Part 10
What I mean by the Romance of Communication is this: that the establishment of regular lines for ocean traffic, the building of railways and, above all, of good roads, have made it possible for a multitude of men to see those contrasts which travel can afford, and this development of modern travel has just begun to afford our generation, and will afford with much greater generosity the generation to come, an opportunity for feeling physically the complexity and variety and wonder of the world. This is a good thing.
Not so long ago it was a difficult matter for a man to go from some Northern part of Europe, such as England, to so isolated a community as that which inhabits the Island of Majorca. Now it is easy for a man and costs him but a few pounds to go from England to Barcelona, and from Barcelona he can sail with a rapid and regular service to the port of Palma. When he reaches that port he cannot but feel the Romance, finding this little isolated State wealthy and contented in the midst of the sea. Corsica, of which men know so little, is similarly at hand to-day, and so are the Valleys of the Pyrenees, especially of the Spanish valleys upon which as yet there is hardly any Northern literature or experience. In a year or two we shall have the railway through the Cerdagne, and another line will take one up the Valley of the Ariège into the middle part of Northern Spain.
But of all these benefits to the mind which the modern charge is procuring, I know of none more remarkable than the entry into the Desert.
That portion of Northern Africa which the French have reclaimed for Europe, and which was throughout the existence of the Roman Empire an integral part of European civilisation, consists of the great tableland buttressed to the north and the south by mountain ranges, and crossed in its middle part by parallel outcrops of high rock. This plateau stretches for somewhat more than a thousand miles all along the southern shore of the Western Mediterranean. If the reader will take a map he will see jutting out from the general contour of Africa, an oblong as it were, the eastern end of which is Tunis, the western end Morocco. All that oblong is the tableland of which I speak. The coast is warm, fertile, densely cultivated and populous; full of ports and cities and the coming and going of ships. The highlands behind and to the south of the coast line are more arid, very cold in winter, baking in summer, and always dry and rugged to our Northern eyes. But they are habitable, the population is spreading upon them, and they contain the past relics of the old Roman civilisation which prove what man can do with them when their water supply is stored and their soil is cultivated.
Now this habitable land suddenly ceases, and falls into the Desert of Sahara. The demarkation is abrupt and is everywhere noticeable to the eye. It is indeed more noticeable in the eastern than in the western part. The limit between what Miss Bell has called, in a fine book of hers, "the Desert and the Sown," is more than a day's march in width upon the Moroccan frontier; indeed it is several days' march, and one is not over-sure when one has left the habitable soil and when one has reached the inhospitable sand at the eastern end. The limits are not only marked sharply by a differentiation in the climate and the vegetation, but also by an abrupt escarpment. The Atlas (as the plateau of Northern Africa is generally called) falls in huge, precipitous red cliffs right down upon the Sahara. It so happens that these cliffs, just at the point where they are most abrupt and most rugged, and most romantic, are cleft by a profound gorge through which the Wady Biskra runs very clear and cold, filled with the melting of the snow upon the high mountain of Aures to the north of it. This gap in the cliffs the Romans knew well. They had a military station here to guard them against the ravages of the nomad tribes who afterwards, in the form of the Arabian Invasion, overran their African province and turned it from an European and a Christian to an Asiatic and Mohammedan thing. The Romans called that gorge "The Kick of Hercules," as though the god had here by a stroke of his foot broken away from the cultivated north toward the Desert. Through this gap ran their military road, and here, as a formation of the gorge demanded, they carried that road over the river, the Wady Biskra, upon the bridge the stones of which still remain, though renovated and supported by modern work, to recall the greatness of the empire.
The Arabs, in their turn, have called this astonishing breach "Foum es Sahara"--the mouth of the Sahara; and, as is always the case where they found a Roman bridge, they have added the name El Kantara, the bridge. For it is remarkable that the Arabs were unable to continue Roman work, especially in masonry, save where they had a large Roman population to help them after their conquest, and the bridges which the Romans had built were regarded by them with a sort of superstitious reverence.
Now this Mouth of the Sahara, this gap in the glaring wall of the Desert, has, by a coincidence which has its obvious geographical cause, and which is to be discovered in many another pass throughout Europe and Northern Africa, served for modern methods of communication the purpose which it served for the ancients. It is the nearest approach which the Desert makes to the sea-coast; it is the approach involving the least engineering effort, the most obvious and the most natural entry from the northern cultivated land on to the waterless sandy waste. Therefore, modern civilisation has used it, and you get here more than anywhere else that romance of sudden contrast with which, as I have said, modern methods of travel have gifted the modern world. The French first built down this track a military road, as hard, excellent and well graded as any that you will find in Europe. It not only goes through the gorge, but right on into the sand of the desert, bounded upon either side by masonry, and it has reached, or very soon will reach, Biskra without a break.
Some time after this road had been planned, a railway was constructed along the same track, with certain divergences where the gradient of the highway was too steep for the rails and where therefore long curves were necessary. Whether a man goes by the road or the rail, this is what he sees--and he had best see it in early spring, or what is with us in England late winter. As the road and the rail wind downwards from the little plateaux, by great steps as it were from one level to another, the traveller has about him such scenery as has accompanied him for the last hundred miles: fields of cotton, the trees proper to a temperate climate, and rugged, rocky ridges cropping up from the cultivated soil. There is nothing around him to remind him of what is called "The East," except the camel preceding its master up or down the great highway and the distinctive dress of the natives; for the climate, the crops, and the temperature, the quality of the sunlight, he might be on one of the plains of Western America, which indeed this part of Africa most nearly resembles.
He comes to a clean little inn entirely French in architecture, surrounded by a cool and quiet garden, and with the river running behind it. He walks on a few hundred yards through the gorge, and quite suddenly at the turning of a corner the Desert and all its horizon breaks upon his eyes. He sees a waste of hot, red, unusable sand, a brilliant oasis of palm trees, and even the sun, small and glaring above that plain, seems something different from the familiar light which he had received but an hour before.
It is the most complete contrast, the most sudden and memorable revelation which modern travel affords. And if I had to advise any one who with short leisure desired some experience of modern travel, at least in the way of landscape, I would advise him to visit this astounding place. It has already found its way into many English books, but the great mass of people who could enjoy it do not yet know how exceedingly easy is its access. For travellers even to so near a place like to put on an air of mystery. There is no one with a fortnight to spare and £20 to spend who cannot walk or bicycle or motor to this place at the right time of the year (for in summer the heat is insupportable and in winter the snow on the high northern plains makes travel difficult). Any one who will take that journey would have a memory to last him all his life.
There are those who say that the popularisation of wonderful things is the spoiling of them. I have never been able to agree. Places are not spoiled by the multitude of those who reach them, but by the character of those who reach them, and no one will journey to this meeting place of the East and the West, I think, save with a desire to wonder and to observe, which of itself breeds reverence. Such men may come in any numbers and the place will be the better for them. At any rate, I repeat, it ought to be known to any one who has the sum or the time to spare, that a revelation of such a kind is quite close at hand, for as yet hundreds of Englishmen with far more than that leisure and infinitely more than that wealth are ignorant of the place and its opportunities; and your quickest way is by Marseilles and Bona, and on your way I beseech you to stop and see Timgad, which is a dead Roman city lying silent and empty under the sun upon the Edge of the Desert.
ASTARTE
If you stand outside the old fortifications of the town of Toul and look eastward toward the German peoples, you see a long even line of hills, very high but not quite mountainous; they end in a sharp dip, and rise again, and terminate in an isolated summit which, like so many of the striking conical peaks of Europe, is dedicated to St. Michael.
These heights, like all the crests which surround the basin of that entrenched camp, are fortified, both with complete works and with connecting trenches and batteries; save in the gap between the isolated hill and the ridge I have mentioned the guns are everywhere. In this gap, in the hollow of it and upon the hillside, is a little village which, like all the villages on the actual line of the encircling forts, is wholly dominated by the soldiery; these furnish it with all its trade, these give it its few adventures and its manner of life. The peasants are woken summer and winter by the sound of bugles; the heavy firing of practice is a usual thing to them; a profitable commerce with a garrison twice as numerous as the civil population enriches those who work upon their land.
In this village there lived one of those families which are poor in a country of free men through their own fault; they had land, of course; no rent was asked of them; they were in a community which had now for many ages administered itself, and had for more than a hundred years forgotten the oppression of a territorial class. Nevertheless, by some vice of temperament, they lived like slatterns, and if they cultivated at all some tiny patch of their ruined and weedy holding, it was but just so much as would keep their souls within their bodies, and they preferred chance begging and barefoot jobs at the railway-station or in the streets of the town. Their house was more a cave than a hut; it was dug out of the hillside, with beaten earth walls, save where the front portion of it jutted out, and was roofed with old bits of corrugated iron borrowed or stolen from the sappers. These were supported by a jumble of ramshackle wood, old railway-sleepers, and here and there were gaps stopped roughly with canvas.
In such a place, surrounded by brothers and sisters of all ages, and the only houseworker to a drunken and worthless mother, lived, by accident, one of those women who have such great power in this world. Her ugliness was singular; it had nothing to do with that power save perhaps to enhance it. Her hair, which was sparse and crisp, was of a bright, unpleasing red, harsh and offensive; her eyes were green and stood very far apart in her head; her mouth was large and very decided and firm. It is not by any recapitulation of her features (though any one who had once seen them would always remember them) that one can give the impression of her power. This rather proceeded from a gesture, a manner, and a whole being which was the continual outer manifestation of a certain kind of soul. There was strength in all her gestures, an upstanding challenge in the poise of her body whether she worked or walked, and a sort of creative handling of things whenever she grasped them which at once arrested the attention of a man. Her excessive poverty and the gross carelessness of her surroundings, by contrast greatly enhanced these things.
The young soldiers cared very little for mysteries; their religion was indifferent to them, their knowledge of the perils and of the adventures of the soul was less than that of children; for those who might have guessed at the mysterious things which everywhere surround our existence, even at twenty-one, had such imaginings drowned and purged out of them by continual labour in the open air, by hours of grooming and of riding, by the deep and glorious fatigue of such a life, by sleep in the night, by hunger and by fellowship. Nevertheless, among the more leisured, that is, among the non-commissioned officers, there was one man who fell under the spell. He was handsome, unintelligent, lacking in judgment, and perhaps twenty-five years of age. His father was a large farmer to the north of Rheims; he had a very fair allowance from home; he was regular and did his service well; he was, so far as the non-commissioned ranks can be in any army, popular with the men. This fellow felt the spell. He felt it neither deeply nor violently, for his nature was one on which the great emotions could have no play; but he would seek such duties as brought him to the village, he would intrigue to be sent upon any inspection of the reserve forces or with provisions up into the forts, or upon any other business which would give him for a few moments a chance of seeing her at the door of that miserable hovel, and of exchanging half-a-dozen words from the saddle. His leave he would often spend in the inn of that village, some said in her company (but I doubt if this were true); he would have taken her once into Nancy to see some public show or other, but she would not go.
Between the end of winter and the start for camp, the thing had become as much a habit to him as his own name, and by a sort of code which the regiment observed, his habit was respected and passed by; indeed, to have become so immeshed regarded no one but himself, and the singular net that had been thrown over him was not one which others envied. But there was one who envied him.
When he had been Vaguemestre, that is, the sergeant deputed to fetch the letters of the regiment, and often also when he had gone out to note the condition of the reserve horses or upon any other message, he had taken with him one of the two-year men, a Belgian who had crossed the frontier to find work in his teens, and was not ill content to have been caught by the conscription, for he was utterly destitute and knew neither father nor mother. This man was dark, short and broad; he was kindly in temper and, one would have said, an animal for stupidity. He was possessed of great physical strength; he was a faithful servant and follower where he was employed. And his Sergeant who thus favoured him would often see to it that his service should be lightened in one way or another, and made his life more easy to him than it was to the other drivers of the battery. He was popular, every one helped him, he had done harm to no one, he was always willing. He very rarely spoke, amid all that voluble clatter of young men, and when he did, it was to crack some simple peasant joke or to repeat some old tag of a proverb.
But one day the head of the room who happened to have no stripes and was no more than an older soldier, or, as it was called in that service, "an ancient," found him sitting on his bed and crying. The lout was crying in a gentle but despairing sort of way. The ancient was a rough man, a miner and rather brutal. He would have none of it. And just as he was making things rough for the Belgian, the Sergeant's voice came down the wooden corridors calling him to saddle the two beasts: and all the Belgian did was to refuse. It was a quite unheard-of thing. There was no elasticity in the service; and if any one in authority said "Do this," to say "I will not," or even to be slow in obedience, was as grave, or rather as unknown, as is a crime of violence among wealthy men.
Now the Sergeant, with more womanliness and discernment than one would have thought any one could have shown in such a place, made no noise about it, but came in to see what miracle had happened. He saw the lad sitting there upon his bed with his coarse face full of despair, and he did not in the least understand what could have happened. The eyes of the lad were as full of wonder and of terror and of hopelessness as though he had seen some full tragedy of human life. The Sergeant shrugged his shoulders and let him be, and to save his being worried sent him off upon an easy job until he should come round. Then taking another man to saddle the two horses and to accompany him, he went off upon his usual round towards the hills, upon some official errand or other which he had managed to secure. But when he got there he found in the village, without leave, and having run and panted through the newly ploughed fields, this Belgian fellow, looking like an angry dog, sullen, and with new tears in his eyes, standing outside the door of the hovel.
He ordered him back; he rode his horse after him as the Belgian obeyed, and began trudging suddenly away, and said that he would not report it, but that it was a piece of madness, and that if that sort of thing went on it ended in Africa.
The Belgian said nothing, but plodded off, his enormous strength apparent in every step; and apparent also in the set of his neck and shoulders, and the bending of his head, something of doom. When he got back to quarters he got a ball cartridge from the workroom--no one knows how--he put it in one of the gunner's carbines, which he took from the rack--he had never handled such a weapon before--pulled off the boot from his sockless right foot, put the barrel of the thing in his mouth, and with his toe pressed down the trigger. In this way he killed himself.
I have told the thing exactly as it happened. Then many of the young men first knew that our lives are not wholly of our own ordering, or, to put it better, learned that to ride one's destiny needs in the soul of a man a training, a quickness and a constancy like that which, in the body, helps a man to ride a strong horse and to control him.
THE HUNGRY STUDENT
It was with great astonishment combined with a sense of misfortune that I discovered the other day in a garret off the King's road in Chelsea a poor hack formerly of my acquaintance, who in his endeavour to keep body and soul together had formerly been distinguished or rather ridiculous among journalists by his excursions into every conceivable subject and his preparedness to write any sort of books that a publisher might order of him.
When I found him after these many years he was lying in the last stages of some disease the name of which I forget but which anyhow was mortal; and it was the character in the disease which most affected him--to its scientific appellation he was indifferent.
He confessed to me that he had long had it on his conscience that in a work of his now long forgotten he had promised the reader to tell a certain story, and that this promise had never been fulfilled.
"It is in the beginning of the book," he whispered feebly as his dying eyes were turned towards the four chimneys of the electrical works, "that I promised to tell the story--nay, two stories; I promised to tell the story of The Hungry Student, and also the story of the Brigand of Radicofani. Both these stories weigh heavily upon my conscience. I have promised," he continued in a nervous manner which was tragically affecting, "and I have not redeemed my promise. Readers of mine may have died, still wondering what the truth may be. I beg you, therefore, to take this manuscript" (and he motioned with his wasted hand to some sheets of paper by the side of his bed) "and to give it to the world. At once," he said with the haste and fever of a dying man, "to-morrow you shall come and I will give you the second manuscript concerning the Brigand of Radicofani." ("Both," he moaned, "I took from the writings of others.") "And then I can die in peace."
I took the manuscript and left him, and to fulfil his last wishes I publish it here.
* * * * * *
A student in the University of Paris had the misfortune to be wholly deprived of money in any form, and such credit as he had once enjoyed was also entirely exhausted. It was now thirty-six hours since he had eaten any memorable meal, and during that long period of time he had tasted no more than one roasted potato, a pennyworth of chestnuts, a cup of coffee, and a little bread which he had kept in his pocket from the day before yesterday, and which was therefore of a hard and ungracious sort. Even that had been consumed in the small hours of the morning, and he sat upon a stone bench in the evening of the day about fifty yards from the Odéon Theatre, carefully considering what course he should pursue, and determining, if it were necessary, to thieve; for hunger had got him where hunger gets us all--which is not, as too many assert, in the stomach, but in the throat and palate and brain.
As he there sat he thought of delicious things; not of a mere filling, but of rare matters. He had longings. He remembered that beans, green beans, are better crisp than soft; and he thought of irrecoverable aubergines, and of what an onion was when it was well fried, and of larded chickens, and of great Touranian pears, and of the kind of wine called Chinon; he thought of all these things. But there is this quality about hunger, that the imagination does not satisfy it in any degree at all, but stimulates it only, and he was tortured as he sat upon that bench. Remember that he had not any money at all. He even recalled as he there sat the excellent taste of fresh bread and chocolate, and he was about to get up and walk off the memory of such things when a confused and growing rumour coming up the steep street round the corner broke upon him. It was the noise of many young men. It was almost military in its character, though it had no precision, for one felt in it the advance of numbers. It swelled with every moment, and at last there swung round the corner and up towards his bench a considerable body of students who were walking rapidly, excitedly, and happily, gesticulating freely and telling each other good news, while a very powerful and loud-voiced young man led them on. He could hear snatches of what was said by this company. One was crying: "It is surely the best cooking in the world!" Another, "I care nothing for the cooking, but what wine!" Two others were eagerly disputing whether the lark or the thrush were the better bird, and one was hoping that there would be a chaudfroid of nightingales. Some few sang songs, others in a sort of contented silence went forward eagerly; all evidently had before them some great goal.
As the Herd swept by him a lean young man with black hair just stooped in passing the Hungry Student and whispered: "Would you like to eat to-night?" He whispered back "Yes." "Then," said the first, whose eyes burned like coals, "up you get and follow, and hold your tongue until you learn the tricks of the rest."