North Africa And The Desert - free ebook by George Edward Woodberry

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North Africa And The Desert

George Edward Woodberry

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NORTH AFRICA AND THE DESERT

NORTH AFRICA AND THE DESERT

SCENES AND MOODS BY GEORGE E. WOODBERRY NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1914 Copyright, 1914, by CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS Published April, 1914 To SETH LOW LONG MY FRIEND AND ONCE MY CHIEF A STATESMAN INTERESTED IN ALL THAT PERTAINS TO HUMAN WELFARE I DEDICATE CONFIDENT OF HIS SYMPATHY THIS BOOK OF THE ARAB WORLD I TUNISIAN DAYS...

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I

I

I WAS fortunate in my first landfall at Tunis. It was a fine sea picture framed in that chill November dawn. On my left, over the rippling watery gold to the few pink clouds eastward, lay the great blue mountain headland, stretching far behind. In front, a little to the right, was Goletta, the port, hard by; and ranging off northward the line of the ocean beach ran stern and solemn, with the lighthouse above. That rise, there, was the hill of Carthage. Westward over the hollow space of waters sw

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II

II

Barren enough was my first acquaintance with the land side, weary, cheerless, desolate, like windy prairies in autumn, uninhabited, uninhabitable; and I was chilled to the bone when I came back to the hotel, then in the bud of its first season. It is more sober now, but then it had a near cousinship to Monte Carlo; it was delightfully irresponsible, vivacious, gay. One passed to the picturesque bar and the café, thick with interesting groups; or with equal ease to the “little horses” with their

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III

III

Ranging through the country by rail, I found one of the oldest lands of earth wearing the signs, familiar to my eyes years ago, of the American West. It seemed, at times, like an hallucination of memory with odd differences, such as one might have in a dream. Now and then one came to a larger and well-gardened station, some watering-place of the richer citizens in summer; or to a thriving seaport; but, in general, the stops were at way stations, as in all thinly populated districts—a simple cros

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IV

IV

Once on such an excursion on the eastern seacoast, the Tunisian Sahel, I left Sousse behind in the noon glare, a busy, thriving, pleasant place, swarming with Arab life in its well-worn ancestral ways and with French enterprise in its pioneering glow. The old Saracen wall lay behind me towered and gated, a true mediæval girdle of defence, and I gazed back on the white city impearling its high hillside in the right Moslem way, and then settled myself to the long ride southward as I passed through

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V

V

Sfax is the southern capital of Tunisia. It has always been an important site, and under the new rule of the French thrives and prospers commercially, in true frontier fashion, as the chief market and base of the country being opened up in the inland behind it whose seaport it is. It is also an old Mohammedan stronghold, and its inherited life and customs go on, as at Sousse, in the immemorial Arab ways. I remember it as the city of the olive and the sponge. In the early morning light the open s

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VI

VI

I seek in vain the secret of the charm that Tunis lays upon me. Coming back to it, one feels something intimate in the city, such as there is in places long lived in and cherished, impregnated with memories, subtilized by forgotten life and feeling. It has sunk deeper into the senses, the affections. Can the charm be merely its soothing air, its weather, which, after all, is our physical element? It has a marvellous sky; all hues that are celestial and live in heaven are there. What clarity! Its

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VII

VII

I like to pass my afternoons in the shop of the perfumer in old Tunis. I come by covered ways, where the sunlight sifts through old rafters on stained walls and worn stones, and soon discern in the softened darkness the low, small columns wound with alternate stripes of red and green—bright clustered colors; down the winding way of dimmed light in the narrow street opens on either side the row of shallow shops, shadowy alcoves of bright merchandise; and there in the heart of old Tunis, each in h

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VIII

VIII

Quick music comes down the evening street—the clatter of cavalry—the beautiful rhythm of horses’ backs—flash of French uniforms so harmonized with the African setting—spahis, tirailleurs, guns—a gallant and lively scene in the massed avenue! I love the French soldiers in Africa; but it is with a deeper feeling than mere martial exhilaration that one sees them to-night, for this is an annual fête-day, and their march commemorates the entry of the French troops into Tunis. One involuntarily looks

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IX

IX

Tunis is the gateway by which I entered this world—the new world of France, the old world of the desert. It was almost an accident of travel that I had come here, refuging myself from the life I had known, and seeking a place to forget and to repose, away from men. I had no thought of even temporary residence or exploration; but each day my interest deepened, my curiosity was enlivened, my sympathies warmed, and slowly I was aware that the land held me in its spell—a land of fantastic scenery, o

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I

I

SNOW in April! I could hardly believe my eyes as I looked through the blurred panes of the one small window on the large, moist flakes falling thickly, the trees green with spring-time whose young foliage was burdened and slim limbs delicately heaped with snow an inch deep in the windless air, while the little park was a white floor and the half-invisible roofs a drifted curtain like a broken hillside—it was so like a snowy spring at home. I was in the unpretending hotel, in an upper corner room

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II

II

Later in the afternoon, the weather continuing to clear, I drove with a French gentleman—we were mutually unknown—to the cascades lying not far to the southeast. Tlemcen is posed at a somewhat high elevation on the last spurs of the ranges that encircle and dominate it from behind, and faces a great plain, bounded with distant blue mountains on the sides, and having the Mediterranean at its far limit, whose gleam can be seen only on fair, clear days. It is a spacious prospect; and the near view

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III

III

The fruit-bearing feature of the country must have been an original trait. Pomaria, or as one might say in our own phrase, Orchard-town, was the name of the first settlement in the colonizing days of Rome. I walked to the place, just under the northern wall of the city, one morning for a stroll. I was soon at the foot of the tall minaret of the ruined mosque of Sidi Lahsen that rises on the site of old Agadir, which was the Berber name that next absorbed the Roman Pomaria; and I saw the Latin-in

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IV

IV

A little to the west of Tlemcen, and almost adjoining it, stands another ruined city, Mansourah. I rambled out toward it on a road alive with market-day bustle and travel, where the country people were arriving in groups with produce and beasts of burden, and the interest of the weekly holiday in town—a rough, hard people, not at all like the Tunisians, but doubtless of a more vital stock. The French cavalry were exercising in the Great Basin that had once been like a lake in that quarter of the

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V

V

The conversion of a people to a new religion, notwithstanding the glory of apostolic legends, must have always been largely a nominal change. The victorious faith takes up into itself the customs and cardinal ideas, the habits of feeling and doing, the mental and moral leaf-mould, as it were, of the old, and it is often the old that survives in the growth under a new name and in a new social organization. It was thus that Catholicism re-embodied paganism, whether classical or heathen, without a

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VI

VI

The secular phase of Berber life in these ages is vividly illustrated in the person and career of Yarmorâsen Ben Zeiyân, the founder of the first kingdom of Tlemcen. He belonged to the tribe of Abd el-Wâd, who, with their cousins, the Beni-Mérin, under the pressure of the Arabs of the second invasion, came up from the desert and took possession of the coast, the former about Tlemcen and the latter in Morocco. For many years these tribes, under the Almohades, had exercised feudal rights over the

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VII

VII

In the brilliant years of Tlemcen, during which it was a spray of the flowering branch of Andalusian art, what is most striking and remains on the mind with a touch of surprise is the sense of the long and various contact of the Berber world with inherited Mediterranean civilization. We are accustomed to think of the north coast of Africa as a much-isolated country; but no place in the world is ever so isolated as it may seem to be; and the connection of the North African peoples with the centre

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VIII

VIII

I went out into the night on my last evening and wandered in the dark streets till the falling gleam of a Moorish cafe drew me into its shadowy spaces, where I drank a cup of coffee, listening to sudden snatches of native music and observing the swarthy and stalwart Arabs where they were banked up on a sort of high stage at my left. It was a characteristic but dull and lifeless scene. At a later hour I visited the moving pictures. The large, obscure shed was jammed full of rough-looking men and

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I

I

I WOKE, in the train, on the high plateaus. Dawn—soft green and pallid gold, luminous, then dying under a heavy cloud while faint pink brightened on the sides of the great horizon—opened the lofty plain, boundless and naked, thinly touched with tufts of vegetation; as far as one could see, only the elements—color, cold, swathing wild herbage on rugged soil; and far off, alone, the haze of an abrupt mountain range. It was the steppe beyond Khreider. The vast, salt chott of El-Chergui, that streak

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II

II

I went by myself to visit the old ksar, the native village which had occupied this site before the coming of the French and the rise of the new town about the railway. It lay some little distance to the west of the track—a collection of palm-trees, with a village at the farther end, backed by a white koubba. My Arab boy, who had never lost sight of me, had me in charge, and led the way. We crossed into the strip of barren country and saw the ksar with its palmerai before us, like a rising shoal

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III

III

“ Monsieur , le spahi.” I went out in the early morning air and found my escort for Figuig, a tall, dark Arab, almost black, his head capped with a huge turban wound with brown camel’s rope in two coils, and his form robed in a heavy white burnoose that showed his red trousers beneath; he held two horses, one tall and strong, for himself, the other, smaller and lighter, a mare, for me. My friend soon joined us with his mount, and, glancing at my mare as I also mounted, warned me not to rein her

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IV

IV

Beni-Ounif was dull. There was nothing interesting there except the mise en scène . It was pleasant to be dining with officers, for they were the principal patrons of the hotel, with whom stars and crosses were as common as watch-guards in New York; and it was stimulating to see the ensigns of the Legion of Honor where they were something more than the international compliment of a ribbon twisted in a black buttonhole and had their heroic meaning, a decoration on an officer’s breast. The crosses

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V

V

It was a brilliant morning. I went to the edge of the desert and looked off south with the wish to go on that all unknown horizons wake, but which the desert horizon stirs, I think, with more longing insistence, with a greater power of the vague, than any other; for there it lies world-wide, mysterious, unpenetrated, and seems to open a pathway through space itself, like the sea. All true travellers know this feeling, the nostalgia for the “far country” that they will never see; it is an emotion

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I

I

IT was a cold dawn in late April at Biskra. The carriage, long and heavy, with three horses abreast, stood at the door. Ali, a sturdy Arab, young but with no look of youth, wound in a gorgeous red sash, sat on the box; and as I settled in my place, Hamet, the guide, followed me gravely and sat down beside me, and at a word from him we were briskly off on the long, uneventful drive to Tougourt, over the desert route of about a hundred and thirty miles southward, to be covered in two days’ travel.

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II

II

I woke at the first streak of dawn. Two beautiful morning stars still hung, large and liquid, in the fading night, but the growing pallor of daybreak already disclosed the wild and desolate spot where we had fortunately stopped. Drifts of trackless sand stretched interminably before us; the young palms showed low and forlorn in the gray air; the scanty brush by the ditch was starved and miserable; everything had a meagre, chill, abandoned look. As soon as it was light we reversed our course, and

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III

III

I emerged the next morning from the arcaded entrance of the hotel, which was one of a continuous line of low buildings making the business side of the public square, and glancing up I saw a great dog looking down on me from the flat roof. There was little other sign of life. The square was a large, irregular space which seemed the more extensive owing to the low level of the adjoining buildings over which rose the massive tower of the kasbah close at hand on the right and, diagonally across, the

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IV

IV

I spent the evening in the Café Maure of the Ouled-Naïls. They are la femme of the Sahara, daughters of a tribe whose centre is at Djelfa, not far from Laghouat, leagues away to the west, and thence they are dispersed through the desert, adept dancing-girls who perform in cafés; and in that primitive society, it is said, no reproach attaches to their mode of life, which yields them a dowry and brings them at last a husband. The custom is not peculiar to the Sahara; I have read of its existence i

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V

V

The horses stood at the door early the next morning for a drive to Temacin, some thirteen kilometres south. We were soon out of town, travelling beside an oasis on the left and going in the open desert; a boy joined us from the oasis and excitedly struggled to keep up with the carriage, no difficult task, for the route was heavy with sand; two other boys on donkeys ahead were having a race; and the route had always some touches of travel. The openness of the view was boundless, and I had not see

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VI

VI

It was three o’clock in the morning when I went out to start on the return under the stars. The streets were dark and silent as we drove out; but the heavens were brilliant, and the twin lights of Tougourt shone behind us like lighthouses as we made out into the sandy plain. A few miles on we passed a company of soldiers convoying a baggage-train—strong, fine faces above their heavy cloaks, marching along in the night. The stars faded and day broke quietly—a faint green, a dash of pink, a low, b

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I

I

IT was in my early days in the desert, and Yussef told me tales. There was a Bedouin camp—indicated vaguely in the distance by a gesture; a real desert encampment. “Were there many tents? Twenty? A hundred?” “There might be—thousands!—who could know?” It was near an old French fort where some relative, variously designated as little brother, step-brother, nephew, cousin, was in charge; we would be welcome; there would be cous-cous, real cous-cous, made in the desert. It was mid-winter; but a car

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II

II

The dunes lie to the west of Biskra. They are real sand-hills; one can climb on them, there are echoes to be waked, and the plain stretches finely to the mountains behind; but it is the forward view that holds the eye. The altitude is not great, but high enough to give a perch something of the commanding power of a cliff prospect over the sea, and the dunes themselves reminded me vaguely of the Ipswich sand-hills of my own coast and their sterile sea-views. The magical thing in the desert is its

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III

III

It was the time of the April fêtes at Biskra, and I went out in the delightful warmth of the early afternoon to see. There were to be races, but I was especially attracted by the promise of a falcon hunt. A long line of white-robed Arabs streamed into the country fields, and I drove amidst them by a quiet road shimmering with dust, and when I turned by the great pen where the horses were kept, into the enclosure, the crowd was already assembled. It was a large, open plain whose side-lines were d

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IV

IV

The processional is an inherent trait in the desert landscape, owing to the fewness of the human figures and their concentration in the vastness of the horizons. Everything seems strung out—herds of goats, wandering camels, even the scattered palms; and in the caravans or troops of horse or military trains the feature is emphasized. It is the trait of a migratory land. The mise en scène for a procession, in the true sense, is superb. The eye centres the scene on the great space and views it whol

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V

V

It was the music of the Aïssaouas in the night. The din was terrific, barbaric, ear-piercing, instruments and voices, as I entered the little, roughly boarded hall, sufficiently but none too well lighted, in which hung a slight haze of smoky vapor. There were upward of a score of the order with their chief standing, and a few men were seated on one side, who made a place for me among them. The group in front, close by, filled a small, oblong space, in the midst of which over a fire was a fuming

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VI

VI

The fascination of the desert, that which makes a desert lover, is not in its incidents, voyages, sights; it is in its life. It is the life of nature. I do not mean the picturesqueness of its human traits, the passage of men and animals over a scene with which they are so sympathetically colored as to seem only a part of its flora and fauna, its transitory efflorescence; nor the landscape with its breadths, infinities, hallucinations, hierarchies of color, élans of the soul and poems of the eye,

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VII

VII

The crudities of the desert have a charm all their own. There is a wild flavor not only in the life but in the nostrils. The strong saltpetre smells, impregnating the air for leagues, the earthy scents of the marsh-like and sodden soil, the odors of cattle, are stimulants; they recall the whiff of salt marshes by the sea, the tarred ropes of wharfs, the sharp fragrance of rolled seaweed on the beaches, aromas of low tide, in days of long ago. They are both prophecies and memories. They wake my b

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I

I

IT was afternoon in a small oasis village of the Zibans. I was seated on a straw mat in a little garden-space just outside the café, and dreamily regarding the intense blue sky through the vine leaves trellised overhead, which flecked me with their shadows. An old Arab was praying just in front. Two groups, one on each side of me, were placidly seated on clean, yellow mats—young men, whose dark, sad faces, thin-featured and large-eyed, contrasted with their white robes. They were smoking kif—a t

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II

II

A strange thing to me was the absence of any political state. There has never been a political state, properly speaking, in the desert. Such was the parcelling of the communities, so elementary the governmental form, so feeble the impulse of political aggregation and cohesion, that the general condition might seem to be an anarchy. In the Kabyle villages of the mountains and among the Mzabites of the Sahara the assemblies of the elders with the election and change of head men present an aspect o

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III

III

The old life of the desert is passing away; the fact is written on the landscape, on the faces of the people and in their hearts. It was as full of miseries as of grandeurs; and its disappearance is for good. What was admirable in it was the endurance of the human heart in the sterile places, and the mysterious flowering from it, amid this desolation, of a great faith. The death of a religion, no more than the decay of other institutions, should perplex or disturb; all these alike are the work o

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IV

IV

The stars were coming out in the sky; the coolness of the night was already in the air. The old Arab had long ago departed; the kif-smoking youth were gone. I was alone under the vine trellis, with the dark lines of the palm grove before me in the falling night. The proprietor, a mild-faced and gentle-mannered old Arab, came, as I rose to go, with a few pleasant words, and gave me a small branch of orange-flowers and a spray of the white flower of the palm. “ C’est le mâle ,” he said with a smil

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I

I

IT was a coast-line hardly raised above the sea. On that low horizon only a few rare palms silhouetted the far verge above the surf. The pale-blue flood of the sea, lifting measurelessly on and on in the shining levels of fair weather; the thin, white, uneasy line wrinkling down the league-long spits of sand; the slender jets of the tufted palms etching the vacant azure vague—there was nothing more, hour after hour. And “in the afternoon we came unto a land”—but that would be to anticipate. As a

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II

II

The next morning was bright and fair, and I went out to explore the land southward, a stretch of about twenty kilometres to the strait which divides the island from the mainland. We were soon out of the town and almost at once in the fields. The road, extremely dry and sandy, wound over a very open country of scattered farms, with lines and groups of palm and olive, besides other trees, on slightly rolling, bosomy slopes with long and gradual variations of level. It was a pleasant scene in the w

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III

III

I had never made a Jewish pilgrimage. The opportunities for one are rare, for the Jews are not a pilgrim people. There is on the island, however, a place which is described as a point of their pious journeying for centuries, and thither I repaired. It is the synagogue at Hara-Srira, a village of seven hundred inhabitants, which, with a neighboring and larger village, concentrates the Jewish population of the island in their segregated life. It was only a few kilometres away, and I reached it by

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IV

IV

I had not forgotten the hunting of the lotus, but it was now more clearly defined as a search for the jujubier , which is identified with the ancient plant. Persistent inquiry revealed the probability of a lonely specimen some five miles off in the country. We set off by a new route to the southeast, and away from the more travelled roads. The track was rough, and the horses toiled through heavy sands. The farm we were seeking was not on the road, and we left the carriage standing and tramped fo

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V

V

The marvellous boy was waiting at the pier; the sail was set; the steamer, a distant film of gray smoke on the horizon, was sighted; and we cast off. It was a pleasant sail but without the romance of the landing. The boy, almost in my arms, sat steering the boat, and conversed with me with glances of his brown eyes; the sad-faced father amidships gazed vacantly over the sea. We laid a straight course, and it was too soon finished. The embarkation was easy. The old man gave me his benediction wit

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I

I

ABSALOM ENGLAND, a tall grizzled Arab and sea-pilot, saluted me on the deck. The combination of names, race, and occupation might have seemed peculiar to me once, but I was proof against any African vagary. He was a land-pilot now, and took charge of me and mine. I did not lose my liberty, but I had unknowingly parted with all responsibility for myself; thereafter, except in consular guard or barred in my hotel, I was under his incessant watch and ward. I even began to have some value in my own

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II

II

We were finishing our late nooning at the café which pleased me best near the little park with the old Roman statues by the sea, where the handful of resident Europeans liked to take the air at evening. I was engaged in my favorite occupation of regarding the street. The little room was crowded with natives seated close, quietly gaming or doing nothing; Turkish officers rolled by in carriages; there was continuous passing; a half-dozen gamins played in the street, the most eager-faced, the most

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III

III

A drive in the oasis was always worth having; the sky was the purest blue, it was brisk desert air in the nostrils, and notwithstanding my misadventure with the Jewish village I yielded to Absalom’s programme and went to see how the negroes fared at their own rendezvous. It was a lesson to me not to prejudge even a trifling adventure in a new land. The sight was piquant. The village was a little collection of conical roofed huts with brush fences round each one; a few palms feathered the sky ove

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IV

IV

The consul had made me his friend by incessant kindness. He had at the start insisted on my taking my first meal in Tripoli with him, and since then I had lived almost as much at his table as at the hotel, which was a blessing, not to say a charity. He was a scholarly gentleman, long resident in the Levant, and familiar with the Moslem world, though his appointment to Tripoli was of recent date. It was to this last fact, perhaps, that I owed the rarest of my privileges, an invitation to visit th

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V

V

The British consul, who had also shown me attention, arranged for me to visit the Turkish school of arts and crafts. Hassan Bey, who seemed to be an aid of the Vali, waited on us one morning at the Consulate, and we set out to walk to the school. Hassan Bey was an exile from Daghestan, of a fine military figure, middle-aged, thick-set, with a pleasant countenance; his gray whiskers became his energetic face; he had a look of power and the grave authority of character. He wore a sword; his sleeve

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VI

VI

It was night. Absalom and I were in the Arab quarter, on our way to see some Soudanese dancing. There were few passers in the deep-shadowed, silent, blind streets that grew darker and seemed more mysterious as we penetrated deeper into the district. We had gone a considerable distance. From time to time a man would meet us, and then another. We seemed to be going from precinct to precinct under some sort of escort. I noticed that Absalom had many hesitations; once or twice he refused to go furth

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VII

VII

I went out for a last drive with the British consul toward the oasis of Gergarish, which lies westward of the city, a new direction for me. He was familiar with the Mediterranean; and, the talk falling on the classical background of North Africa, I told him of my search for the lotus at Djerba. He avowed his belief that much of the Greek mythic past had its local habitation on these coasts, and gave me a striking and quite unexpected instance. I had supposed that Lethe was an underground stream

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VIII

VIII

I had loitered for the last time in the street of the blueness and lingered in the souks of the Djerba merchants and especially in the little shop of a mild-mannered Soudanese dealer where I gathered up the curious objects that had been slowly collecting there for me to serve as mementos—things of gourd and hide, of skin and straw, a few ostrich plumes. I had photographed the baker’s shop, and stopped at the intersection of the four corners to look once more at the ever-passing figures of the in

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IX

IX

I went on deck. It was a May night with a fresh, cold wind. There was a bright star over the crescent moon which hung well down the west, and all the heavens were bright, but not too bright. I leaned on the rounds of a rope ladder of the rigging by the ship’s side aft, and was alone; it was cold, and the passengers were few. I noticed on the horizon a dark shadow half-risen from the waters and mounting toward the moon; it rose rapidly, and grew black as it neared the light above. It was like a h

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