Part 6

It was not an art of structure, though at times, as in the tower at Mansourah, it has structural nobility, or, as elsewhere, lines of grace; neither the architects nor the workmen were expert builders, and they treated structural elements—the column, the arch, the dome—decoratively; these were subordinated to a decorative intention. The genius for decoration, however, found its main channel in the treatment of surfaces, sometimes curved and limited, but usually flat and spacious. It sprang rather from the art of graving than of modelling, and flowered especially in the line—arabesque. The line was employed in a series of geometric patterns—squares, polygons, circles—symmetrically arranged, and mingled with more or less distinctness; or in rectilineal or curvilineal combinations that were also patterns, repeated indefinitely; or in formalized script based on calligraphy. The origins of this mode go far back into antiquity; but its predominant use is the special trait of Moorish decoration. The second main feature of the art was in its color—mosaic. It is true that the lineal decoration of plaster and wood was painted, in red, blue, and olive-green, but this color has disappeared; for our eyes, so far as color is concerned, it is the mosaic that has survived; and here, too, the mosaic sometimes borrows its interior designs from the patterns of lineal decoration. The origin of this mosaic is also lost in antiquity; the art in one or another of its forms had long been widely diffused in the Mediterranean world. The Roman soil of Africa had been covered with mosaic floors, which may still be seen in beautiful and varied collections of them at Tunis and Sousse; Byzantine work, such as is found at Ravenna and in Sicily, was a living art through the Middle Ages; and the contemporary Persian manufacture of tiles and similar work passed everywhere in the commercial world, and may be closely connected technically with the art in Andalusia. It was for exterior decoration that the mosaic faience was principally employed. The motives of the lineal decoration are few—disks, stars, and the like—and in the floral design only the acanthus formalized is used; similarly, the colors of the mosaic are few—manganese-brown, white, copper-green, iron-yellow, rarely blue. The combination of these few elements—colors and patterns—is unrestricted by any limit, they are undefined by any form, they grow by accretion, and they thus obtain and give the quality of the infinite, the illimitable, which is the most obvious trait of the arabesque. It is an art that plays with form only to escape from it, whether in color or in line.

The charm of this art does not lie merely in its perfect fitness to its light and cheap materials, nor in its easy solving of its own problems, but rather in its kinship to the Arab genius, its response to the desert spirit. This is most deeply felt in the mosques, where it is in contact with the gravest things in life. The mosque is the plainest of sacred places, and delights a Puritan soul. There are no images of humanized deities or deified men; there is neither god nor saint nor mythic story; neither is there any mystery of dogma or speculation to be told in symbolism of material things; there is only unbodied and unformulated religious awe, the worship of the spirit in the spirit. The art that defines has here no function. The Western genius, master of life, is a defining genius; the oriental way is different—it is an effusion, an expansion, an illimitable going forth. This art, too, with its few motives, its paucity of fact, its monotony of structure, yet issuing always on the illimitable, the infinite, resumes the structure of the desert, which is similar in its elements and effects, its composition and its sentiment. It is also completely free from the burden of thought, the fatal gift of Western genius with its hard definings, too avid of knowing, whose art is rather a means to cage than to free the bird of life. It is an art restorative of the senses in their own kingdom—whether in line or color, a pure joy to the eye, a “disembodied joy,” too, as art should be, full of abstraction, yet unconscious of anything beyond the sensuous sphere. It is easy to sum its salient technical points and to indicate its obvious affinities with the mosque, with desert nature, with the Arab genius; but even though he see it, one cannot easily appreciate it in its decay, nor well imagine it in its fresh beauty, as a visible harmony for the soul, without some initiation into the fundamental moods of the race for whom and of whom it was. To me, nevertheless, the sight was a pure delight, as is the memory; a nomad art it seemed, born of the desert and expressive of it, an evanescence of beauty playing on fragile and humble materials, as life in the desert is fragile and humble, and clad in the evanescence of nature—life not too seriously valued, sure of speedy ruin, not worthy of too great outward cost.

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 boys, French soldiers in many colors, and Arabs in hanging folds, with life-worn faces, often emaciated; but I noted as a general characteristic that self-contained, self-reliant immobility of countenance that is the type of border men; it was the crowd of a frontier town. I went back to my hotel under the keen midnight sky at last, thinking of the long and crowded life of the historic past in this old caravanserai of the desert tribes, of the scenes of which I had been reading—the Koran-led army, the battle of the women, the palace feasts, night-long, where pages swung rose censers among the guests and the revelry ended with the morning prayer; of the great figures—the scholar-saint, Sidi bou-Médyen, the ascetic revolutionary, Ibn Toumert, the Berber shepherd boy who found a kingdom, the world conqueror by the sea at Mahdia, the young princes drowned; of the desert courage that had flashed here, a sword from the scabbard, of the desert piety that had here flung away the jewel of life a thousand times, of the generations of desert idealists who in the crowded schools had walked the way of light as it was vouchsafed to them; and in the waking reality of the French border town, whose night scene had depressed me, it seemed an Arabian dream.

FIGUIG

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III

FIGUIG

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 streaks the middle of the steppe with its waste and quicksands, lay behind; but its saline arms still clung to and discolored the surface, and whitened the view westward with dull crystalline deposits. This wide blanching of the gray and red soil striped and threw into relief the rigid scene—aridity, vacancy, solitude, from which emerged the still grandeur of inanimate things. It was the characteristic scene of the high plains—a vague monotony, colored with sterile features flowing on level horizons. As the train ascended nature seemed still to unclothe and uncover, to strip and peel the land; but not continuously. From time to time the steppe lapsed back to a thicker growth of tough-fibred alfa, whose home is on these plains, and bore other dry, sparse, darkish desert plants upon reddish hummocks; on this pasturage distant herds of camels browsed unattended, as on a cattle-range, in the wild spaces fenced by rolling sands; then the climbing train would soon pass again amid low dunes. Few stations, at long intervals; isolated, meagre, they seemed lost in the spreading areas, mere points of supply; the most important was but a village, with sickly trees; but they took on an original character. They were fortified; obviously built for defence, with sallies and retreats in their walls; guarded casemates obliquely commanding all avenues of approach and the walls themselves; doors that were meant to shut. It was a railway in arms, a line of military posts, or blockhouses, as it were, on an unsettled border. The sight gave a tang of war to the silence of the uninhabited country, and reminded one of unseen tribes and of the harsh frontier of Morocco over opposite, south and west. Slowly the mountains sprang up; one had already drifted behind, Djebel-Antar; and now the peaks of the Saharan Atlas, rising sheer from the plain a thousand metres, lay on either hand, bold crests and jutting ranges—Djebel-Aïssa on the left, the Sfissifa on the right in the southwestern sky, Djebel-Mektar straight ahead. We had passed the highest point of the line at an elevation of thirteen hundred metres, and were now on the incline and rapidly approaching the last barrier of the Sahara. We were soon at the foot of Mektar. It was Aïn-Sefra, an important military base.

But I did not think of war; to me Aïn-Sefra is a name of literature and has a touch of personal literary _devoir_; for there in the barren Moslem cemetery, outside the decaying ksar, is buried the poor girl who taught me more about Africa than all other writers; she had the rare power of truth-telling, and lived the life she saw; her books are but remnants and relics of her genius, but she distilled her soul in them—one of the wandering souls of earth, Isabelle Eberhardt. She was only twenty-seven, but years are nothing—she had drunk the cup of life. Here she died in the oued, the torrent river whose bottom I was now skirting, a wide, dry watercourse, strewn with stones, and with roughly indented banks. It was dry now, but on these denuded uplands and surfaces, after a rainfall, which is usually torrential, it fills in a moment with a furious sweep and onset of waters; and thus a few years ago it rose in the October night and tore away the village below the high ground of the French encampment; and there she was drowned. The echo of her soul in mine, long ago at Tunis, was the lure that drew me here.

There, before my eyes, was the sight I had longed to see, just as she had described it. I knew it as one recognizes a lighthouse on a foreign coast, so single, so unique it was—the leap of the red dunes up the defile, fierce as a sword thrust of the far desert through the mountains. That was Africa—the untamed wild, the bastion of nature in her barbarity, the savage citadel of her splendid forces to which man is negligible and human things unknown. The dunes are golden-red, tossed like a stormy, billowing sea; they charge, they leap, they impend—petrified in air; an ocean surf of red sand, touched with golden lights, frozen in the act of the wild wind. They are magnificent in their lines of motion, in their angers of color; but the spirit of them is their _élan_, their drive, flung forward as if to ram and overwhelm the pass with a wide sandy sea. The light on them is a menace; they threaten; nor is it a vain threat; they move with the sure fatality of all lifeless things, they will invade and conquer—a foe to be reckoned with; and to fend the valley against them, man takes a garden, trees, plantations, advancing a van of life against all that lifelessness. It is a superb picture there, among the mountains, a symbol of the struggle—the long battle of vegetable and mineral forces, clothing and desolating the planet; and it holds the rich glow of the African temperament, a spark of the soul of the land.

The train winds on in the bright morning air by a shining koubba, dark palm tufts, and the high, silent tricolor, and goes down the oued, turns the mountain, passes into the rocks, a strange scene of stormy forms and sterile colors, and makes from valley to valley by sharp curves, from oued to oued by deep cuts, piercing and grooving its passage to lower levels through the range of the ksour. Almost from the first it is unimaginable, that landscape. It is all rock in ruins, denuded and shivered, shelving down, disintegrating; fallen avalanches of rotten strata; every kind of fracture; whole hills in a state of breaking up into small pieces, pebbly masses, bitten, slivered. We traverse broken, burnt fields of it, all shingle; expanses of it so, beneath walls cracked and scarified; we curve by scattered bowlders of all sizes and positions, down valleys of stones; new hills open, sharp-edged, jagged—continuous rock. All outlooks are on the waste wilderness crumbling in its own abandonment; all contours are knife-edges; the perspectives are all of angles. In the near open tracts lie relics and remains, mounds, mountains, and hills that have melted away; steep lifts on all curves; and on the sky horizon, following and crossing one another, saw-toothed ranges, obliquely indented with sharp re-entries, or else acute cones and rounded mamelons: the whole changing landscape a ruin of mountains being crumbled and split and blown away. It is an elemental battle-field, where the rock is the victim—a suicide of nature. In this region of extreme temperatures with sudden changes—burning noons and frozen nights, torrid summers and winter snows, downpours of rainfall—the fire and frost, wind and cloudburst have done their secular work; they have stripped and pulverized the softer, outer rock shell, washed it down, blown it away, till the supporting granite and schist are bare to the bone. It is a skeletonized, worn land, all apex and débris; near objects have the form and aspect of ruins, the horizons are serried, the surfaces calcined. It is an upper world of the floored and pinnacled rock, an underworld shivered and strewn with its own fragments, a “gray annihilation”—of the color of cinders. I imagine that the landscapes of the moon look thus.

A mineral world, bedded, scintillant, flaked. It is dyed with color. All life has gone from it, and with the departure of life has come an intensification, an originality, an efflorescence of mineral being. The earlier stages of the ride—the red mountains striped beneath with black, beyond the middle ground of a prevailing reddish tint sparsely scattered with a vegetation of obscure greens and dull grays amid strong earth colors, once with the bluish-black of palm-trees blotting the distance—I remember now almost as fertility. Here there is not a leaf—nor even earth nor sand. It seems rock devastated by fire, like volcanic summits. A sombre magnificence, a fantastic grandeur! Blue-grays, browns, and ochres of every shade gleam on the slopes of the hillsides; reds splash the precipices and walls; innumerable, indescribable tones, too gloomy to be called iridescence, shimmer over the mid-distance and die out in twilights of color amid the manganese shadows, on the cold limestone heights, in the sandstone gullies. Where I can see the surfaces of the shivered stones, I notice their extraordinary smoothness. There are purples and black-greens and violets among them, but for the most part they are black, like soot; for amid this fantastic coloration, what gives its sombreness to the scene—the trouble of the unfamiliar—and grows most menacing, is the black. The land is oxidized—blackened; its shivered floor is strewn with black stones; black stripes streak its sides far and near; amid all that mineral bloom it is to black that the eye returns, fascinated, enthralled. It invades the spirits with its prolonged weirdness; it awes and saddens. And all at once we emerge from a deep ravine—oh, _la belle vie!_—a sea of dark verdure makes in from below, like a fiord, among the naked mountains round it—silent, mysterious, living, the green of the palm oasis; and swiftly, after that stop, we dip into the black gorges beyond Moghrar, more sombre, sinister—valleys of the color and aspect of some strange death, the incineration of nature in her own secular periods, the passing of a planet. Slowly vegetation begins—tufts amid the rock interstices, desert growths, the _chaufleur saharienne_, the drin, the thyme, plants of ashen-gray, stiff, sapless; trees now—betoums, feeble palms; a beaten track with a trio of Bedouin Arabs. It is the oued of the Zousfana; and we debouch on the far prospect—off to the right the oases of Figuig, oblong dark spots on the foot-hills of Morocco, and before us to the left the great horizons of the Sahara, the _hamada_. Five hours from Aïn-Sefra. It is Beni-Ounif.

I descended from the train amid groups of soldiers. I lose my prejudice against a uniform when it is French or Italian; and in North Africa the blue of the tirailleur, the red of the spahi, are a part of the _mise en scène_. These were soldiers of the Foreign Legion. I had been familiar with their uniform, too, in the north at Oran, and particularly at Sidi-bel-Abbes, one of their rendezvous; and I saw it again with friendly eyes, for all that I had here—harborage, security, freedom to come and go—did I not owe it to them? The Sud-Oranais is their work, like so much else in Algeria. I trudged through the sand, a young Arab tugging at my baggage and guiding me, to the hotel, which occupied a corner of an extensive flat building of Moresque style, rather imposing with its towers though it was only of one story, on a street that seemed preternaturally wide because all the buildings were likewise of one story. The whole little town, a mere handful of low, fragile blocks, looked strangely desolate and lonesome, forsaken, isolated, dull. The host received me pleasantly—I was the only guest to arrive, and there was no sign of another occupant—and took me to my room in the single corridor; it was clean and sufficient—a bed, a basin, and a chair; a small, heavily barred window, at the height of my head, looked on a large, vacant court. So this was the _terre perdue_. I was “far away.” “The brutality of life—” I was “clean quit” of it, like a lark in the blue, like a gull on the gray sea. “_Adieu, mes amis,_” I thought. Where had I read it—“The man who is not a misanthrope has never loved his fellow men.”

There was a knock at my door: “Monsieur, some one to see you.” It came with a shock, for the solitude had begun to seize me. I went toward the office. A young soldier of the Legion approached me, full of French grace, with a look of expectancy on his fine face. “I heard there was an American here,” he said in English; “I did not believe it,” he added; “I came to see.” “Yes,” I said, “I am an American.” “There hasn’t been one here in two years—not since I came,” he spoke slowly—keen, soft tones. “South American?” he ventured. “No,” I said, melting. “Truly from the United States—where?” His look hung on my face. “I was born near Boston,” I replied, interested. “I was born in Boston.” I shall never forget the gladness of his voice, the light that swept his eyes. A quick, soldierly friending seized us—the warmth that does not wait, the trust that does not question. In ten minutes he was caring for me like a younger brother, introducing me with my letters at the Bureau Arab, doing everything till he went to his service. In the evening we met again, and so the lonely journey of the day ended in an African sunset, as it were, of gay and brilliant spirits, for I know of no greater joy than the making of friends. He was of French parentage, and the only American in the Legion; at least, he had never seen nor known of another. And I went to bed thinking of the strange irony of life, and how the first thing that the _terre perdue_ gave me was the last thing I expected in the wide world—a friend.

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 in the plain. Accustomed as my eyes are to large horizons, this country had an aspect of solitariness that was extraordinary. The sand-blown black rock, the _hamada_, lies all about; the mountains of the Ksour that back the scene to the northeast are reddish in color and severe in outline, and the mountains of Morocco, cut here by three passes, block it to the north and west with their heavy and wild masses, while other detached heights are seen far off to the south. From this broken ring of bare mountains, red and violet and gray, the rocky desert floor, blown with reddish sand, makes out into the open distance interminably to horizons like the sea. In the midst of this the little ksar with its trailing palm-trees, Beni-Ounif with its slender rail and station, its white redoubt and low buildings, with the Bureau Arab and its palms a little removed, seem insignificant human details, mere markings of animal life, in a prospect where nature, grandiose in form and without limit in distance, exalted by aridity, is visibly infinite, all-encompassing, supreme. The sun only, burning and solitary, seems to own the land. The moment one steps upon the windy plain it is as if he had put to sea; he is alone with nature, and the harshness of the land gives poignancy to his solitude.