Part 11

The garden of Count Landon is botanically interesting, and a delightful refuge from glare and dust and importunity. It is not in the ordinary sense a garden; it is rather a great plantation or shrubbery divided by winding paths. The excessive neatness of these paths, built of hard mud and carefully sanded, rather spoils the effect of the wilderness to an English eye. There is abundance of running water, and the palm, which likes to have “its toes in the water and its head in the sun,” flourishes exceedingly. With it are many bamboos, peppers, oranges, and various species of _ficus_,—the usual subtropical assemblage. I observe no tree-ferns; yet the conditions appear very suitable. It is one continuous jumble; there is no attempt at grouping, which would perhaps have produced a more noble and more natural effect. But as you come suddenly here or there to the verge of this thicket, you are startled and delighted by the contrast of mellow shade within, and the shimmering glare without;—a contrast quite after the manner of Biskra, which revels in the juxtaposition of the incongruous. Those who come to the desert in search of peace and quiet may find themselves in the plight of the guests of a Swiss innkeeper who advertised: “My hotel is recommended to those in search of solitude; thousands come here in search of solitude every summer.” But in the garden of M. Landon you may be at rest, and dream dreams and see visions, as I did. I had been reading certain modern French writers who are concerned to prove that the inhabitants of this country, the _indigènes_, are not Arab at all. They don’t deny the Arab conquest, but hold that the claim to have “come in with Okba” is as empty a boast as among us is the assertion, “We came over with the Conqueror.” They are arguing to a case. If the native is not of Semitic origin there is hope for him. He has been more or less Christian before, so he may be Christianized again, or anti-clerical radical socialized, or whatever is necessary to make him an up-to-date Frenchman. But with all their theorizing nothing is effected. The Arab,—or Berber,—goes on in his Arabian,—or Berberic,—way, unmoved by any attraction of French politics and irreligion. How is he to be broken in? A chance remark of an American fellow-traveller opened to me the great discovery. History supplies other instances of idle words changing its course. There is to-day a great civilizing influence at work on cosmopolitan lines such as the world has never seen before. It has already profoundly affected some of the greatest of human interests,—religion, commerce, and clothes. It will ultimately bring about the abolition of war, because no one will have time to fight. It is permeating the most unlikely quarters; if I mistake not my German neighbours this evening at dinner were continually alluding to it; and what Germany thinks to-day, Europe will think to-morrow. The Arab, or Berber, must be brought into the movement. He must play golf. My American friend informed me that golf has changed the habits of the American business man. It appears that since Columbus arrived this individual has never taken any exercise; he has sat in his office glued to his desk from dewy morn till long after sunset. All that is over, and in a moment. At 3 p.m. he now furtively affixes to his office door a notice, “Back in ten minutes,” and is off to the American Sandwich. Saturday is a whole, not a half, holiday; and Sunday has become a day of especial unrest. If in the twinkling of an eye such a slave of ingrained habits may find salvation, need we despair of the poor Arab, or worry ourselves about his pedigree? To all appearance he is usually short of a job; his posture of seemingly permanent repose is explained to me as one of waiting till his dates are ripe. Golf will alter his whole attitude of mind as of body. Local conditions are most favourable. The Sahara contains the finest sand-bunkers in the world. The creation of greens is merely a matter of sinking Artesian wells, a laudable process on which the French Government is already embarked, but with no full appreciation of its real significance. Temporary club-houses of galvanized iron would meet all requirements for the present. At once the Arab’s (I must continue to call him the Arab, in spite of my French authors) distinctive dress would go. No one who has not put it on can realize in what a cuirass, in what folds, he is involved. As he is he could never hope to drive a decent ball. Array him in a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers and putties (I observe that his French conquerors are greatly affecting putties) and his aloofness disappears. At a stroke he enters the world-movement; Colonel Bogey will oust the Lord Okba; and when Hadji ben Mohammed ben Yakoub comes over to represent the Biskra and North Sahara Golf Club at St. Andrews may I be there to see him win.

A little way further south than the garden of Count Landon, on the Touggourt road lie the scattered native hamlets known to the French as _La Vieille Biskra_, the crumbling houses of a ragged population. Here is the very _ne plus ultra_ of Arab untidiness. But the play of sunbeams through the palm trees’ grateful shade turns squalor into beauty. Arab villages are often half in ruins. Their irregular construction of blocks of dried mud gives them the aspect of the homes of animals rather than of men,—the creation perhaps of some gigantic ant. When it rains they not infrequently fall down. And the labour of rebuilding is not lightly undertaken.

Biskra is soon to lose its present distinction as the end of the railway line. The rails are being rapidly laid towards Touggourt, 212 kilometres to the south, a desert town where splendid gardens flourish beneath the shade of 200,000 palm trees. The irrepressible motor-car has already stirred its dust. The prudent Michelin guide describes the road thither as _piste carrossable mais imprudente à suivre par mauvais temps_. You are advised to take mats to lay down in the softer places for the car to run over. But what happens in the event of a serious breakdown is not explained. When the rail is finished the enterprising tourist may pass by Biskra as a mere wayside station and continue to the end. But he may be only going farther to fare worse. It does not appear that the distant towns of the Sahara present any special points of interest beyond their existence. Yet perhaps there are some to whom the desert calls as to others the veldt. But they will stick to their camels and their mules, and merely use the railway extension as a jumping-board for further explorations.

To him who strives to peer beneath the obvious surface nothing in Biskra is more significant than the statue of Cardinal Lavigerie. It stands in the main street close to the luxurious Royal Hotel, hard by the quarter of the Arab cafés and the street of the Ouled-Naïl dancing-girls, a symbol of the eternal amidst the evanescent, a protest for God against the Devil and the world. And it looks south. Thousands of miles away, across the vast expanse of the continent, another statue looks north. Rhodes and Lavigerie, two types of our civilization, further apart in intention and in ideals of human conduct than are their statues, look forth over Africa from their separate standpoints, the Africa for which each spent his strength. Both worked to bring to the Dark Continent the accumulated wealth of light to which Europe is heir; they drew perhaps on different departments in the great storehouse; they directed the illumination to different points; but to evolve order from chaos, to substitute freedom for tyranny, to impose peace even, if need were, by the sword,—these were the objects which both pursued.

The neighbourhood of Biskra is rich in memories of Sidi Okba, the barber of the Prophet, and the first of the Arab conquerors. It was he who pushed westward from Kairouan through Barbary to the Atlantic, having defeated the Berbers under Koceïla and other chieftains. Arrived at the shore of the ocean he raised the standard of the Prophet crowned with the crescent, and indicating with it the course of the sun from its rising to its setting, dashed forward and breasted the waves with his horse, crying, “God of Mahomet, were I not stopped by the waves of this sea, I would go to the ends of the earth to carry the glory of thy name, to fight for thy religion and to destroy those who will not believe on thee!” On his return journey he was attacked by a force of Berbers under Koceïla near Biskra and killed with three hundred of his followers. He was buried in the oasis which bears his name, and his tomb is an object of pilgrimage and veneration.

But the Berbers, if they had killed one leader, did not succeed in maintaining their independence. That they adopted the invaders’ religion is not very surprising. Their previous religions seem to have sat lightly on them: idolaters, pagans, converted in numbers to Judaism, orthodox Christians, Donatists,—they had been all in turn. The dogmatic simplicity of Islam is summed up in the words, “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Prophet of God.” It only demands a belief in this one God and the veneration of Mahomet, last of the prophets, invested by God with the mission to bring back men to the religion of the ancient patriarchs and to the acknowledgment of the Unity of the Godhead. It is completed by belief in three revealed books, the Bible, the Gospel, and the Koran. It denies the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus Christ, who is regarded only as a prophet, but allowed to have possessed a special nature.

The simple formula of Mohammedanism was not very difficult for a man with no prejudices to accept. It meant, of course, more than appeared from its positive assertion; it was directed alike against the Trinitarianism of the Christians and the idolatry or image-worship of pre-Mohammedan Arabians. In its rejection of anthropomorphism it stands on a high intellectual plane; and it is one of the marvels of history that such an abstraction as the God of Mahomet should have been sufficient to rouse the Prophet’s followers to their pitch of conquering enthusiasm. Races beaten in battle no doubt easily accepted its primary proposition. “People follow the religion of their kings,” says an Arab proverb. But there was more behind. The Prophet attached to his religious doctrine a very precise ethical code, a moral system admirable on the whole in its exposition of the duties of man to man; yet in its permission of polygamy regarding women as inferior to men. And on the political side he united the functions of the priest, the judge and the king. It follows that however enlightened the main basis of Mohammedanism it is fundamentally opposed alike to Christianity and to modern theories of democratic government and the equality of the sexes. “Men are superior to women on account of the qualities with which God has gifted the one above the other,” says the Koran.

After the manner of organized religions all sorts of complicated additions have been made to the originally simple rule of the Prophet, which enjoined prayer, ablutions, fasting, abstinence from wine and the flesh of the pig. These accretions are largely concerned with the veneration of saints and the exorcising of spirits. Among the former not the least is Sidi Okba, canonized rather, we may suppose, for his prowess as a conqueror and his zeal as a propagandist than for any peculiar sanctity of life.

The oasis of Sidi Okba lies about twenty-one kilometres south-east of Biskra. The road crosses a level plain, and is at present in a rather rough condition, but is being re-metalled. The drive is a pleasant one, with the long line of mountains on the left fading away into a blue distance; on the right the desert with an occasional oasis marked by its group of palms. As we approach Sidi Okba the dark belt visible from Biskra takes shape. The little town lies in the midst of an immense group of date-palms, of all sizes, some of great age; one has the honour of being described as the oldest palm in Africa. Sidi Okba has not been in any way Europeanized, it is still the unadulterated East; its houses built of mud, of one story; its streets narrow, winding and very unclean. It appears to be greatly over-populated, and the mass of its inhabitants to be very poor. The streets are thronged with men, but scarcely a woman is to be seen. The stranger, who will do well on this occasion to bring a guide, will be quite unmolested, and to all appearance totally disregarded. A main street full of little shops, curious and interesting, leads to the market-place, which is the very climax of Arab untidiness. Sidi Okba is not a place for the squeamish.

The chief object of interest is the mosque, which is considered to be the oldest Mohammedan building in Africa. It is a square building surrounded by a portico, with a flat roof supported on twenty-six rudely carved columns. The saint’s tomb is contained in a little chapel which it is unlawful for the unbeliever to enter. The mosque and its porticoes are greatly resorted to by students and pilgrims; it contains little cells in which they are lodged, and endowments have been created by pious benefactors for their support. There are many present to-day: here a single student reading laboriously a passage of the Koran written on a wooden slab; there a little group of doctors squatting in a circle apparently discussing a knotty point, but in reality only capping each other’s quotations from the sacred book. In an adjoining room is the usual Arab school—a number of boys surrounding a seated master who is armed with a long cane, and yelling their lesson (the Koran again) with all their might. It is all very far apart from the workaday western world. Yet even into this very shrine of esoteric Islam has the West edged its way. On the walls of the mosque hang highly-coloured prints of the holy cities of Arabia, Mecca and Medina. My guide pointed them out to me as objects of interest. In the corner of the view of Medina I noticed the words, “All rights reserved. The Cairo Punch.”

On one of the pillars is engraved in early Cufic characters the grandly simple inscription, “This is the tomb of Okba, son of Nafè. May God have mercy on him.” The wooden door of the mosque is very finely carved in a curious design. It is said to have been brought from Tobna, in the high plateau of the Hodna, and to have been formerly covered with precious metals and jewels, which were sold for the benefit of the mosque; but this may be doubted.

To obtain a view of the township and the oasis you may ascend the minaret. Here your guide will not accompany you. Arabs object to any prying eye surveying their roofs, which are the resort of their women. They have perhaps grown accustomed to the irrepressible European, who will always go to the highest point at all hazards; he is also beneath their contempt, and in any case will depart and be no more seen. With one of their own countrymen it is different; he may be the European’s servant, but he is a fellow-religionist and not a mere animal like his employer. So the European is tolerated with a shrug. For the office of _muezzin_, the custodian of the mosque, whose business it is to ascend the minaret and call the faithful to prayer, a blind man with a brazen voice is in much request. If not actually, the _muezzin_ is conventionally blind. So he will light a candle to guide you up the dark staircase, and accompany you to the top. The town lies below you and all around,—a curious collection of square mud boxes. On many of the roofs are basket-work erections, which are explained to you as the framework of tents, in which the inhabitants sleep during the great summer heats. Over the heads of countless palm trees your eye ranges to the desert, bounded on the north by the cliffs of Barbary, limitless to the south. And southwards you will gaze till you grow weary of immensity.

Perhaps nowhere more than at Sidi Okba, under the shadow of the great conqueror’s tomb, may you feel the haughty disdain of the Arab. He stalks past you apparently in utter unconsciousness of your presence. You belong to a civilization which for the moment has conquered his in war. Allah has willed it. But you represent with your anthropomorphic religion, your abominable demeanour and social arrangements, especially your own lack of dignity and the licence you allow to your women, all that he holds most accursed. You attach undue importance to human life in this world; and this leads you into a ridiculous state of worry about trumpery matters of sanitation and so forth, which are quite beneath the notice of a man concerned with the higher mysteries of the universe and considerations of eternity. Your grovelling disregard of the really great things gives you leisure to devote yourself to such trifles as trade and transport, and so you grow rich, which is rather to your discredit than the reverse. Wherefore the Arab expresses his contempt for you by the supremest indifference, striving only to preserve the hem of his robe from contact with the unclean.

The ordinary traveller will perhaps leave Biskra with no great regret, however much he may have found of interest in his visit. But to those rare spirits among us who endeavour to repair the mischief caused by our first parents, Biskra presents very special opportunities. There is very little to see, and nothing whatever to do; it is a capital place for sitting in the shade with a brilliant sky above. The Garden of Eden is an Oriental ideal; these Arabs who exist in contemplation of their palm trees are striving to live up to it. It is not at all an English ideal. The primeval curse lies heavy on the Englishman; he has made the best of it and has come to regard work as a virtue. Not only by the sweat of his brow must he earn his living; by the sweat of his brow must he achieve his pleasure. A paradise in which he could not knock a ball about or kill the other animals were no paradise to him. Yet even among our strenuous people there are emancipated individuals, to whose simple needs a sunny climate and regular meals at a comfortable hotel suffice:—

“Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A flask of Wine, a Book of Verse,”

such will find a congenial resting-place.

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_IX—THE SAHARA_

The desert in imagination and reality—Underground water—Artesian wells—Mozabites—Touaregs—The camel—Recent developments—Railway projects—The Army of Africa.

“I’ve in the desert with these eyes beheld The hurrying pilgrim to the slow-stepped yield; The rapid courser in the rear remains, While the slow camel still its step maintains.” THE GULISTĀN.

Everyone, it has been said, has his own Sahara. For many of us perhaps the geography lessons of childhood left an impression of an ocean of shifting sand, sometimes separated from the sea by a narrow strip of cultivated land, sometimes extending to the very shore, from which majestic lions, appropriate lords of the inhospitable desert, gaze pensively at the setting sun. If we had the misfortune to be born half a century or more ago, the maps of Africa of the period, with their vast interior emptiness, suggested to our youthful imagination that this unpleasant region extended over the greater part of the continent, the elephant taking the place of the lion in the more southern portions.

“So geographers, in Afric maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o’er unhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns.”

The last generation has seen these mediæval ideas considerably modified. Travel and war have been the means of filling much of the blank space; the arts of peace have followed in their wake; African railways would occupy quite a respectable page in a world-wide Bradshaw; and the Stock Exchange in a searching for economy of syllables has irreverently shortened the poetical Tanganyika to the practical Tank. The great flat plain is last to go;—the millions of acres of rather light soil which the French have been so unaccountably anxious to daub with their colour on the map. We have given up the lions; we know that such carnivorous beasts can only live in a fairly fertile country which supplies sufficient food to their prey. But we have clung to the plain and the sand. Nevertheless it seems that they must go too. We read that you may travel for days in the Sahara on rocky hills and not find enough sand to dry your signature. So perish the beliefs of youth.

Yet to any picture of Algeria the Sahara supplies a romantic background. The sight of a caravan arriving from some distant oasis still has power to stir the imagination. Even in face of our information as to the Sahara’s only partial sterility, we cherish some shreds of wonder at the men who can wring a livelihood and find the means of travel under such inhospitable conditions.

The Sahara has been defined as the region which receives only as an exception any rainfall, whether of Mediterranean origin, or from the tropical regions of West Africa. It is only relatively a desert in the strict sense of the word; no part of it is absolutely without rain, and even in the districts which are reputed the most dry the traveller may meet with violent storms. The generally arid nature of the soil is due to the fact that water circulates not on the surface, but underground. Where it comes to light either by natural or artificial means, a focus of intense cultivation, an oasis, is produced.

The Algerian Sahara is only a portion of the great desert of Northern Africa. Yet it is ten times the size of Algeria itself. It consists roughly of two great depressions separated by an isthmus of calcareous hills. Each of these basins contains a great expanse of dunes, and the two chief groups of oases occur in their lower levels. A generation ago it was commonly believed that the Sahara was the bed of a sea which had disappeared at no very distant date; and projects were formed of admitting the Mediterranean by means of a canal. But more precise knowledge has shown that its sterility is due to other causes; that like the rest of the continent it has its ancient conformation of mountain and plain; that it has distinctive flora and fauna long established; and that the portion which lies below the level of the Mediterranean is of very small extent.

Between eighty and ninety per cent of the surface is of rock, slightly undulating and broken occasionally by perpendicular ravines and large crevasses. Here, as a rule, no water can be found, and the only vegetation is an occasional thorny shrub. With the regions of the sand dunes it is different. Their sterility is by no means absolute. They have a vigorous vegetation of their own, which will support camels, and even sheep at a favourable season. They absorb eagerly the rainfall which runs off the rocky plateaux, and acting as a sponge retain it for a long period. Their comparative barrenness is due only to the dryness of the climate; wherever they can be irrigated they become fertile.