Part 8

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 I saw stood for acts of bravery on the field of battle. There were a few other guests who came and went, a French hunter, a Belgian professor who told me of the prehistoric cabinets he had seen farther south, an officer’s remarkable collection, and explained to me the geology of the Sahara in brief and interesting lectures. The town itself never lost for me the vacant and makeshift frontier look that it had at first sight; one could walk from end to end of it in a few minutes and come out on the desert, which was monotony petrified. Nothing happened except the arrival and departure of the daily train. Once I met on the edge of the desert the _goum_, a compact small body of native Arab cavalry attached to the French arms, a splendid squad of fighting men; rather heavy and broad-shouldered they looked, wrapped in burnoose and turban, mature men whose life was war, black-bearded, large-eyed, grim—predatory faces; and they were in their proper place, with the naked mountains round and the desert under their horses’ feet—a martial scene of the old raiding race. I should not like to see them at work, I thought; their trade is blood, and they looked it—strong, hard, fierce—pitiless men. But usually there was nothing uncommon to my eyes. Once in the café, where we sat over our long glasses of the fortified liquors and tonic drinks of which there is so great a variety in desert towns, some one brought in a beautiful great dead eagle. It was as if he had been killed in his eyrie to see him there on the desert among the soldiers. We returned to our glasses and our talk: tales of Paris, tales of Odessa in the Revolution, tales of long Algerian rides, encounters, anecdotes of the road—what tales! And other men’s tales, too—Anatole France, Pierre Loti, Maurice Le Blanc, Claude Farrère, Pierre Louÿs—all my favorites, for my friend knew them better than I did, and made me new acquaintances “in the realm of gold” that I like best to travel. What happy talk! and the time went by. I went out alone to see the full moon rise over the solemn desert by the reddish hills in the chill air, and fill the great sky with that white flood of radiance that seemed every night more ethereal, more remote from mankind, more an eternal thing; and at the hotel we would meet again to dine late, for my friend being a private soldier, we waited till the officers were gone; and then again the tales and the happy talk, and good night. That was life at Beni-Ounif.

“Would I like to go to the theatre?” I repeated, for it was an unexpected invitation. “You might not think so, but there is a theatre at Beni-Ounif,” said my friend. So it appeared that the Legion, among the multitude of things it did, occasionally gave a performance of private theatricals for its own amusement, and my friend himself was to play that night. It was a beautiful evening with a cold wind. I made my way through the burly military group wrapped in heavy blue cloaks, with here and there a burnoosed spahi or tall tirailleur, and entering the small hall was given a seat in the front row among a few ladies and very young children, two or three civilians, my Belgian acquaintance being one, and half a dozen officers with their swords and crosses. “The tricolor goes well with the palm,” I said to myself, as I turned to look at the prettily decorated, not overlighted room, where trophies of the colors alternated with panels of palm-leaves on either side and at the rear, giving to the scene a simple, artistic effect of lightness and gayety with a touch of beauty, especially in the palms. It was characteristically French in refinement, simple elegance, and color; there was nothing elaborate, but it was a charming border to the eye, and no framework could have been so fit for that compact mass of soldiers as was this lightly woven canopy of French flags and the desert palm on the bare walls of that rude hall. But it was the men who held my eyes. The room was packed with soldiers of the Legion; a few spahis and tirailleurs stood in the rear or at the sides; there was no place left to stand even; and I looked full on their serried faces. My first thought was that I had never seen soldiers before. I never saw such faces—mature, grave, settled, with the look of habitual self-possession of men who command and obey; resolute mouths, immobile features; there was great sadness in their eyes that seemed to look from some point far back, heavy and weary; they had endured much—it was in their pose and bearing and on their countenances; they had ceased to think of life and death—one felt that; but no detail can give the human depth of the impression I felt at the sight—faces into which life had fused all its iron. And there was, too, in the whole mass the sense of physical life, of hardship and hardihood, and of bodily power to do and bear and withstand—the fruit of the desert air, long marches, terrible campaigns in the sands. It was a sight I shall always remember as, humanly, one of the most remarkable I ever looked on.

The Foreign Legion is commonly believed to be made up of broken men who have in some way found themselves eliminated from society, thrown out or left out or gone out of their own will, whether by misfortune, error, disappointment, or any of the various chances of life, and who have joined the Legion to lose themselves, or because they did not know what else to do with their lives. They come from all European nations and are a cosmopolitan body; and, no doubt, here and there among them is a brilliant talent or a fine quality of daring gone astray; but I imagine a very large proportion of them are simply friendless men who at some moment of abandonment find themselves without resources and without a career, and see in the Legion a last resource. I believe there are great numbers of such friendless men in our civilization. Among the thousands of the Legion there must be, of course, every color of the human past; the losers in life fail for many reasons, and in their defeat become, it may be, incidentally or temporarily, antisocial, or even habitually so, as fate hardens round them with years; but in a great number of cases, I believe, society has defaulted in its moral obligations to them before they defaulted in their moral obligations to their neighbors; and, holding such views, it was perhaps natural that, so far from finding the Legion a band of outcast adventurers and derelicts, I found them very human. I did not read romance or virtue into them. I know the hard conditions of their lives. If there be an inch of hero in a man, he is hero enough for me. The story of the French occupation of Algeria is largely the story of the Legion. For almost a century it has been one of the most effective units of the French army all over the world; and here in Algeria it has been not only a fighting force of the first order, but also a pioneer force of civilization. The legionaries have built the roads, established the military and civil stations, accomplished the first public works, drained and planted; they have laid the material foundations of the new order; they have not only conquered, but civilized in the material sense, and the labor in that land and climate has been an enormous toil. The reclamation of Africa is a great work, sure to be looked on hereafter as one of the glories of France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and I thought, as I turned and the band began the overture, what a comment it was on society that in this great work of the reclamation of Africa from barbarism and blood and sodden misery so large a share was borne by this body of friendless men for whom our civilization could find no use and cared not for their fate. What a salvage of human power and capacity, turned to great uses, was there here! and from moment to moment I looked back on that body of much-enduring men with a keen recurring sense of the infinite patience of mankind under the hard fates of life, of the infinite honor and the infinite pity of it all.

To-night all was light gayety and pleasant jollity. The Legion has one characteristic of a volunteer regiment—its men can do everything, so various are the careers from which it is recruited. Its music is famous, and the orchestra played excellently; and as the first little play began, “Mentons Bleus,” the players showed themselves good amateurs. The audience responded quickly to the situations and the dialogue; there were brightened spirits and much laughter, easy, quiet enjoyment and applause. The second part was a series of songs, done by one performer after another, each doing his stunt with verve and the comedy of the variety stage; there was a full dozen of these light-hearted parts. In the intermissions the men stayed in their seats, though about the doorway there would be a little movement and changeful regrouping, but it was an audience that sat in their places ready for more; there was no smoking. The last number of the programme—a small, pretty double sheet, like note-paper, done by some copying process in pale blue, with a sword, rifle, and cap on the ground before two palms lightly sketched in the lower corner of the title leaf—was another one-act play, “Cher Maître,” and was received with a spirit that seemed only to have been whetted by the previous amusement; and when it was over the evening ended in a round of generous applause and a smiling breaking up of the company after their three hours’ enjoyment. It was pleasant to have been with the Legion on such a night, and to have shared in its little village _festa_, and I stood by the doorway and watched the men go by as they passed out, till all were gone.

It was midnight. The radiant moon poured down that marvellous white flood on the hollow of the desert where the little town lay low and gleaming, very silent. But I could not rid my mind of the soldiers’ lives. I thought of the torrid summer heats here in garrison, of the burning marches yonder in the south, of the days in sterile sands that make the sight of palm and garden a thing of paradise—incredible fatigues, mortal exhaustion, monotony. One cannot know the soldiers’ desert life without some experience; but some impression of it may be gained from soldiers’ books, such as one that is a favorite companion of mine, “Une Promenade dans le Sahara,” by Charles Lagarde, a lieutenant in the Chasseurs d’Afrique, a thoughtful book, full of artistic feeling, and written with literary grace, the memorial of a soldier with the heart of a poet, who served in South Algeria. In such books one gets the environment, but not the life; one touch with the Legion is worth them all. I fell to sleep for my last slumber at Beni-Ounif, thinking of soldiers’ lives, friendless men—

“Somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan.”

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 that is like a passion—mystical, and belongs to the deep soul. The desert horizon, like the sea’s, at every moment breeds this spell. But as I turned back, with the sense of the chained foot, my disappointment was tempered by the knowledge that I was to companion my friend, who had been ordered to Tonkin; and I had timed my departure to go with his detachment on its way north. As I went down to the train my Arab boy, with the infinite hopefulness of such attachés, brought me a dead wolf, if by chance I would like it; but I could not add it to my baggage, whereat he was sorrowful, but was comforted. The station presented a lively scene—many soldiers in their white duck trousers and red caps; there was a band; the air was filled with good-bys and laughing salutations; the car windows grew lined with leaning forms and intent faces; the music struck up, high and gallant, and with the last cries and shouts we were off on the line.

It was too short a ride, though the train climbed slowly up the incline, while the desert grew a distant outlook and was shut from view as we made into the winding valleys; and we mounted up through the black defiles, the desolation of the shivered rock, the passes of the toothed ranges, the blocking cliffs and columnar heights—all the petrifaction and fantasy of that naked and severe land; but I was less sensible of its enmity and melancholy than when I came through it alone, though it was harsh and wild, a _terre perdue_. My friend travelled with his comrades, but we had a long lunch in the train before Aïn-Sefra, and a longer dinner when night began to fall, with tales and talk. Tales of the mutiny of the _batallion d’Afrique_—Othello tales these, fit for fearful ears; tales of night surprises, Arabs crawling by inches for hours in the sands, the sentinels killed without a sound, the first alarm bayonets through the tents, and then the rouse, the square, the victory; tales of the desert madness, the _cafard_. Stirring tales. Talk, too, of home and friends left behind us in the world, of the dead and the living, and of what might yet be for both of us. He told me much of the Legion, for that interested me; but he never complained, and if he caught some unspoken thought on my face from time to time, “_C’est le métier_” he would say, and smile my sympathy away. He was a youth after my own heart; but the night fell darker and darker, and there would be an end. At the last station where it was possible, he came back to me. It was good-by.

TOUGOURT

* * * * *

IV

TOUGOURT

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. We were soon beside the sleepy silence of the oasis, and passed the old yellow slope that was once a fortress to guard it on the edge of the sands; we dipped along by little fields of fresh green barley and rose on the steppe of the _bois_, a tangle of low undergrowth, scarcely waist-high, of twisted and almost leafless shrub, that clothes the desert there with its characteristic dry, rough, tortured, and stunted but hardy vegetation. A few Arabs were to be seen in places cutting it for fire-wood. Camels, too, far away in almost any direction, loomed up, solitary and ungainly as harbor-buoys on a windless morning tide. On all sides lay the sharp black outlines of oasis clumps of palm-trees, distinct, single, solid, each a distant island, with miles to cross before one should land on its unknown shore; and behind us the range of the Aurès seemed to block out the world with the wild beauty of its precipices, which made one cliff of all the north as if to shut out Europe. It was like a wall of the world. All about us was the desert; everything seemed cold and gray and distant, lifeless, in the pallor of the morning; but with every mile the whole world brightened and warmed. Desert air intoxicates me; every breath of it is wine, not so much to my blood or my nerves, but to my whole being of man; and long before we reached Bordj Saada, the first halt, I was keyed to the day. It was a glorious day, cloudless and blue, and drenched with sunshine and radiance and warmth pouring on vast spaces; and the Bordj, a disused military post, a sort of large stockade for refuge and defence, standing solitary on its high ridge, was an old friend and a place of memory for me; there once I had turned back, and now I was going on. There was excitement in the moment, in the look ahead; and so it was only as we swept round the curve down into the valley of Oued Djedi and crossed its dry channel that I felt myself embarked, as it were, on my first true desert voyage. I had coasted the Sahara for a thousand miles here and there, like a boy in a boat; but now I should be at last out of sight of land.

We were quite happy voyagers, the three of us. Ali, on the box, sang from time to time some cadenced stave, careless as a bird, in a world of his own; indeed the drive was an adventure to him, for, as I afterward found, it was his first going to Tougourt; and had not Hamet, almost as soon as we started, lifting one intent, burning glance straight in my eyes—it was the first time I had really seen him, as a person—told me that I had brought him good luck, for that night his wife had borne him a boy? He was content. A fine figure, too, was Hamet; he answered, as no other guide but one I ever had, to the imagination; he filled my dream of what ought to be. A mature man, rather thick-set, with a skin so bronzed that in the shadow it was black, with the head of a desert sheik, noble, powerful; when he moved he seemed still in repose, so sculptural were all the lines of his figure, such dignity was in every chance attitude; he seemed more like some distinguished aid to attend me than a guide. His white burnoose fell in large folds, and as he threw it partly over me in the first cool hours, he disclosed some light, white underdress over whose bosom hung low a great gold chain with beads under; a revolver swung in a leather case, rather tightly drawn below his right breast with a strap over the shoulder; white stockings and slippers completed his garb. We talked of trifles, and the conversation was charming, not too fluent—talk of the road; but what I remember is my pleasure in finding again what often seems to me that lost grace of a fine natural demeanor in men. It is of less consequence to me what a man says than is his manner of saying it, and speech is not of the lips only, but of the whole man; and, in my experience, it is the unlearned who are also unspoiled, that, all in all, say things best. And ever as we talked or were silent the horses went on, the brilliant bare line of the Aurès sank slowly down, and round us was the waste of rock with its fitful tangle of tamarack and drin, the sea of sand with its ridged breadths, the near or distant horizon lines as the track rose and fell; and with the hours the panorama of the road began to disclose itself.

The road was really a broad, camel-trodden route on which the carriageway, winding about, found going as best it could; the railway that will some time be had been surveyed along it, and the telegraph-poles that already bore the wire far beyond Tougourt into the desert were seldom far away. On the earlier part of the journey the going was excellent in that dry season. It was not a lonely road, though for long stretches it was solitary. Over the brink of a rise suddenly would spring up a half-dozen human figures, sharp outlines on the blue sky, and a flock would come tumbling after as if clotted about their feet, and there might be a donkey or two; it was a Bedouin family on its northern migration to the summer pasturage. What an isolated fragment of human life it seemed, flotsam tossing about with the seasons, as little related to anything neighborly as seaweed, yet spawning century after century, living on, with the milk of goats, in such a waste; and how infinitely fresh was the simple scene! one or two men, a boy, women, children, and goats tramping in the desert toward water and green food, a type of humanity for ages—and it was such a wretched subsistence! But what a bodily vigor, what a look of independence, what a sense of liberty there was there, too! Now it would be two or three camels with the canopy in which women ride, with flocks, too, and more men and boys, more warmly clad, with more color and importance—some wealthier head man with his family going the same northward journey. Or, as the carriage crested some ridge, we would see miles ahead a long line creeping on toward us—a trade caravan; and after a while it would pass, the camels pouting in high air, under the loads of balanced boxes or bales laid across them, lumbering dumbly along in the great silence, like convicts, as it always seems to me, from another sphere of existence.

Many creatures give me vividly this impression of having haplessly intruded into a state of being not meant for them. The turtles in the swamps of my boyhood, leaning their sly and protruded heads out of their impossible shells, the fish that have great staring eyes in aquariums, frogs and toads and all centipedal sea creatures, are to me foreigners to life, strays, misbirths, “moving about in worlds not realized,” and all grotesque forms of life—even human deformity when it becomes grotesque—wake in me something between amusement and pity that they should be at all. I feel like saying as a guide, wishing to correct a friend of mine, once said: “Monsieur, you are a mistake.” But of all such creatures, the camel fills me with the most profound and incurable despair. He is the most homeless-looking of all creatures. He has been the companion and helpmate of man from the dawn of human life, and our debt to him through uncounted ages and in places where the human lot has been most penurious and desperate is untold; but man has never been able to enlighten him; he looks, on all occasions and under all circumstances, hopelessly bored with existence, unutterably sick of humanity. There is a suicidal mood in animal life, and at times one can see glimpses and intimations of it surely in the eyes of animals; the camel embodies it, like a stare. I wish they were all dead; and when I see their bones in the sand, as I often do, I am glad that they are gone and have left the ribs of their tabernacle of life behind them by the wayside. Every desert traveller writes a little essay on the camel. This is mine. I will not modify it even for the sake of the meharis that come down the route, overtaking us from Biskra; they are the racers that have just competed in the yearly trial of speed from Tougourt—aristocrats of the species; they have a clear gray tone and slender delicacies of flank and skin; all day they will be speeding ahead and dropping behind us; the desert is their cloth of gold and they its chivalry—splendid beasts they are, as native to this blown empire of the sand and the sun and the free air as a bird to the sky—and they lift their blunt noses over it with unconquerable contempt. It is amazing how the creature, supercilious or abject, refuses to be comforted. There is no link between him and man. If you seek a type for the irreconcilable, find it in the camel.