual master of the younger generation in Spain;
Juan Ramón Jiménez, the poet; Luis Araquistáin, the satirist and social
critic; Manuel Cossío, the authority on Greco; Azorín and Pío Baroja,
Spain’s leading novelist; Ramiro de Maeztu and Enrique Díez-Canedo,
critical leaders in Spain’s cultural renascence; Ramón Carande, the
historian, and Pedro Salinas, the poet. All of these eminent men of
Spain, in long conversations, helped me with a hospitality truly of
their land, to my search for understanding of a people notoriously poor
in critical and historical tradition. Nor can I neglect to mention
Alfonso Reyes, the Mexican poet and Ambassador to the Argentine
Republic, and Baldamiro Sanín Cano, the Colombian essayist, who helped
to clarify for me that so urgent aspect of the Spanish spirit which is
American. It must, however, be understood that none of these men is to
be held responsible for the conception or for any of the ideas of this
book.
¶ Much of the materials of my work has appeared in article form in
magazines. To the Editors of _The Commonweal_, _The Dial_, _The Menorah
Journal_, _The Nation_, _The New Republic_, _The North American Review_,
_La Revista de Occidente_ (Madrid), _The Saturday Review_ and _The
Virginia_ (University) _Quarterly_, my acknowledgments, also.
¶ Finally, a word by way of explanation. What I have attempted might be
called a Symphonic History. Spain is a complex integer: some of the
elements which compose it are known commonly under such terms as
climate, geography, historical events, literature, manners, custom, laws
and art. Since I felt the Personality of Spain to hold all of these
_immediately_, as a body holds all its organs, I have essayed, not to
discuss them severally, not to relate their passage and chronological
order, not primarily to picture or to dissect them. But I have let them
come, each in its measure and its turn, upon the scene: and like actors
in a play, like themes in a symphony, they have spoken their parts. If I
could have my way, the pages of my book would come unto my reader as a
drama he sees acted in an evening, or as a work of music he hears
performed in an hour. I cannot command this proper and impossible
hearing. I can but pray my reader, in some such spirit and attention, to
take the book which lies now in his hand. Let him do this for me, and I
shall gladly leave to him the judgment of my failure or success.
W. F.
_New York, December, 1925._
_CONTENTS_
PAGE
PRELUDE: THE SKY OF SPAIN 5
PART ONE: _Spain_
CHAPTER
I. HINTERLAND IN AFRICA 11
_a._ _Oasis_ 13
_b._ _Moghreb_ 24
_c._ _Ishmael and Israel_ 34
II. HINTERLAND IN SPAIN 43
III. ANDALUSIA 49
_a._ _El Andalús_ 51
_b._ _The Eye_ 57
_c._ _The Bowels_ 64
_d._ _A Goddess and Don Juan_ 70
_e._ _The Gypsies Dance_ 80
_f._ _Spain Dances_ 82
IV. ARAGON 89
_a._ _The Atom_ 91
_b._ _The Way of the Atom_ 96
V. CASTILE 101
_a._ _The Castle of the Cid_ 103
_b._ _The Stones of Wisdom_ 110
_c._ _The Water Bridge_ 117
_d._ _The Miracle of El Greco_ 121
_e._ _The Tomb_ 132
VI. THE DREAM OF VALENCIA 137
PART TWO: _The Tragedy of Spain_
VII. THE WILL OF THE CATHOLIC KINGS 141
VIII. THE WILL OF SAINT AND SINNER 155
_a._ _Irony and Honor_ 157
_b._ _The Mystic_ 159
_c._ _The Jesuit_ 167
_d._ _The Jurist_ 173
_e._ _The Rogue_ 178
_f._ _Velázquez_ 183
IX. THE WILL OF DON QUIXOTE 189
_a._ _The Birth of the Hero_ 191
_b._ _The Career of the Hero_ 201
_c._ _The Book of the Hero_ 218
X. THE WILL OF GOD 227
_a._ _The Bull Fight_ 229
_b._ _Man and Woman_ 239
_c._ _Madrid_ 250
PART THREE: _Beyond Spain_
XI. THE RIFT IN BARCELONA 255
XII. THE COMEDY OF THE BASQUE 261
XIII. TWO ANDALUSIANS 273
_a._ _The Sleepers_ 275
_b._ _The Awakeners_ 280
_c._ _The Sleepless Spirit_ 287
XIV. THE PORT OF COLUMBUS 293
_PRELUDE_
_THE SKY OF SPAIN_
_The sky of Spain is high. It is above earth very high. It is above
Spain very high. It is separate from Spain.... It is a clear white sky.
Sunlight is white in it. And the clouds are white.... It is a still sky.
The clouds stand still in a great height and fixed as in a crystal....
The light of the sun becomes the light of the sky, becomes the light of
the clouds, far from the dark red earth of Spain. Spain is her earth and
her sky.... I am within the pasture plains of Extremadura. Behind me
lies Badajoz...._
* * * * *
_I have walked at dawn upon an ancient bridge of granite across the
summer-shrunken river. The water curls and swerves through gold sand. In
little steel-blue pools it lies deep; then it runs off in thinning
saffron ribbons. Soldiers sit on black horses who drink the water
silkening at their knees. The bridge swings in yellow arches. There is a
bastioned gate cut with the conquering arms of Leon and Castile._
_In the east, a low sun. Its horizontal hand touches my face. It is hot,
striking across cool dawn. Badajoz is houses gray and gold over shut
streets around a Gothic church. The sun is outside the cool city. On the
Cathedral porch sit two old women. Their day has begun: it is to sit
with open claw and to close on coin and to bless the giver of coin._
_In my pocket is naught but the moldy paper of Portugal and the silver
duros of Spain. I shake my head at the two aged women. “No tengo suelto.
Lo siento.” I smile. She to my left smiles back. The other frowns and
mutters. They are one, save for the difference between a frown and a
smile._
_Hairy goats clatter, swinging creamy udders. Burros pass with men and
women, stolid, on their haunches. Through the crevice of leaning walls
the sun lays a hot finger on my brow. My body is chill._
_The bread in the fonda tastes coarse. It is sour and hurts my mouth.
The coffee is tasteless ... a sort of gray heat ... good. Now I have a
pocket full of coppers. I cross to the Cathedral porch. The two old
women ... one, split by a frown and a smile. To the frown, I give five
coppers, to the smile I give one. The smile and the frown do not change.
I am in Spain!_
_The shut town is expanding. The sun is still outside; streets twist to
avoid it. But the sun works. The city expands. Men and women are a
melting on the street. Men and women are motes of life within the
melting city...._
* * * * *
_Badajoz is behind. The sun is high, and here the pasture plains. The
Guadiana treeless wanders to the south. It is a thirsty river. It is a
river homesick for the hills of its youth; moved by a dream of coolness
southward, languidly stirred to win this dream in the south. Cities have
no sky. Beyond the walls of Pax Augusta which centuries have mellowed
from the Roman Camp holding harsh soldiers to this Badajoz ... now the
sky of Spain...._
_I have never seen a sky so far from my head: I have never seen a world
so sharp in my eye. The sky lifts me to a realm of visions. And as I
pass into its moveless search, still I stand fixed within this graphic
world.... Sheep bleat in a wave of dust.... The dust is dense. Curling,
swirling, puffing, streaking down, the dust is clear as glass. The sheep
are solid masses of tempestuous wool; each sheep is a writhe about four
feet, about stalks of sinewed bone jerking it on. Here’s a man. A solid
body. Hands crustaceous; face crisp skin drawn on a gaping skull: and
over the skin porous as soapstone, bristles of separate hair, sweat,
huddles of dust. The smoke from the cigarette cuts rising through the
air. Over his shoulder, miles and miles away, a ruined village rests on
the hump of a hill. Barbary figs stand at the walls of a splintered
chapel. Solid Spain! The earth is clotted, corrugation, furrow. In a red
gulch a blackish water drips. And there are flowers, purple like shreds
of morning._
_Everywhere sky. So far away, and everywhere. Its apartness is a force
lifting the broken things of Spain as in a great dance Godward. Dust and
sheep-hoof, ash of cigarette, pound of the shepherd’s staff on the
earth, swish of his chaps, the dog’s soft pads against stone ... rise
all in this various clarity, as in a dance, to the sky._
* * * * *
_I have a vision which has not left me. I shall love this people and
this world. For in my vision I have been born as they.... There is a
Funnel. Its walls are the round, white sky. It is thewed together by the
rays of the sun. And at the Funnel’s mouth is the mouth of God, speaking
the words which are the things of earth. Down this Funnel as in birth,
we fall. Until we strike upon the land of Spain._
_PART ONE_
_Spain_
_CHAPTER I_
_HINTERLAND IN AFRICA_
_a. Oasis_
_b. Moghreb_
_c. Ishmael and Israel_
_a. Oasis_
In the desert, night is reason; the day is magic and madness. This is a
law of the desert, and of the desert dwellers.
The light of the sun turns air into an incantation; it is dangerous to
man as the sharpest steel or the fire. And the air possessed makes
marvels of the land. The sky is opaque like a baking stone. The sterile
hills are in perennial motion. They are not hills docile and quiet for
the feet of man. They are enactments of geologic drama. By æons they
displace not man alone, but the first life that crawled. Each rim of the
hills is an age; they gyre in cosmic emotion.
Under a cloudless sky that is too still, earth veers; and under the
hills, sand by some magic teems with forms of flesh. The light on a dune
turns it into a thigh. Far off the waste becomes a sea, a snow-field.
But this exquisite flesh and snow and sea are aloof. Man is contemporary
only with the birth and with the death of worlds. And the hushed
counterpoise of life, which is his mortal span, is desert.
But with the night the world becomes a world that he can dwell in. The
evening star, sending its ray through opalescent dusk, is a sun he can
dwell with. The sky grows soft. The hills are shrouded like his body;
they are compounded like his soul of silences; they behold a sky that
does not sear and an earth he can walk. The moon strides like a master,
subduing the caravans of stars. The moon is male, and human.
The world of the day is a world of violence. It has no water and it has
no sweetness. It is the world of this life: best spent in marching,
passionate-shrewdly, toward dusk. Night is man’s kingdom, his dear
reality: it is a place of gardens under which flow waters: it is a place
of measurable fires: a place of shadows and of meditation: a place of
dew and of love.
Wonder therefore not at the triumph of Mohammed, master of lands of
desolation, who leads his peoples still across a day of flame to the
revealing sleep of his dusk paradise.
* * * * *
This magic of the desert day is ironic; at odd places the irony turns
smile. Just enough welcoming the smile to tempt man to live on within
the toils of the desert. The name of the smile is Oued--whence our word
Oasis. The Oued is a spill of water from the breast of a mountain.
Hidden springs converge and burst the rusty slope; and there is a tiny
river till the sands have drunk it. Where it flows, the desert smiles:
smiles date-palms, fig trees, thickets of oleander. So the desert keeps
its perennial victims living.
At the bottom of the Oued is the town.
The mountains raise their convolutions in a great struggle, ere they
break and die under these southern sands. The heights grow steep. Water
falls through rock, pours through curtains of brush that hang upon the
gorges. There is verdure: cataracts of stone with silver veins of water,
flats of sand where the palms rise seeking the sun above a precipitous
gulch, water mills hid in orange-groves, terraced houses with many roofs
and every roof a place for looms, for women. The water broadens, is
caught into a hundred irrigating ditches. The date-palms thicken and
camp like an army; the town huddles with its white walls windowless.
The morning sun comes late to the Oasis, for it must rise above the
hills. But dawn dwells already on the desert. It is a subtle radiance of
decaying night. Infinitesimal browns and blacks fleck the dim waste:
these are the camps of nomads who use the Oasis as a trading center.
Their tents are of undyed camel wool, strung low so that they look like
camels crouching. The great slow beasts are at anchor by the tent. Dry
grass is piled for them; they turn their delicate heads on the arched
neck that fronts the body like the prow of a ship. Camel grass burns
within. The Arab, swathed in his white burnouse, squats at the mouth of
the tent and strikes his brow to the dust, saying his dawn-prayer.
Unveiled behind him is his wife over the flame of twisted grass, and
cooks and watches her children. On the horizon stand two caravans of
twenty camels, bulging with dates. Now the thread of their approach
writes upon the desert. It is market day in the Saharan center. There
will be many caravans. And the wide scatter of nomads will close in like
fragments of iron magnetized; making an irradiant design from the town
to the horizons.
The market place is a low square, on the edge of the town away from the
Oasis. One side of it is a mosque, a Koran school, a string of Moorish
cafés where already merchants huddle with their coffee. The corner
breaks into a labyrinth of streets strident with tiny shops. Upon a
third side, the desert road cuts into the breast of sand-dunes; far away
is the white solitary shell of a Marabout’s tomb.
The crowd is the town and the desert: an Arab world, drawn by hunger
from far gold slopes, to make this thick and hardy organism. Most of the
men wear burnouses of unbleached wool; their heads are covered by the
ample hood and the skirt falls low over the inner jacket, over the naked
legs, to the feet which are either bare or shod with sandal soles of
grass thonged to the ankle. Time has dyed the virgin wool and use has
torn it; the shreds and rents are fantasies in dirt. Within the hoods,
sun-baked faces stare. The hands are talonous; the legs are like the
tendoned legs of some great bird. And yet the dirtiest garment falls to
the dust with grace; and the most squalid head is high.
The merchants sit on straw mats: they bake round acorn cakes on
brasiers; they sell dates gold-dry, bronze-rich; they measure
thimblefuls of palm oil dripped from reeking goatskins; they cobble
sandals; they sell liver of camel and _couss-couss_, a staple dish of
wheat, flaked with vegetables or with meat. (Donkeys stand mournful,
charged with juniper from the distant Atlas.) They sell dust and
fragments of silver, potsherds, amulets against devils, halters, tea;
they sell the dry leaf of the favorite henna. The crowd sways,
bartering, laughing. The Arabic is vowelless and the burnouse is proud.
The Arab is shrewd; his eyes glint, his fingers snap, his voice pelts.
He is the survivor of countless children who have died.
Children not yet dead weave through the intricate clamor. The boys wear
a burnouse over a naked body; the girls are bound in a thick wool
garment that will announce to the men when the breasts bud. They beg,
they snatch a date, they nibble. Half of them are blind in an eye. For
Islam makes no answer to the Ophthalmia of Egypt: is not Allah good to
the blind son, giving him fortune as a beggar, as a ballad singer, as a
muedzin to call the prayer from the mosque tower? Blind eyes, ravaged
flesh, hard voices--most of the children will die. And their survivors
are these hooded men at barter.
Therefore, the men are strong: it is the law that they eat first and
what remains may go to the women and the brood. Women are here, too.
Ancients with foul rags to bind their bulging udders and their bony
legs; ancients almost bald with hands and faces splotched in the henna.
They sell wool or weave mats from the coarse camel grass that bunches in
the sand dunes like the hair on a mole. Younger women hold the veil so
that a single eye peers at the ominous world. They buy wood, slices of
liver, oranges from the East. In the weave of laughter, guttural and
fleshless, of bray of donkey, of rumble of camels like the ebbed roar of
a furnace, twines the call of children ... the call of begging, the
life-call. A hand plashes a drum, a strain of song rises and binds this
chaos.
He sits between a cobbler and a nomad ebon-black with the drooped tender
lip of the Semite. He is the blind singer. He wears a clean tunic of
white and his head is swathed in the turbash. His bare legs gleam like
metal. His hands are delicate as prayer within the market clamor. He
clasps the shallow drum; and his fingers fall like rain.
He sings the deeds of the warriors of Allah. From Mecca they came, and
Al-Medinah; they spread from Araby to Egypt and down to Sudan and east
to India. They brought the sword of the Prophet to the hand of the
world. Like the sun, they went west; like Gabriel they rose into the
Spanish north, bridging the sea with minaret and prayer....
Metal he sings: his song is sparse like shreds of grass on a sand hump.
Five notes, naked, timbreless, make this intricate weave. They start
like arrows, like catapulted stones, like horse-hoofs on the desert.
This music is stripped like war; and like war single-willed.
The blind bard’s face is gray beneath the sumptuous swathes of his
turbash. His lips twist like cord; his face like an engine discharges
the song of Islam--single of key, terrible in singleness.
* * * * *
The sun stands beside the minaret that forms part of the west wall of
the town. The eastern mountain is gold and over it lies a pallid
crescent moon. There will be moon tonight upon the desert! From the
_fondoukhs_, camels are beaten forth. They are prodded to their knees
which are then bound so that they cannot rise. And the fragile humps are
heaped with the exchange of the mart. Great bags, here, oozed sugar of
the date: now there is wheat and wool. Fifteen camels, lashed and
hobbled, groan: then sway into the air like an armada moved by the wind
of guttural call and staff-blow. Fifteen camels swerve through a narrow
gate into the desert.
The town stands behind, low mosqued: the minarets rise from the flat
roofs like acrobats. Palms make a misty coronal to the east: thousands
of palms, mazed like a camel’s hair: and over all the sterile mountain,
a chart of ages, working to the sky. Now, from the minarets comes a
voice.
_Alláh acbar.... Echhed en la ila ella Alláh._
_Echhed en Mohammed Rasou Alláh._
_Haï ala Elsalat. Haë ala Elfaláh._
_Alláh Acbar.... La ila ella Alláh._
It is the call of the muedzin. Invariable his word, his key: invariable
the five points of the day ... dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset and
dark ... when from all the minarets of town, in all the towns of the
land, in all the lands of Islam, the muedzin calls to prayer. The voice
is of iron. Myriad muedzin voices, like strokes of some intricate
machine, weave together, and bind Islam holy.
Allah is great.... I affirm there is no God save only Allah.
I affirm Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah.
Come ye to prayer. Come ye to adore him.
Allah is great.... I affirm there is no God, save only Allah.
Belal, first muedzin, crier for Mohammed, spoke these words. They are a
redolent poem: ecstasy was in them, and resolve. They have not changed
in syllable since Belal received them from his master, a year after the
Hegira, the year of our era 623. But they have hardened. They are a
terrible horizontal stroke upon a prostrate people. Harder than bells of
Christendom they are; harder than the Jewish plaint which Mohammed
hated, which Mohammed strove to wipe from the ears of the earth.
The caravan has halted. The camels stand docile, pathetic, shifting
their great loads; for it hurts the soft pads of their feet to stand
laden, it is easier to walk. The men scatter and squat, each by himself,
but each turned from the setting sun toward Mecca. The water of the
desert is the sand; and with the sand the men make their ablutions. They
place their sandals beside them; all that is unclean in the folds of the
burnouse they lay aside. Their mouths mutter fast; their hands perform
intricate gestures. To swerve from the immemorial forms, even by a
finger twitch, is to be in heresy and to be damned. Their brows touch
the sand....
... For man is earth. The brow is his highest and his noblest part.
Let his brow therefore, five times with each day, be lowered to
earth. This is ISLAM....
The camels fall into the rhythmic swing which will not swerve while the
moon swings over the sand and the sand swings under the night, and the
silent men round the ocean of the desert.
* * * * *
From the town, as from a smoldering fire, smoke. There are no chimneys;
Allah takes care of the smoke. After the bright street, the house is a
cavern. The eyes, refocused to the dark, observe a long, high chamber,
its walls black with ages of grime, its ceiling stanchioned by wooden
posts that shine like ebony. There is no table, there is no chair, there
is no bed. Dry grass is piled in corners, and serves for sleeping. Four
families live in this lower half of the house. Four women squat in its
several quarters; about them nurslings, before them a little brasier to
which the children feed chips of wood, shreds of rush. The women cut
turnips, bake wheat for the _couss-couss_. There is a stair that is
scarce a stair: ages of feet have worn it to an incline. The upper story
has more light; there is a hole in the center of the ceiling which leads
to the roof. If it rains, the water falls through the heart of the
house; but light comes in, smoke rises out. Here, too, there is no
furniture. A chicken pecks in the crumbled floor; an old woman weaves at
a loom. Her hands know an immemorial process of weaving, like the mouth
of her husband praying.
The roof is the domain of the women. The street is for the men and all
that the street leads to. But the housetop is the street and the
playground of women. On sunny afternoons of the cool season, here is
their escape from the drudge and dark of their homes. This house is
high among the houses whose flat roofs move away in waving whiteness. A
minaret thrusts up ... there is a gap, a square ... then the packed
counterpoint of roof and turning wall and wall again to the green dense
at last of palms, to the gorge of the Oued, to the sand-stretch
southward where the sun lies in a mist as in a sea of opal.
The white roofs are gay with the color of women. Veils are put aside.
Babes suck at ruddy breasts. Red shawls and red babouches touch the
color of laughter. Women are carefree. Even the onus of prayer that sits
on Islam is not for them. Let them but bear children and hold the good
will of their men.[1] One woman, the rich blood clear beneath the bronze
of her cheek, presses to her bosom a child who will soon die. Children
come and often children go. The way of the child, to manhood or the
grave, is in the hand of Allah. A girl, candid and great-eyed with a
flinty note upon her luscious flesh, like steel on velvet, holds to her
lovely breast which motherhood has not distorted from its apple-rondure,
a babe whose eyes are already shut with pus. She will have a blind
son--perhaps a muedzin, perhaps a poet: certainly a Seer.
* * * * *
When the sun is good, many women follow up the Oued, with their brood,
for a day’s washing. The river is gracious within its precipitous banks.
The winter sun, sweet like our sun of June, has yet the reverberant
Saharan weight. It strikes the top of the hills, it rolls down over the
clay-maze; it strikes the level sand, down once more it bounds into the
gorge, over drenched bushes, over hanging rock and fills the Oued. Here,
knee-deep, with their thin gowns lashed to the thigh and the rondures of
their bodies speaking, stand women: and the sun comes to them. Other
women lay the washed clothes on rocks and with bare feet dance on them,
mangling and rinsing in song. The sun and the vigil of the hills, and
the town distant, release the spirit of this flesh. Allah is far away,
and the pure violence of Mohammed. Women are pagans again, and the Oued
has gods. Children peal. Girls let fall their tunics and their breasts
dance with their feet. Old women have eyes hot with memories, as they
watch the crisp bodies of their daughters.
But beyond the Oued, beyond its walled mouth where the water disappears
in sand, and beyond the date-palms, lies another town. It is more drear
than its graveyard. So far, doubtless, in old days the river ran ere it
had clotted and shortened its way with silt. The town is almost a ruin.
A few children play, but the houses are silent. No windows break the
seared patched blocks of clay. The graveyard is higher, and it has a
wall. Here one can sit and watch the ruined town and the maze of gardens
by the Oued and the palms, and the present town and the desert sea. The
muedzin has thrust his call to sunset prayer. The muedzin is gone. The
sun is gone. The mountains are sapphires in a cornelian heaven. The
Sahara moves in copper from the town: grows argent: its dunes are
swathed in mist like women’s bodies in irradiant shawls. The desert
fades into a fume of opal under a bronze horizon.
Intricate designs stir in the graveyard chaos. Between the head stones
and the foot stones the thin earth is raised so that the body may
lightly rise to Heaven. (Jackals and dogs, as well as souls, find the
shallow graves to their taste.) And now, to meet this subtle stir of
dust, comes music. Common notes, sordid notes, between the sand and the
sky. Drone of men in prayer, sudden motley of boys who sit in a black
room and shout the Koran, girl laughter, donkey bray, banter--a music
secret as this world. It comes with the night, swift, like any
revelation. It fuses with the graveyard stones, with the world. The
labyrinth of walls, enclosing gardens down to the Oued, is one with it.
Fig tree, palm, volute Barbary cactus, winding path to the river, muddy
river stretch, litter of refuse, excrement, manure, fuse with the music
and the graveyard stones, rhyme in the oneness of Allah.
A late worker jogs past on a burro. A Caïd--Judge--swings with his
basket-saddle on a mule. Another worker sticks his rod into the open
sore on his burro’s haunch. On one side of the glimmering Oued is the
town--a wall with many breaks, cobbles on mud, that lead into alleys and
that grow into streets. The walls, within, flank out into a square from
which turn several streets. The houses here are open to the night, and
on the doorsteps before brasiers red with coal, sit women. Allah is one.
They wear gay shawls, striped skirts. They wear massive barbarous
bracelets, anklets, necklaces. Their faces, in the gloom, are heavy with
designs: brow, cheek, chin painted with henna or with kohl. From eye to
temple run delicate starry lines. And the hands are henna-splashed. When
man approaches they sing the song of invitation. Behind them crouching
on their brasiers, freshening their faces, gleams a room with a samovar
and a couch. Now, the classic song of lust from their still lips. The
crystal and the song of Islam! One note for all prayer, one note for all
begging, one note for lust. Allah is one.
The whole town has caught the day’s fair fever. A man sits with a metal
pipe whose saccade cadence flies ... splinters of steel ... into the
night. And women dance. They move in strange reply to the music. For it
is violent, swift and lean; it is the clang and charge of martial hoofs.
But the women are slow, almost imperceptible their feet; almost moveless
their thick bodies. The arms wave languid like branches of the willow.
The whole town in the dead day’s fever. Dance and laughter and flame
blossom in the shadows of the street. A ballad singer sits among the
girls: he sings of the chieftain whose head was left upon the field and
how the Prophet came and joined it to his body, for the Resurrection.
But girls dance in a rising tide of Spring. His hands upon the drum make
running of swift steeds, his voice is a javelin: the girls move like
their breathing breasts.
Here is a large blank house. The court is high, and all about ring
little doors of oak. Below is a hall. Its walls are muffled in rugs, its
floor is far under carpets. Before the divans are tables, and the tea is
spiced. Men in white squat and play upon pipes, and their black eyes
gleam. The music’s shrillness shrieks. Now come women. They are four.
Unminding loveliness moves within thick brocades and clashing gems. The
faces are exquisitely painted. Verdant and nervelessly, they dance. The
body is quiet as a tree, the hands are pliant and susurrous like leaves.
The male music works.... A stomach wrench, violent as childbirth,
shatters upon the mellifluous woman’s body. Above the music comes a cry
from her mouth; it is a piercing call made pulsant with the hand clapped
periodically to the open lips. It dies; the elemental bodies stir again
within the dress and a sleep. But the male music works. The women pause.
The musicians turn about, so that they cannot see. With unfeeling hands,
the dancers loose the bonds of their thick robes. They step from the
splendor fallen to their feet; they are naked. Only the jewels flash and
bite upon their musing flesh. They dance. The muscles of their thighs
flow upward toward their breasts; the arms twine sleepy. The male music
works. The stomach, sudden, as if in unseen violation, wrenches,
cascades, in passional response. The shrilling pipes are visited whole
upon the naked women. They shriek: their cry, overtoned, fluted,
pulsant, marries flesh and iron: blots out the music, and the music
falls.
The town is asleep. Swarming reeking streets of the town are gray and
are shells. The walls stand white under the sky, and over the depths of
brooding human darkness. The crescent moon, with the dark sphere visible
within its horns, sends scimitar rays into the sleep of Islam.
_b._ _Moghreb_
A semi-desert land holds well the squalors and the splendors of its
past. This edge of Africa is the western end of the world whence the sun
slides down to the sea. The bleak steppes, studded with sage and cactus,
rise to sudden mountains; snow fields balance palm groves. It was a
harsh place for a great world to grow in. But glories long since dust in
Bagdad and Damascus have still their form in the cities of Morocco.
The prehistoric source lives in the prehistoric mountains. The Moor here
is Berber. No one knows who is the Berber save that his speech is kin to
the speech of Abyssinia and Egypt. His villages are perched on the
slopes of the Atlas and in the stony fastness of the Rif, much as the
Roman found them--and the Phœnician. Squat rectangular houses with
thatch roof form a semicircle on the crest of a divide. Below is a
thousand feet of air and a torrent; above are the clouds. The houses are
of mud and grapple like goats to the earth. In the low, flat lands
between the tiers of mountain, the houses are round. Closer to them than
the houses of Europe are the huts of the Congo. They form a full circle
within which dwell the cattle at night and sleeps safety.
The archaic world lies whole in the stratified history that is the
Moghreb. Ages before Christ the Semite scattered markets on the coast
and Carthage grew great. Rome became a mere machine for periodic taxes.
Roman order and Vandal havoc left the Berber untouched. He is a hard,
dark, leathery man. His head is close-cropped. He is prone to silence.
Despite the myth of the Moroccan Sultanate--that feeble creature of the
French and Spaniard--he is still unconquered.
Between the coast and the valley of Meknes and Fez he has lived, sullen
and declining. The spark in his eye, the curl of his black lip tells
that as he has outlived a long parade of empires, he will outlive this
French one. In such mood, he dons his woolen tunic broidered red or
blue, loads his olives on his donkey’s back and goes down to effete Fez
or Marrakech for barter. Yesterday he bartered with the Arab, with the
Vandal, with the Roman. Earlier, he knew the men of Carthage, the silver
lords of Tartessos. _He_ is a Berber.
Islam alone has won him. But not until Islam had passed him many times,
conquering half the Mediterranean world. The first Arabs converted some
Berbers and took them along, not loitering in these mountains. Berber
horsemen were soldiers and captains in Spain. But the Berber at home did
not stir from his stone somnolence. Córdoba and Toledo kindled fires
that warmed the monastic cells of Italy and England. Egypt awoke once
more. Mecca and Bagdad grew great. Morocco, halfway between the east and
the west, was invaded by new waves of Arabs. Hillalians and Idrissides
built fine towns in Algeria and Tunis. Morocco was surrounded by
splendors. The mountains remained mountains.
Three hundred years the streams of culture flowed through this frustrate
land, from Spain to the east and from the east to Europe. Now came a
Berber tribe from the southern desert: the Almoravides with their great
chieftain Yusuf. Twenty-two hundred years since the Phœnician had
builded in the Moghreb, and now the Moghreb in its own name grew great.
Fez, Marrakech, Rbat bloomed and their power spread to Tunis and to
Spain. Many ages did this stubborn world take to blossom; many ages has
it taken to die. The greatness of the Almoravides, of the Almohades, of
the Merinides lives still in Morocco.
* * * * *
Fez is the metropolis of a world that is gone: the head of a missing
body. A hundred thousand Moors in Fez-el-Bali live in an age synchronous
with the Crusades and with the Gothic. The modern world is here like a
mirage--or like a curse of Allah.
A river, plenteous in water for Morocco, makes of the hills a single
grove for olive, fig and eucalyptus. The town lies solid, within them.
Most cities are a crust of houses split into streets and squares. Old
Fez is a solid carapace of roofs, its rise and fall like the
articulations of a body.
Underneath the roofs are the _soukhs_, intricate like the wrinkles on an
old man’s face. These are streets of myriad and tiny shops. In one
section there will be only goldsmiths--hundreds of men squatting before
their little bellows and their little gems. In another congregate the
sellers of fish, the vendors of soap and grease, the ironmongers, the
makers of leathern ware. The typical _soukh_ is not more than three
paces wide; and each shop is an open box, slightly above the level of
the walk, and large enough for a single squatting man. Overhead, is a
roof of grapevine or of rush, joining the two sides of the street
together and letting in mere crevices of light.
Back and forth in this myriad-textured warren move the Fasi. The rich
swathe through on mules; asses laden with produce are led by uncouth
Berbers from the mountains or by black slaves from the south of the
Sahara. The human pigment is bewildering. The city Arab is pale as a
dweller of the northern towns of Europe: the Kabyl is dark-skinned,
blue-eyed: the Ethiop is black as the shadows in the tiny shops.
Burnouse and turbans are pied. Vendors shout for the passers-by to stop.
And from time to time there is a break in the ceaseless lineage of
bazaars: the carved, closed shutter of a Koran school shields
the incessant coil of adolescent voices, strident, wild,
unmeditative--shouting the words of their Prophet. Along the bare walls
of the mosques and the medersas, beggars are posted. Their stintless
catch-word weaves with the beat of ass-hoof, with the thresh of human
feet, with the shop-calls, with the chanting of students.
Each beggar has his phrase. It invokes alms with the patronage and to
the glory of a particular saint. It guarantees to the almsgiver a
saint’s word in Heaven. He sits in the shadow of the holy buildings. The
carven door leads through a passage of mosaic to a court, gorgeous with
tile and woodwork laid perhaps with mother-of-pearl. The holy students
of the medersa live in cells, mounting in honey-comb mass to the
minaret.
From the crowded _soukhs_, streets toweringly high and sinisterly narrow
twist in all directions. A band of Moorish minstrels moves from dark
door to dark door. The voices of drum and pipe give forth a ghost of
music. The voices are shrill like the calls of mountain life. Arab music
was lean and violent, a gray fusion of thrusts. This song of the true
Moor is almost disembodied. It has accent, but no texture. It stands
against the intricate mellow noise of the city, enfolded in the liquid
sconce of hills, like a savage summons. A door opens, a copper falls in
a drum. The leader of the band gives his toned blessing; the slender men
move on, weaving with their song a pall on Islam.
On a hill stands the mosque of Bab-Guissa (one of the 785 mosques built
in Fez by the Almohades, exclusive of monasteries and medersas). By this
mosque is the north gate through which the Berber from the Rif passes
with donkey-charge of olive or of grain. Each donkey-load pays duty to
the Sultan; and each appraisal calls for threats from the custom
officer--degenerate Moors who are truly slaves of France. The Riffian
pays his pence in sullen silence. And his non-resistance maddens the
Fasi. Nearby is an olive market, _Fondouk el lhoudi_. The olives ripen
in winter. Vast rush troughs and baskets hold the black fruit in the
open Square, under the sun and the flies, and the sweating men and
donkeys. With the barter come blows. A negro catches a bargainer with
his teeth and is flung off with a ripped cheek. The crowd buzzes, deeply
unmoved. The open baskets of olives, black-gemmed in the air, give an
intenser note....
On the heights above Bab-Guissa are the ruined tombs--the _koubbas_--of
the Merinides. Their crumbled arabesques look down on the long valley of
Oued Fez. A spirit of those ancient rulers could still find his
Fez-el-Bali: know this shut and terracing carapace of stone, blue tile,
gold ceramic, fumy beneath the sun. The old walls are there, too,
although time and cactus have splintered them. And the mosques rise like
a thousand claws toward Allah--the hold of the pious town on the One
God.[2]
The sun is sinking on the Almohadian wall that forms a corner with the
mosque Bab-Guissa. Soon will come from myriad minarets, the call for
evening prayer. The mountain donkeys no longer lurch through the Gate;
and the slaves of the imprisoned Sultan are gone. This rocky height
studded with moldering tombs, this wall and this tower form a natural
amphitheater. It is crowded with Moors. They squat on the ground,
swathed in burnouses. Water-boys thread silently. All indeed is silent,
facing down to a central point within the wall where sits a man.
His beard is white and his voice is gentle: he is a man with exquisite
hands and manners of the Court. And he is speaking so quietly, that the
massed crowd must hold silent indeed, if it would hear him. He is the
Chronicler of Fez--poet, historian, journalist: one of the great sons of
the Moghreb. Each day at nightfall, for an hour, he bespeaks in his own
verse the glory of Islam. Each of his tales lasts three months: there
are four of them to the year. His unemphatic words give to the men of
Fez two realities of Islam: the splendor which was, and the splendor
which is eternal. He speaks, not without humor; his immobile body
radiates peace. He tells of the gardens underneath which flows
water--the Garden whither Islam somnolently moves through this demonic
hour of wireless, guns and rail-ways....
* * * * *
The capital of the Sultanate is Rbat. From here, the Almohadian troops
set sail for Spain; and after the triumph of Alarcos in 1195,
Rbat-el-Fath--“Camp of Victory”--received its name. Fez, in hills, is
gold: Rbat is a dazzling white over the sea. The bou Regreg slopes down
within its sands, between two gentle promontories. On one of them Rbat,
on the other Sla--ancient cities, equally white above the sea, equally
proud, equally hostile. You can row from the _soukhs_ of Rbat to the
palaces of Sla in a minute. But these are worlds kept separate in an
ageless confrontation. Time was when the two cities were independent;
blood stained the sands of the Regreg. Each town slants to the sea upon
a mighty dune; and this dune is a divided graveyard.
The ocean has opened Rbat. Its bright streets run with the breeze. Its
masonry is less delicate and more resolute than that of Fez. In its
soukhs is a tang of salt. The Moors themselves are less shut up. Though
their burnouses swathe them and the women walk as hidden in their veils,
an Atlantic rhythm has crept within these folds; the somnambulance is
brighter.
“We have lived fair days
In Granada, house of delight.
Among its roses and its roses budding
We have sped many a silver night.
Alas! no more for our enraptured use
The dwellings of Andalús.....
Hush! do not make me suffer more.”
We are the guests of a _Cherif_.[3] Two slave girls crouched on the
carpet sing for us. The house is modern. But in each detail it is a copy
of the classic Moorish style whose glory is Al-Hambra. These might be
the days when Al-Ahmar, king of Granada, was friend of the Catholic
Fernando; and when Christians were entertained in the Andalús even as we
in the Moghreb.
It is a long and narrow chamber, run round by a divan yielding with silk
cushions. To a man’s height, the wall is mosaic. Above, it is white
plaster exquisitely laced in arabesque. The ceiling is carved wood,
textured and painted like a maze of flowers, with mother-of-pearl and
gold within the toolings. Outside the door we see the court, and hear
the song of the fountain. The mansion rises to four stories: upon each
floor the balcony goes round and all the windows open in upon it. A girl
brings subtly painted goblets; tea fused with mint is poured. Another
slave places brasiers of sandalwood. The monotonous wail and rending
song has ceased. The singers go in silence, as if they had left with us
all that they had. We hear the pulse of the sea: an indeterminate murmur
of voice and feet. Two little slaves, with eyes too far to be either
friendly or hostile, linger and change our glasses, ere we have half
drained them.
“It is because we have disobeyed the Prophet.”
A young man speaks. He is the eldest son and his burnouse is white,
undecorated wool. He has laid aside his babouches and his feet are bare.
He reclines on the divan, resting his languorous head upon a hand more
exquisite than the lacework on the wall. The features are subtly virile.
There is fire in them, and cruelty. He is a man fine-drawn--but
altogether metal. He is twenty: not yet married. His life is the study
of Lore at his _zaouïa_ and the writing of verse.
“In Al-Koran it is written that we should work--we have not worked. It
is written that all Islam should live in peace--we have fought each
other. It is written that we should shun luxuriance and vice, that we
should cultivate our soil and our minds. We neglect them. It is written
that we should raise up our women--we keep them down. Therefore our life
is disaster. Therefore the French are upon us. We have been the highest
of peoples. Islam and Culture were one. In the old days, among a
thousand men, there was not one who did not read. Within a thousand
homes, there was not one but had delicate rugs, handsomely carved walls.
Now, our houses are dark with smoke; our minds are dark with ignorance.
Like the pest unto the unclean body, the French have come.”
My host smiled, fearful lest the words of his too serious son should
bring discomfort.
“It is an evil hour: and it will pass.”
“Are you acting,” I asked, “to make it pass the quicker?”
“When we are ready, we shall act. Even as a child when it is ready to
walk.” The son spoke. And his friend, a philosopher from Tunis, nodded.
“Islam has been cursed with a new childhood. We are not decadent. I know
that your historians call us decadent. It is a lie. Measure us by the
Law of the Prophet. If it was ever good and great, it is still so today.
Perhaps you would find that it was never good. It has been studied by
intelligent men--the Jews--and found wanting. We can understand that.
But it is not changed: it is not decadent.”
I thought of the world fringing the Power of Rome, before Mohammed: a
chaos of repellent parts, giving no light. The Arab kindled this anarchy
and made it one. I thought of the reeking _Kasbah_ of Algiers; of the
swarming, inert Marrakech and Fez. I thought of the Monastery city in
the Sahara and of the holy Marabout whose Word Arabs came weeks on
camel-back to hear. I had felt everywhere a Body, flaccidly receding
from its accumulate splendors.
“You are a poet,” I said. “Tell me about the forms and the spirit of
your verse.”
“We have sixteen forms,” answered the son. “We have but one Spirit.”
“Poetry,” said my host, “is more plentiful than trees, in Islam. It is
our water-bearer. It is our forest.”
“And your greatest poet?”
All three spoke as one: “The Prophet.”
The Tunisian explained:
“Amrolkéïs, Antsar, El Bassiri, the poets of El Hariri and El Hamadaín
were great. How could there be poetry like that which the Prophet
dictated unto his disciples? In those days, Zoheïr was the greatest poet
of Mecca. The Prophet had escaped to Al-Medinah. At the annual contest,
when all the poets posted their work on the outer wall of El Kaabah,
there was none to vie with Zoheïr. And Zoheïr was an idolater, a man of
the tribe of the Koreishites--deep haters of the Prophet. But a Sura of
the Koran came to the eyes of this man who had been crowned. And he read
it, and he tore his victorious poem. And he said: The crown belongs to
Mohammed, son of Abd-Allah, son of Abd-El-Motalleb.”
“Who are the great poets, now?”
“How, in a low age, can there be high poets? We follow the great humbly.
The best of today--whatever it is--in poetry and in philosophy--is found
in Egypt.”
Mine host led us to the roof of his palace.
“It is night,” he explained. “We are not indiscreet.” He referred to the
custom of Islam which gives the roof as the inviolate playground of the
women.
There was no moon. The stars were a swarm of golden bees within the deep
blue meadow of the sky. From a hundred open courts, hid lights of houses
were thrown up. Each house was a muffled lantern; Rbat was a cluster of
hidden lamps peering into the turbulence of stars. The sea slept. Beyond
the city walls, the ancient tower of Hassan mused, a gray ghost.
The man from Tunis spoke:
“It is said, O my friends, that Morocco is the tail of Islam. Let it
then be known that Islam is a peacock.”
Outside the inner city, in the direction of Hassan, there was a small,
low group of open lights. Here the houses were not dark lanterns; the
houses had windows out upon the street. A trill of horizontal fires came
against the upright monotone of Islam.
“It is the Mellah,” said mine host, “the Mellah of the Jews.”