Part 9

It is said that one meets his enemy in every place, and every traveller experiences these surprising encounters that prove the smallness of the world; but I better the proverb, for it is a friend I meet in the most solitary places. On the loneliest road of Greece a passing traveller called out my name; in the high passes of Algiers I came face to face with a schoolmate; and, however repeated, the experience never loses its surprise. Surely I had seen that gaunt figure pressing up on a stout mule from the head of the fresh trade caravan that was just approaching; that face, like a bird of prey, that predatory nose before the high forehead and bold eyes—yes, it was Yussef, my guide of years ago, with welcome all over his countenance and quick salutations to his old companion. He was a caravan man now, for the nonce, and coming up from the Souf. How natural it was to meet on the desert, with the brief words that resumed the years and abolished the time that had sped away and renewed the eternal now. But we must follow the meharis, slim forms on the horizon ahead, and we went on to overtake them at Aïn Chegga, a mere stopping place, where there was on one side of the way a sort of desert farm, and a relay of horses waiting for us, and on the other a small, lonesome building by itself where we could lunch from our own stores. The sun was hot now and the shade and rest grateful; but we had a long way to go. With thoughtless generosity we gave our fragments of bread to some adjacent boys, and started off rapidly with the fresh horses on the great plain.

The road was lonelier than in the morning hours; the solitude began to make itself felt, the silence of the heat, the encompassment of the rolling distances, the splendor of the sky. There was hardly any life except the occasional shrub, the drin. I saw a falcon once, and once a raven; but we were alone, as if on the sea. Then the Sahara began to give up its bliss—the unspeakable thing—the inner calm, the sense of repose, of relief, the feeling of separation from life, the falling away of the burden, the freedom from it all in the freedom of those blue and silent distances over sandy and rock-paved tracts, full of the sun. How quiet it was, how large, and what a sense of effortless elemental power—of nature in her pure and lifeless being! It is easy to think on the desert, thought is there so near to fact—a still fresh imprint in consciousness; thought and being are hardly separate there; and there nature seems to me more truly felt in her naked essence, lifeless, for life to her is but an incident, a detail, uncared for, unessential. She does but incline her poles and it is gone. Taken in the millennial æons of her existence, it is a lifeless universe that is, and on the desert it seems so. This is the spectacle of power where man is not—like the sea, like the vault of heaven, like all that is infinite. What a repose it is to behold it, to feel it, to know it—this elimination, not only of humanity, but of life, from things! The desert—it is the truth. How golden is the sunlight, how majestic the immobile earth, how glorious the reach of it—this infinite! And one falls asleep in it, cradled and fascinated and careless, flooded slowly by that peace which pours in upon the spirit to lull and strengthen and quiet it, and to revive it changed and more in nature’s image, purged—so it seems—of its too human past.

It was late in the afternoon. Hamet roused himself as we passed down to Oued Itel and crossed its dry bed, and Ali ceased from his vagrant music as the horses breasted the slope beyond. We came out on a high ridge. It was a magnificent view. The long valley of the great chotts lay below us transversely, like a vast river bottom; far off to the northeast glittered, pale and white, Chott Melrir, like a sea of salt, and before us Chott Merouan stretched across like a floor, streaked with blotches of saltpetre and dark stains of soil. The scene made the impression on me of immense flats at a dead low tide, reaching on the left into distances without a sea. It was a scene of desolation, of unspeakable barrenness, of the waste world; its dull, white lights were infinitely fantastic on the grays and the blacks, and the lights in the sky were cold; the solitude of it was complete; but its great extent, its emptiness, its enclosing walls of shadow in the falling day crinkling the whole upper plane of the endless landscape round its blanching hollows and horizontal vistas below, stamped it indelibly on my eyes. I was not prepared for it; it was an enlargement, a new aspect of the world. This was the southwestern end of the chain of chotts, or salt wastes, that lie mostly below sea-level and are the dried-up bed of the ancient inland arm of the sea that washed this valley in some distant age; they stretch northeasterly and touch the Mediterranean near Gabès and the suggestion is constantly made that the sea be let into them again by a canal, thus flooding and transforming this part of the Sahara. It may some time be done; but there is some doubt about the lay of the levels and whether such an engineering feat would not result merely in stagnant waters. Meanwhile it is a vast barren basin, saline, and in the wet season dangerous with quicksands, unsafe ground, a morass of death for man and beast. The ridge where I stood commanded a long view of this sterile and melancholy waste; but I did not feel it to be sad; I only felt it to be; it had such grandeur.

We went down by a rough descent and began the crossing of the chott before us, Merouan, on its westerly edge. The road ran on flat ground, often wet and thick with a coating of black mud, and there was the smell of saltpetre in the air; the view on either side was merely desolate, night was falling, it began to be chill; and by the time we reached the farther side the stars came out. It was a darkened scene when we rode into the first oasis of young palms, without inhabitants, which belonged to some French company. It was full night when we emerged again on the sands; a splendor of stars was over us and utter solitude around; it was long since we had seen any one, and as the second oasis came into view it looked like a low black island cliff on the sea, and as deserted. We drove into its shadows by a broad road like an avenue, with the motionless palms thick on either side, as in a park; there was no sign or sound of life. It was like night in a forest, heavy with darkness and silence, except where the stars made a track above and our lights threw a pale gleam about. This oasis, which was large, also seemed uninhabited; and we passed through it on the straight road which was cut by other crossing roads, and came out on the desert by the telegraph-poles. The going was through heavy sand, which after a mile or two was heavier; our hubs were now in drifts of it. Hamet took the lights and explored to find tracks of wheels, and the horses drew us with difficulty into what seemed a route; in ten minutes it was impracticable. We crossed with much bumping and careening to the other side of the telegraph-poles, and that was no better; forward and back and sidelong, with much inspection of the ground, we plied the search; we were off the route.

We drove back to the oasis thinking we had missed the right way out, and on its edge turned at right angles down a good road; at the corner we found ourselves in the dunes—there was no semblance of a route. We returned to the centre of the silent palm grove, where there were branching ways, and taking another track were blocked by a ditch, and avoiding that, coasting another and ruder side of the grove, again at the upper corner of the oasis struck the impassable; so we went back to our starting-place. Hamet took the lanterns and gathered up his revolver and set out apparently to find the guardian, if there was one. It was then Ali told me he had never been to Tougourt before; Hamet was so experienced a guide that it was thought a good opportunity to break in a new driver. These French oases across the old route, with their new roads, were confusing; and Hamet had not been down to Tougourt of late. The silence of the grove was great, not wholly unbroken now: there were animal cries, insect buzzings, hootings, noises of a wood, and every sound was intensified in the deep quiet, the strange surroundings. It was very late. We had spent hours in our slow progress wandering about in the sands and the grove in the uncertain light. Hamet was gone quite a long time, but at last we saw his waving lantern in the wide dark avenue and drove toward him. He got in, said something to Ali, and off we went on our original track, but turned sharply to the right before issuing from the wood, down a broad way; we were soon skirting the western edge of the oasis; branches brushed the carriage; the ruts grew deep, the track grew narrow, the carriage careened; we got out, the wheels half in the ditch, horses backing. Hamet threw up his hands. It was midnight. We would camp where we were. The route was lost, whatever might be our state; and I did not wonder, for as nearly as I could judge we were then heading north by east, if I knew the polestar. We were on the only corner of the oasis we had not hitherto visited; the spot had one recommendation for a camp—it was a very out-of-the-way place. The horses were taken out, and each of us disposed himself for the night according to his fancy. It was intensely cold, and I rolled myself in my rugs and sweaters and curled up on the carriage seat and at once fell fast asleep.

An hour later I awoke, and unwinding myself got out. It was night on the desert. Ali was asleep on the box, upright, with his chin against his breast. Hamet lay in his burnoose in the sand some little distance away. The horses stood in some low brush near the ditch. The palm grove, impenetrably black, stood behind, edging the long, low line of the sky; there was a chorus of frogs monotonously chanting; and before me to the west was the vague of the sands, with indistinguishable lines and obscure hillocks, overlaid with darkness. Only the sky gave distance to the silent solitude—such a sky as one does not see elsewhere, magnificent with multitudes of stars, bright and lucid, or fine and innumerable, melting into nebulous clouds and milky tracts, sparkling and brilliant in that keen, clear, cloudless cold, all the horizon round. I was alone, and I was glad. It was a wonderful moment and scene. Hamet stirred in his place, and I went back to my post and slept soundly and well.

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 re-entering the oasis hailed a well-hidden group of buildings with a koubba that Hamet seemed to have discovered the night before. An old Arab gave us our bearings. We were seventeen kilometres short of Mraïer, the oasis which we should have reached; and now, making the right turn-off, we saw in another direction over the sands the black line of palms toward which we had gone astray. We soon covered the distance to Mraïer, which was a large oasis with a considerable village and a caravanserai whose gates were crowded with camels; here we got a very welcome breakfast, but we did not linger, and were quickly out again on the desert on the long day’s ride before us.

Since we passed the chott we were in the valley of Oued Rir, along which is strewn a chain of oases like a necklace as far as to Tougourt and beyond. We were really on the crust of what has been well called a subterranean Nile, formed by the converging flow of two Saharan rivers, Oued Igharghar and Oued Mya, whose underground bed is pierced by wells and the waters gathered and distributed to feed the oases. There are now forty-six of these palm gardens that lie at a distance of a few miles, one from another, spotting the arid sands with their black-green isles of solid verdure, making a fantastic and beautiful landscape of the rolling plain of moving sands, with many heights and depressions, stretching with desert breadth on and on under the uninterrupted blue of the glowing sky. The district has long been a little realm by itself, sustaining with much toil the meagre life of its people and periodically invaded and subdued by the great passing kingdoms of the north. Its prosperity, however, really dates from the French occupation. At that time the oases were dying out under the invasion of the unresting sands that slowly were burying them up. The French almost at once with their superior skill sank artesian wells, and the new flood of water brought immediate change. The number of the inhabitants has doubled; the product of dates, which are of the best quality, has increased many-fold; and new oases of great extent and value have been planted by French companies. This is one of the great works of public beneficence accomplished by France for the native population; and evidence of prosperity was to be seen on every hand all the way.

The route for the most part was sandy with occasional stretches of rock, often a beautifully colored quartz, whose brilliant and strange veins harmonized well with the deep-toned landscape; but the eye wandered off to the horizon and drifts of sand, as the heavens began to fill with light and the spaces grew brilliant; in that vacancy and breadth every detail grew strangely important and interesting; a single palm, a far glimmer of salt, a herd of goats would hold the eye, and, as the day grew on, the deceptive atmosphere gave a fresh touch of the fantastic, playing with the lines and forms of objects. We passed from Mraïer, leaving these island oases on the horizon as the route threaded its way more or less remote from them, and at intervals we would touch one—a palm grove on the right, and the village by itself on higher dry ground to the left. Two of these villages, of considerable size, were entirely new, having been built within two years; they were constructed of the sun-dried mud commonly used, but they did not have the dilapidated look of the ksar; they were clean and fresh, a new home for the people who had abandoned the old, unhealthy site that they had formerly occupied, and had made a new town for themselves; and Hamet, who told me this, said other villages had done the same, and he seemed proud of their enterprise and prosperity.

We went on now through heavy sand at times—and always there was the broad prospect, the gray and brown ribbed distance, the blue glow—a universal light, a boundless freedom, the desert solitude of the dry, soft air. “_C’est le vrai Sahara_” said Hamet, content. For myself I could not free my senses of the previous day’s impression of the great chotts as of the shore of a world, and the landscape continued to have a prevailing marine character. I do not mean that the desert was like the ocean; it was not. But the outlooks, the levels, the sand-colored and blue-bathed spaces were like scenes by the seashore; only there was no sea there. The affluence of light, the shadowless brilliancy, the silences, the absence of humanity and human things as again and again they dropped from us and ceased to be, were ocean traits; but there was no sea—only the wind sculpture of the sands, beautifully mottled and printed, and delicately modulated by the wind’s breath, only a blue distance, an island horizon. Even the birds—there were many larks to-day—seemed sea-birds, so lonesomely flying. But there was never any sea. It was the kingdom of the sands.

Here, not far from the route, I saw what was meant by the invasion of the sand. The oasis on its farther side toward the desert was half blown over with the white drifts of it that made in like a tide; the trunks of the palms were buried to a third of their height in it; the whole garden was bedded with it, and as we drew away from the place, looking back, the little oasis with its bare palm stems resembled a wreck driving in the sea of sands. Elsewhere I saw the barriers, fences of palm leaves and fagots, raised against the encroaching dunes, where the sand was packed against them like high snow-drifts. The sand grew heavier now, and as we came to Ourlana, about which palmerais lay clustering in all directions, the horses could hardly drag through the deep, loose mass up to the low building and enclosure where was our noon stopping place. The resources of the house were scanty: only an omelet, but an excellent one, and coffee; bread, too, and I had wine. The family, a small one with boy and girl, whom chocolate soon won to my side, was pleasant, and there was a welcome feeling of human society about the incident; but as I lit a cigarette and watched the fresh horses put in—for here we found our second relay that had been sent ahead some days before—I saw that, if the population seemed scanty, it was not for any lack of numbers. A short distance beyond our enclosure, and on a line with it, in the same bare sandy waste, stood another long building with a great dome, evidently a government structure, and at right angles to it before the door was forming a long line of young children; it was the village school—these were the native boys marching in to the afternoon session, for all the world like an American school at home. I had not expected to see that on the Sahara. I photographed it at once—a striking token of modern civilization; and I saw no happier sight than those playful little Arabs going to school.

We dipped ahead into the oasis by the long lines of palms lifting their bare stems far overhead and fretting the sky with their decorative border of tufts. Here and there were fruit trees, and occasionally vegetables beneath, but as a rule there were only the palms rising from bare earth, cut by ditches in which flowed the water; there was no orchard or garden character to the soil, only a barren underground, but all above was forest silence and the beauty of tall trees. It was spring, and the trees had begun to put out their great spikes and plumes of white blossoms in places, and the air was warm and soft. A palm fascinates me with the beauty of its formal lines; where two or three are gathered together they make a picture; a single one in the distance gives composition to a whole landscape. This was, notwithstanding the interludes of the oases, a continuously desert ride, and I remember it mostly for its beauty of color and line, and a strange intensity and aloofness of the beauty; there was nothing human in it. It seemed to live by its own glow in a world that had never known man; the scene of some other planet where he had never been. There was, too, over all the monotony and immobility of things, a film of changefulness, a waver of surface, a shifting of lights and planes; it was full of the fascination of horizons, the elusiveness of far objects, and the feeling of endlessness in it, like the sky, was a deep chord never lost. It was beyond Ourlana that I noticed to the southwest, a mile or two away, three or four detached palms by a lake; their tall stems leaned through the transparent air above a low bank over a liquid, mirror-like belt of quiet water, a perfect oriental scene. It was my first mirage; and two or three times more I saw it that afternoon—the perfect symbol of all the illusion of life. How beautiful it was, how was its beauty enhanced framed there in the waste world, how after a while it melted away!

Oasis after oasis dropped from us on the left and the right, and in the late afternoon we were climbing a sharp rise through the deepest sand we had yet encountered, so that we all got out and walked to relieve the horses, and ourselves toiled up the slope; and soon from the ridge we saw a broad panorama like that of the day before; but instead of that salt desolation, here the eye surveyed an endless lowland through which ahead ran a long, dark cluster of oases, one beyond another, like an archipelago; and Hamet, pointing to one far beyond all, on the very edge of the horizon, said: “Tougourt.” We descended to the valley, passing a lonely old gray mosque, or koubba, of some desert saint by the way—very solemn and impressive it was in the failing light, far from men; and we rolled on for miles over land like a floor, as on a Western prairie; and the stars came out; and at intervals a dark grove went by; and we were again in the sands; and another grove loomed up with its look of a black low island, and we passed on beside it. I thought each, as it came in view, was our goal, but we kept steadily on. It was nigh ten o’clock when we saw, some miles away, the two great lights, like low harbor lights, that are the lights of the gate of Tougourt. Ali was perceptibly relieved when we made sure of them; for they were unmistakable at last.

Then, in that last half-hour, I witnessed a strange phenomenon. The whole sky was powdered with stars; I had never seen such a myriad glimmer and glow, thickening, filling the heavenly spaces, innumerable; and all at once they seemed to interlink, great and small, with rays passing between them, and while they shone in their places, infinite in multitude, light fell from them in long lines, like falling rain, down the whole concave of night from the zenith to the horizon on every side. It was a Niagara of stars. The celestial dome without a break was sheeted with the starry rain, pouring down the hollow sphere of darkness, from the apex to the desert rims. No words can describe that sight, as a mere vision; still less can they tell its mystical effect at the moment. It was like beholding a miracle. And it was not momentary; for half an hour, as we drove over the dark level, obscure, silent, lonely, I was arched in and shadowed by that ceaseless, starry rain on all sides round; and as we passed the great twin lights of the gates, and entered Tougourt, and drew up in the dim and solitary square, it was still falling.

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 high dome of the French Bureau, with its arcaded front beneath, filling that eastern side. A fountain stood in the midst of the bare space, and beyond it was a charming little park of trees; and still farther the white gleam of the barracks, through the green and on either side, closed the vista to the south. The Moresque architecture, which the French affect in the desert, with its white lights and open structure, gave a pleasing amplitude to the scene; and the same style was taken up by the main street straight down my left, whose line was edged by a long arcade with low, round arches, and the view lost itself beyond in the market square with thick tufts of palms fringing the sky. A few burnoosed figures were scattered here and there.