North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

III

The fruit-bearing feature of the country must have been an original trait. Pomaria, or as one might say in our own phrase, Orchard-town, was the name of the first settlement in the colonizing days of Rome. I walked to the place, just under the northern wall of the city, one morning for a stroll. I was soon at the foot of the tall minaret of the ruined mosque of Sidi Lahsen that rises on the site of old Agadir, which was the Berber name that next absorbed the Roman Pomaria; and I saw the Latin-inscribed stones built into the foundation, ruin under ruin, as it were; for the walls of the minaret, which towered a hundred and fifty feet, were dilapidated, their enamel weather-worn, showing faded green and yellow tones in the rectangular spaces on the sides and the bordering band at the top, which bore the ceramic decoration; the campanile above, tipped with a stork’s nest and a stork, added a touch of lonely desertion, and grass and flowers were growing between the stones of the adjacent roofless floor. Ruined mosques are often as beautiful as English abbeys.

I wandered on through a country district over which was scattered a native village, but in the main an open region. It was remarkable for the number of old trees it contained; and, indeed, hardly less striking a feature of the landscape of Tlemcen, in general, than its garlanding orchards is this grouping of old trees, though it is rarer. The whole African coast affords specimens of trees of great mass and age. I remember one such on the eastern borders of Algeria that I found among the fields, deep in the country; or rather I was guided to it by the Arab children I had gathered in my train, and especially by one Bedouin shepherd lad who had left his wandering herd to follow me, and they insisted that I should see the sacred tree. It was a monarch of the vale—one of a group of three; massive in foliage, long of limb, great of girth, horizontal in aspect, a leaning, almost fallen, tower of the forest. It looked as if centuries were indifferent to it—it was so old. It was a holy tree, a marabout, as they called it; and bits of cloth, strips of rags, fluttered from its boughs, where they had been placed as votive offerings by the poor people of the district. I was told that I should put some copper coins on the bough or in the hollow, for an offering and to have good fortune, for no one would take them, and I did so, glad to pay my devoirs and wondering inwardly how long it was since my own far ancestors had joined in tree-worship. It was the first time I had ever seen a sacred tree, one actually worshipped, and it touched my imagination. At Tlemcen I saw no tree so fine as that; but there were several that bore a patriarchal resemblance; and in the morning stroll I speak of I found a grove of them, not close together, but spread out over the open landscape and nigh enough for neighborhood. They were terebinths, old ruins of the vegetable world, with that same horizontal reach and earth-bowed air—they might almost seem on their knees in some elemental adoration; age filled them; in that cemetery—for it was a cemetery—they were monumental. It was a quiet landscape; cattle were grazing here and there; three or four ruined koubbas with broken arches and fallen walls rose at intervals, once stately monuments, for this was the burial-place of the royalty of Tlemcen in their empire years. Not far away, on a knoll, in a place apart, was the shrine of the first patron saint of the city, then Agadir—for Sidi bou-Médyen was a later comer, and saints, like dynasties, have their times and seasons, and this cemetery of the City-Gate was old before his hillside began to know the furrow of death. The first patron, Sidi Wahhâb, a companion of the Prophet and a comrade of the conqueror, lies under the terebinths. Pointed by a magnificent tree, I passed along its shadow down a shelving, stony way to a little garden of roses; there, in the hollow, sunken in the surrounding soil by its antiquity, I found the grave of Sidi Yaqoub, walled, but open to the sky—a lovely place, with the rose and the terebinth and the sky. This cemetery of the City-Gate was a kind of spiritual outpost for protection; the saints, indeed, camped about all the gates to guard the city in their death; nor was it altogether in vain; it is related of at least one prudent conqueror that he carefully inquired as to number and virtue of the saints who lay at the various gates, as if they had been modern batteries, and selected for attack that postern where least was to be feared from the ghostly artillery. The position at the spot I have described was uncommonly strong.

I followed on my return the broken line of the old ramparts of Agadir, a knife-edge path, or divide, as it were, a climbing, tortuous, rough way, great masses of red soil heavily overgrown with vivid vegetation, trees, bushes, vines, emerging on a bewildering combination of gardens and tanneries—a dilapidated, ruinous way it was altogether. I remember a Tower of the Winds that might have been on the Roman campagna; and to the north there was always the broad prospect of the great plain. It was but a short walk from here to one of the modern gates of Tlemcen, that stands on a higher level than Agadir; and just under it I came on the mosque of Sidi’l-Halwi, or, as one would say, Englishing his name, Saint Bonbon. In his mortal days he made sweetmeats for the children, and the touch of a child’s story hangs about his legend. When the wicked vizier beheaded him and his body was cast outside the gate, it was said that in answer to the guardian’s nightly call for all belated travellers to enter, the poor ghost would cry from the outer darkness: “Go to sleep, guardian; there is none without except the wretched Saint Bonbon.” The repeated miracle found the ears of the Sultan and was verified by himself in person, and the wicked vizier was at once sealed up alive in the neighboring wall, which was conveniently being repaired at the time, and the body of the saint was honorably laid in the shrine where it still reposes in the shelter of another of those secular trees—a carob, this time; and duly the mosque rose hard by with its fair minaret, on whose faces still the brown and yellow tones of the half-obliterated faience duskily shine in the sun. I entered under the portal, partly sheathed in the same weather-battered colors, with touches of blue and green, relics of an older beauty, and I rested there an hour about, under the fretted wooden ceilings, untwining the sinuous arabesque patterns of the arcaded walls, cooling my eyes with the translucent onyx columns of the nave—low columns with Moorish capitals, whose gentle forms attested the burning here ages ago of the lamp of art.