North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

I

IT was afternoon in a small oasis village of the Zibans. I was seated on a straw mat in a little garden-space just outside the café, and dreamily regarding the intense blue sky through the vine leaves trellised overhead, which flecked me with their shadows. An old Arab was praying just in front. Two groups, one on each side of me, were placidly seated on clean, yellow mats—young men, whose dark, sad faces, thin-featured and large-eyed, contrasted with their white robes. They were smoking kif—a translucence of gold in their clear, bronze skin, a languor of light in their immobile gaze, content. The garden made off before me, topped with palmy distance; the silent street, to one side, was out of sight, as if it were not. It was a place of peace. I had finished my coffee and dates. I filled my brier-wood. The May heat was great, intense; and I settled myself to a long smoke, and fell into reverie and recollection.

How simple it all was! That praying Arab—what an immediacy with God! What a nonchalance in the dreamy pleasures of those delicate-featured youths! What a disburdenment was here! I had only to lift my index-finger to heaven dying, to be one of the faithful; and the fact was symbolic, exemplary, of the simplicity of Islam. It makes the minimum demand on the intellect, on the whole nature of man. I had but lately placed the faith in its true perspective, historically. Mohammedanism, the Ishmael of religions, was the elder brother of Protestantism, notwithstanding profound differences of racial temperament between them. The occidental mind is absorbent, conservative, antiseptic. It is not content, like the Mohammedan, to let things lie where they fall, disintegrate, crumble, and sink into oblivion. Western education fills the mind with the tangle-foot of the past. Catholicism was of this racial strain. It had a genius for absorption. It was the melting-pot of the religious past, and what resulted after centuries was an amalgam, rich in dogma, ritual, and institution, full of inheritance. The Reformation was an attempt to simplify religion and disburden the soul of this inheritance in so far as it contained obsolete, harmful, or inessential elements; many things, such as saint’s worship, art, celibacy, were excised. Mohammedanism, ages before and somewhat differently placed, initiating rather than reforming a faith, was an effort of the desert soul to adapt to itself by instinct the Semitic tradition of God that had grown up in it, and to simplify what was received from its neighbors. The founder of Islam was more absolute and radical in exclusion than the reformers in elimination. Islam had a genius for rejection. Mohammed, with the profound monotheistic instinct that was racial in him, affirmed the unity of God with such grandeur and decision that there was no room in the system for that metaphysical scrutiny of the divine nature in which Catholic theology found so great a career; on the other hand, with his positive sense of human reality, which was also racial, he shut out asceticism, in which Catholic conscience worked out its illustrious monastic future. He had achieved a reconciliation between religion and human nature in the sphere of conduct, and he had silenced controversial dogma in its principal field in the sphere of theology.

A creed so single and elementary had no need of a priesthood to preserve and expound it. There was no room for a clergy here, and there was none. The Reformation diminished but did not end the priest; Islam suppressed him; yet there remained much analogy between Mohammedanism and Protestantism in the field of religious phenomena in which the priest is embryonic. Protestantism is the best example in human affairs of the actual working of anarchy; and, in proportion as its sects recede from the authority and organization of the Catholic Church, it presents in an increasing degree, in its individuality of private judgment and freedom of religious impulse, the anarchic ideal of personal life. Islam offers in practice a similar anarchy. I was struck from the beginning with an odd resemblance to my native New England in this regard. It, too, has been a Marabout-breeding country, with its old revivals, transcendentalists, new lights, Holy Ghosters, and venders of Christian Science. Emerson was a great Marabout. The Mormons, who went to Utah and made a paradise in the desert, were not so very different from the Mzabites who planted an oasis-Eden in the Saharan waste. The communities that from time to time have sprung up and died away, or dragged on an unnoticed life in country districts, are analogous, at least, to the zaouias scattered through this world of mountain and sand. In many ways my first contacts with the faith were sympathetic. The faith that had no need of an intellectual subsidy, that placed no interdict on human nature, that interposed no middlemen between the soul and God, woke intelligible responses in my agnostic, pagan, and Puritan instincts; here, too, was great freedom for the religious impulse and toleration of its career; and I saw with novel interest in operation before my eyes the religious instinct of man, simple in idea, direct in practice, free in manifestation, and on the scale of a race. It was the desert soul that was primarily interesting to me—its environment, its comprehension of that, its responses thereto; and, examining it thus, its religion seemed a thing intime and scarcely separable from its natural instincts and notions.

What is it that is borne in on the desert soul, when it wakes in the great silence, the luminosity, the boundless surge of the sands against the sky! Immensity—the feeling of the infinite—nature taking on the cosmic forms of God. The desert is simple. It has few features, but they are all elements of grandeur. It is the mood of the Psalms. Awe is inbred in the desert dweller. There is, too, a harmony between these few elements in their superb singleness and his lowly mind; not much is required of him, and that little is written large for his understanding; he takes things in wholes. His mind is primary, intuitive, not analytical; he does not multiply thought, he beholds; and this vision of the world he lives in, a wonderfully grand and simple world, suffices for a religious intuition as native to him as the palm to the water-source. The palm is a monotheistic tree. Monotheism belongs to the desert. The faith of the desert is a theism of pure nature, unenriched by any theism of humanity, of the human heart in its self-deification; it is a spiritualization of pure nature worship, whereas Christianity, at least under some aspects, is the grafting of a human ideal on an old cosmogony. The God of the desert is an out-of-doors god, like the Great Spirit of the Indians, who had no temples. No mosque can hold him; there is no altar there, no image. He cannot be cloistered; he has no house, no shrine, where one can repair, and abide for a time, and come away, and perhaps leave religion behind in a place of its own. He is in the desert air; and the desert dweller, girt with that immensity, wherever his eye falls can commune with him; five times daily he bows down in prayer to him and has the intimate sense of his being; he does not think about him—he believes.

The desert cradles, nurses, deepens, colors, and confirms this belief. It is a land of monotony, full of solitude and silence. The impression it thus made upon me was profound, and amounted to an annihilation of the past. The freshness of the wilderness, as the discoverer feels it, lay there; it abolished what was left behind; the Old World had rolled down the other side of the mountains. Life in its turmoil and news, its physical clamor and mental clatter, life the distraction, had ceased. It was not that silence had fallen upon it; but the soul had gone out from it and returned to the silence of nature. There is no speech in that rosy ring of mountain walls, in the implacable gold of the sands undulating away to the blue ends of earth, in the immutable sky; they simply are. In the passage of the winds there is stillness. It is not that there are no sounds. The hush is of the soul. Monotonous? Yes. That is its charm. Monotony belongs to the simple soul; and what is monotone to the eyes of the desert dweller is monotone in the ideas and emotions of his psychology. Repetition belongs to Islam; its words and rites, its music and dances are stereotyped, something completely intelligible, identically recurrent, like tales that please children—the same stories in the same words. Prayer and posture, formula and rhythm, endlessly renewing the same idea and the same sensation—they imprint, they intensify; desert moulds, they help the soul to retain its conscious form. The larger mind that discriminates, analyzes, and explores, may tire of this; but it also finds in such a solitude, full of silence and monotony, a place where the soul collects itself, integrates, and has more profoundly the sense of its own being.

The desert is not only the generator and fosterer of the desert soul in its spiritual attitude, its practices and processes, by the larger and universal elements in the environment, but in more detailed ways it provides the atmosphere of life. It is strangely sympathetic with the dweller upon its sands. He is a nomad; and the desert is itself nomadic. The landscape is a shifting world. The dunes travel. The scene dissolves and rebuilds. The sand-hills lift a sculptured mountain edge upon the blue, swells like the bosom of a wave, precipices and hollows like mountain defiles, outlooks, and hiding-places in the valleys, and the surface shall be finely mottled and delicately printed and patterned with lace-work as far as the eye can see. The wind erases it in a night, hollows the hills and fills the hollows; it is gone. The oases disappear; they are like islands sinking in the sea of driving sands; you see their half-sunken trees like ruins buried beneath the wave, still visible in the depths. The face of the land is ephemeral; to leave the route is to be lost. And after the wind, the light begins its play. The lakes of salt and saltpetre, the lifeless lands, the irremediable waste—ruins of some more ancient and primordial desolation, the region cursed before its time with planetary death—change, glitter, disclose placid reaches of palm-fringed water, island-paradises, mirage beyond mirage in the far-reaching enchantment, strips of fertility like lagoons on the mineral mud as when one sees a valley-land through clouds. The heat gives witchcraft to the air; size and distance are transformed; what is small seems gigantic, what is far seems beside you; a flock of goats is a cavalcade, a bush is a strange monster. To the nomad in those moving sands, in that air of illusion and vision, in those imprecise horizons, the solid earth might seem the stuff that dreams are made on. The desert is a paradox; immutable, it presents the spectacle of continuous change.

Nowhere is the transitory so suggested, set forth, and embodied. Here is the complete type of human existence, permeated with impermanence, the illusory, and oblivion, yet immutable; the generations are erased, but humanity abides with the same general aspects. The land is a type, too, of the desert past—its tribes globing into hosts and dispersed, its dynasties that crumble and leave not a ruin behind, its inconsecutiveness in history, wars like sand-storms, peace without fruition. It is on this life, and issuing from its mortal senses, that there falls the impalpable melancholy and intimate sadness of the desert. The formlessness of the vague envelops all there; it is the path of the unfinished, the illimitable; it is the bosom of the infinite where life is a momentary foam. Mystery is continuous there, a perpetual presence. Its human counterpart, its image in the soul, is la rêve, the dream, reverie, as changeful, as illusory, that takes no root, fades, and vanishes. It is not a merely contemplative sadness; it is a physical melancholy. The oases are full of fever, of the incredible languors of the heat—breath is a weight upon the lungs, blood is weariness in the veins, life is an oppression and an exhaustion. It revives, but it remembers. There is a swift spring-time of life, a resilience, a jet, of the eternal force, and age comes like night with a stride. Death is the striking of the tent. It is quickly over. You shall see four men passing rapidly with the bier, a wide frame on which the body lies, wrapped in white; in the barren place of the dead they dig with haste a shallow hollow in the sand; they stand a moment in the last prayer; they have covered the grave swiftly and stuck three palm twigs in the loose sand, and are gone. A change of day and night, of winter and summer, of birth and death, and at the centre the wind-blown desert and the frail nomad tent; and then, three palm twigs in the nameless sand.

The desert gives new values to life. It is a rejuvenation of the senses, a perpetual renaissance. The fewness of objects and their isolation on the great scene increase their worth to the eye, and in the simple life all trifles gain in meaning through receiving more attention; the pure and bracing air invigorates the whole body in all its functions, and the light is, in particular, a stimulant to the eye. The intensification of the pleasures of the senses is due also to the austerities and hardships of life in the waste and the change from suffering to ease. To the nomad, after the rigors of the sands, heat and thirst and glare, all vegetation has the freshness of spring-time; the oasis, welcoming his eyes, is, in truth, an opening paradise. The toiling caravan, the French column, know what it means. The long, black-green lines of the oasis over the sands is like the breaking of light in the east; the sound of running water is a music that reverberates in all their nerves; fruits hanging in cool shadows, flowers, groves—it is la vie, the great miracle, again dreaming the beautiful dream in the void. After the hamada, the desert route, it is paradise. It is impossible to conceive of the sensual intensity of this delight, of its merely bodily effervescence. The Arabs are a sensual race, and the desert has double charged their joys with health and hardship; their poverty of thought is partly recompensed by fulness of sensation. The oases are not gardens in the European sense; they are rude and arid groves and orchards and fields, with a roughness of untamed nature in the aspect of the soil; and the desert everywhere is savage in look, with the uncared-for reality, the nakedness, and the wild glory of primeval things. Yet I have never known habitually such delicacy and poignancy of sensation. The wind does not merely blow, it caresses; the landscape does not smile, it mirrors and gives back delight; odors and flavors are penetrating; warmth and moisture bathe and cool; there is something intimate in the touch of life. There is a universal caress in nature, a drawing near—something soothing, lulling, cadenced—felt in the blood and along the nerves, a volupté diffused and physical; for there is a flower of the senses, as there is a flower of the mind, as refined in its exhalation, in the peace of vague horizons, in wafted fragrances of the night, in luminosities of the atmosphere, in floating vapors of morning, in the dry bed of the oued under the moon, in the pomegranate blossom, in the plume of the date-palm flower, in all evanescence, the companionship of some little thing of charm, the passing of a singing voice. The desert is rich in those mysteries of sensation that remain in their own realm of touch and eye and ear, reverie and dream. It is a garden of the senses; and the wild flavor of the garden gives a strange poignancy to its delights.

This sensuality prolongs its life in the higher faculties; it penetrates and impregnates the mental consciousness; memory and imagination are strongly physical; the soul-life itself is deeply sensuous. It is, in this primitive psychology, as if one should see the coral insects building up beneath the wave the reef that should emerge on a clear-skied world. The desert music reveals this most clearly. Sensation, as has been often said, enters into the arts in varying degrees. Literature is the most disembodied of the arts; its images are most purely mental and free from physical incarnation; then, in order, painting, sculpture, music include greater actuality of sensation by virtue of which æsthetic pleasure, as it arises from them, is more deeply drenched in physical reality. The senses are preliminary to the intellect; that is why the arts precede the sciences in human evolution. The desert dweller has no sciences, and his only art is music, which itself is in a primitive stage, being still characteristically joined with the dance in its original prehistoric union. The Arabs sit, banked on their benches, apathetic, gazing, listening, while the monotonous rhythm of the dance and the instruments rises, sways, and terminates, and begins again interminably. What is their state? It is an obsession, more or less profound, of memory and imagination, retrospective or prospective experience, felt with physical vagueness, defined, vivified, and made momentarily present by the swaying dancer in the emotional nimbus of the music. It is the audience at only one remove from participation in the dance, contemplative but still physically reminiscent of it. The dances are of two general types: that of the negroes, a physical hysteria, full of violent gesture, leaping, and loud cries, the barbaric paroxysm; the other that of Arab origin, a voluptuous cadencing to a monotonously responsive accompaniment. The desert dweller is a realist; his emotions, his desires have not transcended the facts of life; his poetry, so far as it exists, and there is a considerable amount of it, is one of simple and positive images. Mysticism, in the intellectual sense, the transformation of the senses into the spirit, does not exist for him; not nearer than Persia is the mystic path which leads to the ecstasy of the soul’s union with the divine, of the Bride with the Bridegroom; the desert knows nothing of that Aryan dream. Sensation remains here in its own realm; and its summary artistic form is music, itself so physically penetrating in its method and appeal. The music of the desert is to me very attractive; it engages me with its simple and direct cling; snatches of carolled song, the humble notes of its flutes, the insistence of its instruments fascinate and excite me. It is the music of the senses.

The sensuality of the Arabs also found other climaxes, in love and war. It is the intensity of their passion and of their fighting which has charged their history, as a race, with its greatest brilliancy; and at their points of highest achievement a luxurious temperament has characterized them, which has made an Arabian dream the synonym for all strange and soft delights. The desert in its degree has this mollesse, physical languors, exhaustion; but its home is in the oasis-villages. The true nomad contemns the oasis-dwellers as a softened, debilitated, and corrupt race; the life of the nomad is purer, hardier, manlier; he is the master; the oasis pays him tribute. The life of the senses, however, in either form, passes away; vitality ebbs the more swiftly because of its rapid and intense play; pallor falls on the sensations, they fade, and joy is gone. Melancholy from its deepest source supervenes; in the desert—age in its abandonment, decay, and poverty; in the oasis—life somnolent, effeminate, drugged. The wheel comes full circle in the end for all. Meanwhile the vision of life is whole, and goes ever on. Youth is always there in its beauty and freshness. There is always love and fighting. Nature does not lose her universal caress. The desert soul still adores the only God in his singleness. There is great freedom. The route calls. It is human life, brave, picturesque, mysterious—beset by the sands, but before it always the infinite.

Yet, fascinated though I was, I was aware of some detachment. Sweet was the renaissance of the senses—what brilliancy and joy in their play—merely to look, to breathe, to be! To have come into one of the titanic solitudes of nature, comparable only to ocean wastes and amplitudes of the sky, and to dwell there, far from the mechanic chaos, the unbridled egotism, the competitive din—what a recovery of the soul was there, of human dignity, of true being! and to find there a race still in a primitive simplicity, unburdened by thought, not at warfare with its mortal nature, the two poles of the spirit and the body married in one sphere—and to feel the rude shepherding of nature round their nomad lives, inured to hardship, but swiftly responsive with almost animal vitality to her rare kindlier moods and touches—it was a discovery of the early world, of ancestral, primeval ways. It was a refreshment, a disburdenment, an enfranchisement; and it was a holiday delight. Yet over these simplicities, austerities, and wild flavors there still hung a moral distance, something Theocritean, the mood of the city-dweller before pastoral charm. To sit in the café in the throng of Arabs with the coffee and the dance, to muse and dream on the mat alone, to lie apart in the garden and be content—it was a real participation; but in the background behind, in the shadow of my heart, was the old European though eluded. This life had the quality of escapade—to see things lying crumbled and fallen with none to care, to be free of the eternal salvage of dead shells of life and thought—a world so little encumbered with the heritage of civilization! How many years had I spent, as it were, in a museum of things artificially preserved in books, like jars—in the laboratory of the intellectual charnel-house! The scholar, accumulating the endless history of human error, has no time to serve truth by advancing it in his own age; he lives so much with what was that he cannot himself be; his inheritance eats him up. The crown of Western culture is apt to be an encyclopædia. There was no library in the desert. And religion—how much of it comes to us moderns in a dead form! Surely religion is a revelation of the soul, not to it. This is a doctrine of immanence. If the divine be not immanent in the soul, man can have no knowledge of it. Religion is an aura of the soul, a materialization of spiritual consciousness, varying in intensity of light and tones of color from race to race, from age to age, and, indeed, from man to man; it is the soul’s consciousness made visible. It is not to me interesting as scientific truth is, a thing of worth in the realm of the abstract, but rather as artistic truth is, a vital expression, something lived. What a reality it had here in the desert soul—its effluence, almost its substance, giving back the spiritual image of nature in humanity, a condensation of the vast spaces, the vague horizons, the monotony, the mortal burden, in a prayer! It is a new baptism into nature, if not unto God, only to see this aura of the soul in the desert. The scene in all its phases—landscape and men—was to me an evocation of the long ago. But the soul does not return upon its track. The simple life is only for the simple soul. The soul of the old European is not simple. Yet if the leopard could change his spots, if one could lay off the burden of thought, lay staff and scrip aside, and end the eternal quest, nowhere else could he better make the great refusal and set up an abiding-place as in this nomad world. Its last word is resignation; peace is its last desire.

The desert world is a dying world. That is the sadly shadowing, slowly mounting, fatally overwhelming impression that grows on the mind and fills it. Death is the aspect of the scene; sterility, blankness, indifference to life. Inhospitality is its universal trait and feature. It is as hostile to animal and vegetable as to human life—its skeleton lakes without fishes, its drifting valleys without birds, its steppes without roving herds. Its oases are provisioned with water and bastioned with ramparts against the eternal siege of the sands; to preserve them is like holding Holland against the sea. The mere presence of man, too—what is human—shares in this aspect of death. I have mentioned the cemeteries, mere plots of extinction, anonymous, without dates, leaving nothing of degradation to be added to the sense of hopelessness, futility, and oblivion. The dwelling-places of the living are hardly more raised above the soil or distinguishable from the earth they crumble into—typically seen in those ksour of the south, cracked, with gap and rift, dissolving in ageless decay and abandonment, mere heaps over the underground darkness of passages and cells—or here embosomed in a great silence, full of solitude and secrecy, the life of the palm garden, of the great heats, of the frigid nights; always and everywhere with the sense of an immense desolation, denudation, and deprivation. The life of the tent is one of sunshine and vitality by comparison; humble and rugged, it has no decadence in its look; in the villages the decadence seems almost of the soil itself. One goes out into the desert to escape the oppression of this universal mortal decay; and there is no life there, only a passage of life, of which the skeleton of the camel in the sands is the epitaph.

A dying world and a race submissive to its fate. In that nomad world, where everything is passing away, there is nothing fixed but the will of Allah. It is not strange to find fatality the last word of Islam. In the desert world the will of nature appears with extreme nakedness; the fortune of man is brief, scant, and unstable; the struggle is against infinite odds, a meagre subsistence is gained, if at all; and the blow of adversity is sudden and decisive. Patience everywhere is the virtue of the poor, resignation the best philosophy of the unfortunate, and defeat, as well as victory, and perhaps more often, brings peace. These are great words of Islam, and nowhere have they sunk deeper into life than in the desert-soul. They are all forms of that fatality which the desert seems almost to embody in nature, to exercise in the lives of its children, and to implant in their bosoms as the fundamental fact of being. Fatality is in the outer aspect of things and exhales from the inward course of life; melancholy, impotence, immobility accumulate with the passage of years; effortless waiting, indolence, prayer, contemplation—these are the shadows in which is the end. This mood of the despair of life has nowhere more lulling cadences of death. The desert is a magnificent setting for the scene—its strong coloring, its vast expanses, its unfathomable silences; its desolate grandeurs, its sublime austerities, its wild glory—godlike indifference to mankind; its salt chotts, immense as river valleys, tufts of the sand-sunken palms—premonitions of the disappearance of life from the earth, the final extinction of that vital spark which was the wildfire of the planet, the thin frost work on the flaking rock, the little momentary breath of love and war and prayer. Here life takes on its true proportions at the end—all life; it is an incident, a little thing in the great scene. A dying world, a dying race, a dying civilization, truly; but the old European, the wise pessimist in the shadow, has seen much death; to him it is but another notch on the stick. To me, personally near to it and fascinated in my senses still, it is très humain, exciting, engaging; and the melancholy that penetrates it ever more deeply and mysteriously does not interfere with its charm, its blend of delicacy and hardiness, of spirit and sense, of freedom and fate. I have a touch of the heart of the desert-born. “If love of country should perish from the earth,” said my soldier-poet, “it would be found again in the heart of the Bedouin.” No race is more attached to the soil, or so consumed with home-sickness for it. The Bedouin loves the desert.