Part 1

Chapter 13,972 wordsPublic domain

NORTH AFRICA AND THE DESERT

SCENES AND MOODS

BY GEORGE E. WOODBERRY

NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1914

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

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I TUNISIAN DAYS II TLEMCEN III FIGUIG IV TOUGOURT V SCENES AND VISIONS VI ON THE MAT VII DJERBA VIII TRIPOLI

TUNISIAN DAYS

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TUNISIAN DAYS

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 swept the crescent horizon inland, low and misty, centred a little to the south by the obscure white of far Tunis. Carthage is the first thought of the traveller; his instant memory is of Phoenician ships, and his imagination is of Scipio and Regulus—these are the sights they saw.

The steamer plied up the long canal that makes the shallow, broad lake navigable to the docks some miles beyond; flamingoes flew to the right and left over the level lapping waters, fresh in the raw, damp, almost rainy air; and gradually Tunis drew in sight, like a great white flower on the bosom of the sloping uplands, strange, solitary, unexpected, with minarets and the island look of a Moslem city.

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 ever-dissolving banks of faces, a covey of all nations, round the bell-timed play, and to the vaudeville stage with gymnasts, French acting, fat Jewess dancers, and a world lightly enjoying itself, as it looked from railed low boxes on the spacious floor—men, women, children, with tables, glasses, straws, and bright-colored things to drink, waiters, musicians—always a pretty scene, with incidents, and rich in human relations; or one went more gravely by a stairway to the privacy of baccarat in its upper seclusion of the visiting card. It was a pleasant and polite place wherever one might stroll about, and in every corridor and at all hours the grand toilette of capitals, men and women—even adventurers—of the world. The old beylic of Tunis seemed far away; at least, one was still in Christendom.

I stepped out on the sidewalk after dinner, on a broad avenue with trees. At the brilliant crossing carriages were passing with drawn screens; and, as they drove slowly by, fingers held back the curtains, and from time to time glimpses of women’s figures were disclosed of quite a different type from any within doors—ladies of wealthy native families taking the air, and curious to see the French streets by night. So I learned that it was the eve of Leilet-el-Kadir, the twenty-sixth of Ramadan, the night of power commemorating the descent of the Koran on earth, a grand Mohammedan feast; and I went forthwith into old Tunis on my first voyage of discovery. Festivity reigned. On every hand were lights of all varieties; the minarets aloft were outlined with them; in the narrow streets they were as the multitude of the stars for number, colored and clustered, hung and looped and festooned, flaring and lanterned, a fine illumination in the obscurity; and under them an animated throng of all ages, beautifully dressed for the occasion—a city, a race, and a faith _en fête_.

I sat down at last in the café-crowded Place Halfouine, one of the principal open spaces or squares of the old city, not large, and surrounded by low, rather mean, buildings. It was a nightscene, closed in by shadows, the foreground brightened by irregularly placed open cafés with tables outside and benches within, all completely filled with men, drinking, smoking, playing at simple games, quite orderly, without boisterous noise or muscular disorder, or joking—admirable public behavior. It charmed by its novelty—costumes and persons, mass without individuality—the scene of a new land. What folly to think that there are no more worlds to discover! The scene was to me as if no one had ever looked on it before. I observed the faces, the attitudes, the doings of this strange people as if I had just landed from another world; and I would gladly have stayed longer, but, with the early closing habits of Moslems, the square began to thin, and I went with the rest through the fast-emptying street with a glad feeling that in a world, now grown altogether too small and neighborly, I had happened upon one last true relic of the “far away.”

It was four days later, however, that the true holiday came, the feast of rejoicing after Ramadan is over—Little Bairam. It is celebrated at Tunis with special zeal. The morning streets were overflowing with men and children in their best apparel; but the latter, in particular, beautifully attired. Such gold jackets, such tiny burnooses, such scarlet and crimson, turquoise and emerald—and pinks! Such chubby fat faces in their barbaric borders of clothes—or delicate, refined features, stamped with race, set off by their greens and blues! Such vivacity, too; pure childish fun and pleasure in a national holiday! There were strings of open carts of the rudest construction—like tip-carts for gravel—completely filled with these children heaped up like nosegays, their brilliancy of color set off by the rudeness of the common cart. This seemed one of their principal pleasures—taking a ride. But there were others. In a packed cross-street I was addressed by two gallant lads of perhaps fifteen, who were selling tickets at an entrance; with faces and figures full of hospitable welcome to the stranger, they invited me in, and I went. Inside was a small, barn-like theatre with a curtain, a stage and an audience; and there I saw “the shadows,” pictures thrown upon a screen, and the histrionic art was thus practised with lifelike effect. I had read of “the shadows,” but I never expected to see them. I came out after a while, and the boys saluted me with very cheerful and animated smiles as I passed them. I spied another show a little farther on; and this, undaunted by my former experience, I also entered. It was the puppets—also a traveller’s treasure-trove—the French gendarme was the universal and unpitied victim, and the plots were realistic incidents from things as they are. The audience was almost wholly of children, from six years or less to twelve or more, many of them with nurses or attendants; they took an active and even excited interest, and did the necessary reckonings and sums which the transactions on the stage called for, and shouted out the answers as at a school exhibition, it might be, though the transactions in question were not of a sort ever shown at an American school, and would have evoked much remonstrance; but the children were very happy through it all, thoroughly enjoyed it, in fact. I went behind the curtain and saw the puppets engineered; and I left the little theatregoers with fresh ideas of juvenile amusements.

So all the morning I passed among the gayly decked crowd, with one and another small adventure, always handsomely treated, aided, saluted. A people of kind and gentle manners, old and young; and I am glad that I first saw them so fortunately in their days of pleasantry and taking pride in their own. The experience threw an atmosphere of cheerfulness over the land and the people, and softened many a darker scene of their common days, of their penury and hardship—their load of life. I could always think, even when all was at its worst, that they still “had seasons that only bade live and rejoice,” when many went bravely clad and fed full, and the whole city was vivid with a spirit of general joy. The fixed expression of the crowd was one of resigned patience under habitual control; the gayety, the happiness, the holiday were relieved on a grave background—a temperament, a character, an essential living, unknown to me, something secret, profound. It was my first true contact with Islam. One way, at least, by which a religion may properly be measured is by its efficient power on those who profess it; certainly the Moslem faith is very effective on its believers; the sincerity of that faith is the first thing one learns about it in practical observation. How often since then have I gathered with them at this and other fêtes, and seen the carpeted streets and tapestried walls, the solemn processions, the robes of state, the fine horses, the men and the arms, all the barbaric display; illuminations, fireworks, parades; but I have never been so struck, as in these first Tunisian days, with the spirit of gentle happiness that made my earliest impression of the race as I met it on the shore of the sea.

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 crossing of the long gray roads, with a few buildings for the business of the line, vast spaces round about, possibly slightly improved, with fields or orchards or little groves, a crowd of loafers hanging on the gates or fence of the enclosure to whom the arrival of the train was the day’s event, a farm wagon of modern make, with horses, awaiting some expected passenger and driving off to some home lost in the expanse; in a word, the impression was of colonial things, of the opening up of a country, of reclaiming the soil. What one really saw everywhere was a frontier.

In the newspapers there was the same absorbing theme—colonization; the local news, the daily happenings were characteristic of an agricultural, industrial, commercial life of the nature of an invasion of the waste. Here large depots for machinery were rising; there men of broad enterprise, or syndicate companies had planted olives, or corn, or vines, on a vast scale over miles of territory; further on, a new line was making accessible the phosphate wealth of Gafsa. Modern civilization, mechanism, communication, organized exploitation, penetrating a new country, was what one felt, as if that region were truly new like a savage land. Yet how many times civilization, in one or another form, has rolled over it! In reality, it is one of the most ancient beds of the human torrent, bare and forsaken as it looks now. And now it is again a new frontier—the place of the invasion of a new era by a new race with new designs.

This impression, nevertheless, is mainly a thing of the mind, of recollection and observation; to the eye it is not so noticeable, such is the extent of the natural spaces, the contour and atmosphere of things held in these far horizons, the new temperament of that landscape, and so characteristically native still is the aspect of indigenous human life not yet displaced. The earth has the look of the wild. Whatever may have formerly been its culture and occupancy, all had lapsed back to the primitive; a land of plains—melancholy tracts under a gray sky or vast empty spaces under a brilliant sun—edged in far distance by lone mountains, caressed on broken shores by a barren sea; full of solitude, sadness. Here and there some great ruin stood, not unlike Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, or even cities of ruins; the land is strewn with them—temples, courts, baths, cisterns, floors, columns, reliefs, arches of triumph, theatres; but they seldom count to the eye. Antiquity, like the frontier, is also a thing of the mind, in the main; the past and the future are both matter of reflection, in the background of memory and knowledge it may be, but not noticeable in the general landscape. It is a place where human fate seems transitory, an insignificant detail, as on the sea—or like animal life in nature, indifferent.

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 cemeteries, crisscrossed with Barbary fig, and by gardens adjoining the sea, and struck out into the plain, spotted with salty tracts and little cultivated. It is thus that a ride on this soil is apt to begin—with a cemetery; it is often the master note that gives the mood to a subsequent landscape, a mood of sadness that is felt to be sterile also, impregnated with fatalism. A Moslem burying-ground may be, at rare places, a garden of repose; a forsaken garden it is usually, even when most dignified and beautiful with its turbaned pillars in the thick cypresses; but it is always a complete expression of death. The cemetery lies outside at the most used entrance of a town; and, as a rule, in the country it is of a melancholy indescribable—it lies there in so naked a fashion, a hopeless and huddled stretch of withered earth in swells and hummocks, hardly distinguishable from common dirt and débris—the eternal potter’s field. It is a fixed feature in the Tunisian landscape, which is made of simple elements, whose continuous repetition gives its monotony to the land. A ride only rearranges these elements under new lights and in new horizons.

Here the great plain was the common background; my course to Sfax lay over it, broken at first by a blossoming of gardens round a town or village, and twice I came out on the sea; but always the course was over a plain with elemental mark and quality—with an omnipresence as of the sea on a voyage. The line between man’s domain and nature is as sharply drawn on this plain as on a beach; where man has not labored the scene stretches out with nature in full possession, as on the ocean; his habitations and territory are islands. Everything is seen relieved on great spaces, individualized, isolated; fields of grain, green and moving under a strong land wind; or olive groves—silvery gleams—on the hillsides, clumps of trees, or long lines of them, whole hillsides, it may be; or there are gardens, closed, secluded, thickly planted with pear or peach or fig or other fruit, with vegetables, perhaps, beneath and palms above. The figure scenes, too, are of the same recurring simplicity—a man leading a spirited horse in the street, a camel meagre and solemn and solitary silhouetting the sky anywhere within a range of miles, boys in couples herding sheep in the middle distances. The town or village emerging at long intervals is a monochord—a point of dazzling white far off, dissolving on approach into low houses, a confused mass of uneven roofs skirting the ground except where the minaret and the palm rise and unite it to heaven—to the fire-veined evening sky, deep and tranquil, or the intense blue noon, or the pink morning bloom of the spiritualized scene of the dawn. The streets are silent; by the Moorish café lie or sit or crouch motionless figures, sometimes utterly dull, like logs on the earth, or else holding pipes or gazing at checkers, or vacant—always somnolent, statuesque, sedentary. There are no windows, no neighborhood atmosphere—only a stagnant exterior. The feeling of a retreat, of repose, of being far away is always there. These towns have a curious mixture of the eternal and the ruined in their first aspect; as of things left by the tide, derelicts of life all. A ride in the Sahel is a slow, kaleidoscopic combination of these things, a reiteration without new meaning—the town, the cemetery, the grove, the garden, the plain, the fields, camels and sheep, and herdboys—horizons, somnolence, tranquillity. What a ride! and then to come out on the sea at Monastir and Mahdia—such a homeless sea! There may be boats with bending sails, the fisher’s life, suggesting those strange outlying islands they touch at, exile islands from long ago, where Marius found hiding, and where the Roman women of pleasure of the grand world were sent to live and die, out of the world—still the home of a race, blending every strain of ancient blood. Mahdia, once an Arab capital and long a seat of power in different ages, is a famous battle name in Mohammedan and crusading and corsair annals; it stood many a great siege on its rocky peninsula, in Norman and other soldiering hands, however lifeless it may seem now; but as one looks on its diminutive harbor, a basin hewn in the rock, it seems now to speak rather of the enmity of the sea and the terror of tempest on this dangerous coast—shallow waters and inhospitable shores. History, human courage, was but a wave that broke over it, and is gone like the others, a momentary foam; but the sea is always the sea. Everywhere one must grow familiar with the neighboring coast-line before the sea will lay off that look of enmity it wears to all at the first gaze; it is foreign always by nature. To descend here at Mahdia, and to walk by its waves, to hear its roll, to look off to its gulfs and hilltops afar, however brilliant may be the scene, is to invite the deepest melancholy that the waste sea holds—so meaningless that world lies in its monotony all about. I remembered the Moorish prince who here, after his long victories, stood reflecting on the men who were great before him, and how their glory was gone. It is a more desolate port now. One gladly turns to the land—and there meets the plain, equally vaguely hostile.

So I rode on by the unceasing stretch of the way, through town and by garden and grove, into the ever-enveloping plain that opened before. It was like putting to sea at every fresh start; and late in the afternoon, on the last far crest of the rolling plain, I saw the great ruin, El Djem, that rose with immense commanding power and seemed to dominate a world of its own sterile territory. It is a great ruin—a colosseum; arches still in heaven, and piled and fallen rocks of the old colossal cirque; it still keeps its massive and uplifted majesty, its Roman character of the eternal city cast down in the waste, its monumental splendor—a hoar and solemn token of the time when there were inhabitants in this desolation to fill the vast theatre on days of festival, and the line of its subject highway stretched unbroken to Tunis and southward, a proud, unending urban way of villas, a road of gardens, where now only stagnates the salty plain, sterile, lifeless. The hamlet beside it is hardly perceptible, like a mole-hill, a mere trace of human life. I sat out the sunset; and after, under a cold, starry sky, Orion resplendent in the west and the evening star a glory, I set off again by the long road through the sparkling April darkness and a wind that grew winter-cold with night, southward still—the vast heavens broken forth with innumerable starry lights—till after some hours of speeding on a route that was without a living soul, I came again on belated groups of walking Bedouins and fragrant miles of gardens dark by the roadway and many a thick olive grove, and drew up at Sfax.

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 spaces about the market were littered with young boys at their open-air breakfast, which may be seen at most Mediterranean seaports on the Moslem side—the vender beside his cooking apparatus, the boys with saucers of soup or sops of bread, and on all sides the beginnings of labor; but all this meagre human life was framed in an exquisite marine view beyond. The wharf was thickly lined with the strange-looking boats of the sponge-fishers, their Greek flags at half-mast in honor of Good Friday, their sailors in Albanian costumes, their gear heaping the open spaces with ropes and nets and endless tackle. It was all charming, one of the vignettes of travel that will haunt the memory for years—the odors, the little tasks, the look of the toil of the sea, the sponges in dark heaps, the blue, limpid morning air crossed with strange spars and ropes, and the host of fluttering flags.

Later in the day I got its companion scene from a hilltop some miles south of the city, whence one commands a view of olive orchards sloping down in one vast grove, in lines of regular intervals, as far as the eye can reach, and lost to sight on all sides with nothing to break the expanse—only millions of olive-trees regularly planted, filling the entire broad, circling landscape. A little tower surmounts the hilltop and from its round apex one surveys the whole; the sense of this dot-like centre enhances the impression that the scene makes of a living weft of mathematical lines, like an endless spider’s web. It is a unique sight. The geometrical effect is curious, like an immense garden-diagram; the similarity of the round, bullet-like heads of the trees, all alike in shape, is a novel trait of monotony; the silver-gray of the foliage, mixed with the reddish tones of the soil, gives, in so broad a view, a ground earth color quite new to the eye; and the sense of multitude in which, nevertheless, individuality remains persistent and acutely distinct on so vast a scale makes an indelible impression.