North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

II

I went by myself to visit the old ksar, the native village which had occupied this site before the coming of the French and the rise of the new town about the railway. It lay some little distance to the west of the track—a collection of palm-trees, with a village at the farther end, backed by a white koubba. My Arab boy, who had never lost sight of me, had me in charge, and led the way. We crossed into the strip of barren country and saw the ksar with its palmerai before us, like a rising shoal in the plain. Accustomed as my eyes are to large horizons, this country had an aspect of solitariness that was extraordinary. The sand-blown black rock, the hamada, lies all about; the mountains of the Ksour that back the scene to the northeast are reddish in color and severe in outline, and the mountains of Morocco, cut here by three passes, block it to the north and west with their heavy and wild masses, while other detached heights are seen far off to the south. From this broken ring of bare mountains, red and violet and gray, the rocky desert floor, blown with reddish sand, makes out into the open distance interminably to horizons like the sea. In the midst of this the little ksar with its trailing palm-trees, Beni-Ounif with its slender rail and station, its white redoubt and low buildings, with the Bureau Arab and its palms a little removed, seem insignificant human details, mere markings of animal life, in a prospect where nature, grandiose in form and without limit in distance, exalted by aridity, is visibly infinite, all-encompassing, supreme. The sun only, burning and solitary, seems to own the land. The moment one steps upon the windy plain it is as if he had put to sea; he is alone with nature, and the harshness of the land gives poignancy to his solitude.

We walked over rough ground awhile, and then crossed the dry bed of a oued, one of the channels that in time of flood lead the waters down to the Zousfana, whose shrunken stream flows in its wide rocky bottom some distance to the north of the ksar toward the mountains; and we climbed up on the farther side by crumbling footpaths that run on little uneven ridges of dry mud, twisting about in a rambling way, with small streams to cross, which groove the soil; and so we came into the gardens. The aspect, however, is not that of a garden; the background of the scene is all dry mud, whose moulded and undulating surface makes the soil, while the little plots are divided by mud walls, high enough at times to give some shade and meant to retain the irrigating waters. There are a few patches of barley, very fresh and green; but for the most part the plots are filled with trees—fig-trees, old and contorted, with their heavy limbs, the peach and almond with fragile grace and new tender green, the pomegranate and the apple, and rising above them the palms whose decorative forms frame in and dignify the little copses of the fruit-trees, and unite them; but the dry mud makes an odd contrast with the branching green of varied tints and gives a note of aridity to the whole under scene. The plots vary only in their planting, and were entirely deserted. We came through them to the ksar itself with its wall. It is built of dry mud, which is the only material used here for walls and houses alike. The rain soon gives them a new modelling at best, and this ksar is old and ruined, half abandoned now that the French town is near. The outer wall is much broken, with the meandering shapelessness of abandoned earthworks—scallops and indentations, the smooth moulding and mud sculpture of time on the golden soil; and off beyond it stretches the endless cemetery, with the pointed stones at the head and foot of the graves, a tract of miserable death, so simple, naked, and poverty-struck, and yet in such perfect harmony with the sterile and solitary scene, that it does not seem sad but only the natural and inevitable end. It belongs to the desert; it is its comment on the trivial worthlessness of human life, whose multitude of bones are heaped and left here like the potter’s shard. The sun beats down on the wide silence of that cemetery; the sand blows and accumulates about the rough stones that seem to lie at random; there is no distinction of persons there, no sepulchral apparelling of the mortal fact, no illusion, no deception; it is the grave—“whither thou goest.” And it is not sad—no more than the naked mountains of the Ksour, the dark Morocco heights, the silent sunlight; it is one with them—it is nature. On its edge toward the ksar rises the koubba of the saint, Sidi Slimanc bou-Semakha, the ancient patron of the country; it is the only spot of this old Moslem ground that no infidel foot has trod; there his body reposes in its wooden coffin, hung with faded silks within its carved rail in the white chamber, secluded and sacred, and the faithful sleep in the desert outside. It is a world that has passed away.

The ksar itself was like all others in this region. They are walled villages adjoining the palmerai that feeds them; the houses are built of sun-baked earth supported on small palm beams and lean serried one upon another in continuous lines and embankments; narrow alley ways and passages honeycomb them, often with a roofing of the same palm beams, so that one walks in underground obscurity; externally, owing to their old and weather-worn aspect, they have a general ruinous look. The walls on the street are blind; here and there in dark corners a seat for loungers is hollowed out in the side; there is somewhere a square for judgment where is the assembly of the elders, and by the mosque or koubba an open space. There is always a life outside the walls, a place for market, for caravans to stop, encampments of all sorts. All have a look of dilapidation. But this old ksar had more than that; it was obviously in a state of ruin and abandonment. Walls had fallen, exposing the wretched interiors, cave-like, mere cellarage. There was no one there. I passed through some of the covered ways—blank obscurity, with holes of naked sunlight. I did not see half a dozen living figures; they were unoccupied, listless, marooned. It was still—a stillness of death. I found the sources, the underground streams that supply the little oasis; there were three or four young negro girls standing in the water in discolored bright rags; they pointed out to me the blind fish in the water. “C’est défendu,” said my Arab boy when I asked him to catch one. Life seemed défendu. The air was moribund. It was a decadence of the very earth. I was glad to have the hot sun on my back again by the tall palms and green fruit-trees springing out of their dry-mud beds, and I sat down on a crumbling wall, amid the amber deliquescence of the rich-toned soil, and looked back on that landscape of decay, and sought to reconstruct in fancy the desert life of its silent years.

It was an old human lair. Its people, the ksouriens, who lived here their half-underground life, sheltered from the burning blasts of the summer sun and the bitter winds of winter, were a settled townfolk, with their oasis agriculture and simple desert market. The ruling race were the descendants of some Marabout; for the Moslem saint was a patriarch, and one finds whole villages that claim to be originated from some one of them; these men were the proprietors of the gardens, which were tilled by native negroes or Soudanese slaves and their progeny, a servile breed; and there were Jews, who were compelled to live apart, a pariah caste. Outside were the Berber and Arabized nomad tribes, scattered and living in fractions, who went from place to place for the pasturage of their flocks; their chiefs and head men were desert raiders, who took toll by tribute or pillage of the caravans traversing their country, and made forays on their neighbors; the people of the ksar held a feudal relation to these desert lords. The most secure units of property in the land were the zaouias, or monasteries, bound to hospitality and charity, and ruled by Marabout stocks; their gardens and flocks had a protective character of sacredness, the goods of God. Society was in a primitive form of uncohering fragments, very independent, self-centred, uncontrolled; though it was of one faith, hostility pervaded it; feuds were its annals; it had pirate blood. A pastoral, marauding, sanguinary world, with elements of property and aristocracy, but democratic within itself, with slaves and outcast breeds; a world of simple wants but always half submerged in misery; a world of the strong arm. In such a world the ksouriens lived here by the mountain passes. They saw those old nomad tribes go by that mounted to Tlemcen and drank the bright cup of the Mediterranean for a season; but the ksouriens had forgotten them; their passage was only a wrinkling of the desert sand. Caravans stopped by the brown walls; raiders rode by to the desert; the seven ksars of Figuig fought petty wars, one on another, on the hill opposite; mountain women pitched their striped tents by the cemetery wall; the Jews worked at little ornaments of silver and coral; there was a coming and going to the fountain, secret and ferocious love, the woe of poverty and hate—the Arab life of violence and ruse and silence, in the palm gardens, the underground passages, the darkened streets; a life of obscurity and somnolence; and the ksouriens grew pale like wax, with their black beards and corded turbans, and the old Arab vitality melted in their bones. The hours that no man counts rolled over the languid ksar, where white figures sat in the seats in the earthen wall along the covered streets in the silence; the unborn became the living and the stones multiplied in the cemetery; and there was no change. I could almost hear the bugle note yonder that brought a new world of men. And now the ksar was dead.

The moon, almost at the full, was growing bright in the eastern sky; the mountains of the Ksour, that still took the setting sun, glowed with naked rock, rose-colored; on the left the mountains of Figuig lay in black shadow, with the violet defiles between, clear-cut on the molten sky. As I stepped on the rise of Beni-Ounif it was already night; the brilliant white moon flooded the hard landscape with winter clarity; the unceasing wind blew cold. It was a solemn scene.