North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

II

The next morning was bright and fair, and I went out to explore the land southward, a stretch of about twenty kilometres to the strait which divides the island from the mainland. We were soon out of the town and almost at once in the fields. The road, extremely dry and sandy, wound over a very open country of scattered farms, with lines and groups of palm and olive, besides other trees, on slightly rolling, bosomy slopes with long and gradual variations of level. It was a pleasant scene in the warm April air of sleepy peace and solitary silence, unbroken country quiet. One characteristic of the land was soon evident. The population, which is upward of forty thousand for the whole island and is of the pure Berber stock for the most part, has never gathered into towns and villages. The few central points are mere market-places for distribution and supply; the people live scattered on farms in their own demesnes. There are singular farmsteads, built for defence, actually fortified; a wall, enclosing a space large enough for cattle and whatever must be under cover in case of attack, surrounds the whole, with towers at the four corners. These farmsteads are near enough for mutual aid; and with only this system of protection the inhabitants of the island withstood the random nomad forays from the mainland and the pirate descents from the sea for centuries.

The island is really the edge of the desert where it makes down to the Mediterranean. It is, in effect, a farming oasis which has been reclaimed from the sands by its own people through the use of the underground waters. It is in a condition of varied cultivation throughout, but is more fertile in some parts than in others; for, if attention is relaxed, it reverts at once to the sterile, sandy state. A peculiar people inhabits it. They are dissident Mohammedans, and akin in their heresy to the Mzabites of the Sahara, whose fantasia I saw, and who have made the oases to the west and southwest of Tougourt centres of prosperity, besides being a vigorous nomad race of merchants through all North Africa. The sect would be called Unitarians among us, because they carry their insistence on “the only God” so far as to deny divine authority to the prophets, including Mohammed. They have strange bits of mosques, diminutive little things, with a square minaret topped with a curious conical stone, and these are numerously scattered here over the whole island. They are also the Puritans of the Moslem world, strict in their manners, severe even, and very frugal. It is to this folk that the island owes its state of culture; they have created it as a habitable tract; nor do they confine their toil to the land. They weave excellent white burnooses of their wool, and bright, striped blankets, and mould pretty pottery; they engage in the fisheries; and with their nomad instincts they often seek occupation and trade abroad, like the Mzabites, who are credited with a Quaker-like prosperity in worldly affairs. This community, distributed broadly without towns in their own small domains, might seem a dream of the primitive—a frugal folk on a sterile land, in their rural Paradise of small economies and simple manners, leading uneventful lives of humble industry, far from the great world.

It was a curious country to look at—not rich, no bottom-lands, or waving acres, or luxury and exuberance of vegetation rushing forth; the nakedness of the land showed through. But the face of the country had lines of verdure and spots of spring-time and greening reaches over the dry acclivities; the mild warmth of the sun cheered everything to its brightest; there were plotted fields here and there, and the palms gave beauty to the sky and the olives gave character to the earth. There were some splendid olive-trees, old, hoary trunks, knobbed with age and contorted by ocean gales; massive columnar stems of incredible girth that lifted from near the ground immense rounds of heavy foliage impenetrably dark; and others, mere shells and ruins of time, that still shot green shoots from their tops to the bright wave of the sun. It was the scene of an old world; and there was something ancient and venerable to my eyes in the landscape that had seen so little change for centuries and yet had known human life, humble generations, for so long. Far away, beyond sloping breadths of dark, rough herbage whose sparse bunches hummocked the dry soil, glittered a low mass of white walls that slowly defined itself as a farmstead with orchards about; it had a rude, mediæval look in its exterior, and many offices, apparently, suggesting somewhat an old manor. Cattle stood round it lazily, and a couple of men were at work in the cluttered yard. On another ridge was one of those strange mosques, but larger and more important than usual, perhaps the memorial of some island saint. The blue sky shone through the window of the cupola of the minaret, with its conical stone at the top; on one side the olive-trees leaned away from it by twos and threes, and on the other high palms lifted their feathery tops, inclined at different angles, tall, slender, drooping stems with very small tufts. It was a very lonely and peaceful sight in that silent country, stretching far around. We met hardly any one on the road except, in the vicinity of the rare houses, groups who evidently belonged on the place. The houses were not the least curious feature of the landscape. They were roofed with little domes, as is usual on the island. This gave a certain solemnity to the scene—the grave aspect of the East. So we went on in the calm, warm day, mile after mile, undulating over the country, but with no real change of level, with glimpses of the old farms, the sharp-pinnacled, square minarets of the solemn mosques, the white domes, feathery palms, and rolling olives, through the monotony of a land where there was truly a great peace.

We reached Ajim, the southernmost point of the island, in the light of a blazing noon that bit every line of black shadow with a brilliant edge. Ajim was only a short, tumble-down street. The one-story buildings of sun-dried mud on either side presented a low, blank wall, continuous and irregular, broken by a succession of high-arched or elongated oblong openings, closed by rough boards. I think I never saw so poor a hamlet. There was a general look of shabby dilapidation, but this was due to the original poverty of the materials and the humbleness of the effort. There was no appearance of abandonment. On the contrary, there was building going on and the street was lively. I had much difficulty in keeping out of the way of donkeys and camels and porters, as I walked to the upper end and looked in at the fondouk which was thronged with beasts and men. It was a characteristic scene as I turned back, for the walk was only of three or four minutes. The little vista was dominated at the lower end by the rising buildings, and the poor street lay below, half in the sunlight, with its sharp band of inky shadow on the southern side. The people were scattered from end to end, mostly in earth-brown, flowing garments, with here and there a snowy burnoose of some more important citizen; and there were caps and turbans of all sorts, and a dash of faded blue or green now and then showed in the sunshine; but the scene was sober-hued, white and black and brown for the most part, under the dazzling blue in the fresh sea air. The open doors of the street, as I passed along, let a dim light into the interior gloom of what seemed places for storage, cavernous and dark; and further on there were a few shops and cafés, a smith, a rope-maker. There were all kinds of ropes; and it gradually came on me that this was really a fishing village and a place for sailormen, a port. It was a little unlike anything I had elsewhere seen. I went through the rope-maker’s shop; such places always call me with their savor of the sea and its tasks. I had a good lunch at a café; one can always get food in the most out-of-the-way places, if he has any knack for travelling. I remember only the cup of coffee at the end, with some of those strange-colored liquids, exotic drinks that one finds at the ends of the world, bright, tonic, exhilarating; and over one of these I sat watching the little life of the street, a continual passing of men and boys and burdens, with dialogues and incidents, and a not infrequent disposition to take the stranger into confidence with looks and nods and smiles of intelligence. It was a pleasant and picturesque hour in the foreign sun, and ended happily; and I strolled down to the pier, which lies at a little distance from the village beyond a broad, open ground.

It was a fine pier and made out very far into the shallow waters. The mainland lay a mile or two away and was as desert a strand as I ever looked on, flat, bleak, uninhabited. The level waters stretched far away on either hand, blue and shining, and a fresh breeze sent the lively waves to chafe angrily against the pier. The near scene was quietly interesting. Small vessels were anchored at a little distance, and a hull seemed to be building or undergoing repairs near the shore, where there was a group with animals. Close to the pier leaned a tangle of slanting masts and ropes, the Arab fleet of sponge-fishers, not so numerous as the Greek fleet I had seen at Sfax, but similar in character and making a pretty marine view. Not far from it an Arab was sifting grain from a great heap by a moored vessel on the other side, and a camel was unloading. There were several walking figures on the pier, which was very long and narrow, and if one of them stood still he looked, in the strict folds of his Arab dress, like a statue on a bridge, relieved on the sky and the sea with perfectly defined lines. There was one group, however, that centred my attention—a true Bedouin scene. It was a family that had come over on some sort of a ferry from the other side. The man was unloading their belongings from the boat and piling them up on the pier, where a donkey was waiting to be loaded with them. On the heap sat two women, who looked like mother and daughter. The elder arrested the eye at once by her splendid physique and her dress. Her large figure sat in perfect repose on the coarse bagging, and she was clad with desert luxury. Heavy robes drooped voluminous folds about her, from which her dark-skinned head and shoulders, deep golden brown, freely emerged. Her arms were bare, showing the deep armpits and half the full breasts; her hair was raven-black, the eyes large and solemn, the features prominent. She was covered with desert ornaments; silver rings hooped her ears, strings of beads hung over a wide brooch on her bosom, bracelets enclosed her arms; but what most fascinated my eyes was two immense silver crescents, almost moon-size, that hung by either breast. She was a splendid figure there under the open sky by the edge of the desert—a true mother of Ishmael. I shall never forget that unregarding pose—a type of the ages. They told me she was a rich Bedouin woman. I lingered awhile among the boats, and when I came away she was still sitting there immovable.

We drove back, as the afternoon wore on, by a somewhat different route, taking a branching and rougher road; but there was no real change in the scene. It was a sterile land, much mixed with sand, which the labor of man reclaimed with difficulty. The other side of the island is said to be more fertile, and rich in gardens. It was the same very open country all the way, and league after league we left it behind us, rare farms and lonely mosques and dreamy domes sparsely scattered over broad areas of slightly broken land, wells, and little olive groves like apple orchards, fringes of palms on the dying orange sky, tracts of loose sand, speared over with tufted hummocks, until with the starlight we came back to the pleasant hotel with the inner courtyard and the climbing yellow roses.