North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

III

“Monsieur, le spahi.” I went out in the early morning air and found my escort for Figuig, a tall, dark Arab, almost black, his head capped with a huge turban wound with brown camel’s rope in two coils, and his form robed in a heavy white burnoose that showed his red trousers beneath; he held two horses, one tall and strong, for himself, the other, smaller and lighter, a mare, for me. My friend soon joined us with his mount, and, glancing at my mare as I also mounted, warned me not to rein her in straight with that bit, as it was thus that the Arabs trained their horses to rear and caper, and a strong pull might bring her up unexpectedly on her hind legs, and that, he said, was all I need be careful about. We trotted off easily enough down the street toward the railway, and in a few moments turned the last building and were on the route westward over the open plain. The old ksar lay far off to the left, the Zousfana to the north, and between was the unobstructed stretch of the rocky hamada, herbless and strewn with small and broken stones, to where we saw a line of straggling palms beneath the Morocco hillside. The air was brisk and cool—just the morning for a gallop. The temptation was too great for my mare, who showed no liking for her neighbors, and, after a few partly foiled attempts, struck boldly off the trail to the left. I minded my instructions and had no desire to see what she could do on her hind legs. I had neither whip nor spur. I gave her her head. I was likely to have a touch of the Arab fantasia, and I did. I settled myself hard in the saddle as she flew on; she was soon at the top of her speed; it was the gallop of my life. Her feet were as sure as they were fleet on the pathless, rocky plain; she avoided obstacles by instinct; and if she came to a dry, ditch-like channel now and then that cut the level, with a slight retardation for the spring she jumped it, as if that were the best of all. But it was a pace that would end. After a mile or so she breathed heavily, and I, seeing some Arab tents pitched not far away, turned her toward them, thinking she might regard it as a friendly place, and so brought her up quite blown and with heaving sides. Three or four Arabs, very friendly and curious, ran up, and I dismounted. “Méchante, méchante,” they kept saying; and I looked at the shallow glitter of the mare’s eyes, as she turned them on me to see the rider she had got the better of, and for my part I said “Furbo”—something that I learned in Italy. My friend came riding up after a little to know where I was going, and said he thought I was “having a little fun”; and the spahi rode in, and, dismounting, also with a “méchante” changed horses with me. I said good-by to the friendly Arabs, and we rode off straight north to the route from which I had involuntarily wandered; but it was a fine morning gallop.

We came without further incident to the line of scattered palms, amid a very broken country, where the ascent makes up to Figuig, enclosed in a double circle of walls. Figuig is the name of the whole district. It includes a lower level where is the ksar of Zenaga and its vast palmerai, and a higher level on which are scattered the other six ksars amid their gardens. All are built of sun-dried mud, as are also the two walls, the inner being furnished with round towers at frequent regular intervals. We went on amid a confusion of gardens—fruit-trees with vegetables under them, such as beans and onions, and plots of bright barley in the more open places, but mostly palms, with little else, all springing out of the dry mud; we were past the ruinous-looking stretches of the brown, sunbasking wall, and began to be lost in a narrow canyon, as it were, up which the rude way went between the enclosed gardens. There was hardly width for our horses as we rode in single file on the uneven, climbing path that seemed something like the bed of a torrent, and indeed every now and then water would break out from underground and pour down like a cascade or swift brook, with a delicious sound of running streams. On either side the garden walls rose a great height far over our heads, and above them brimmed branches of fruit-tree tops with the splendid free masses of palms hanging distinct and entire in the bit of blue. We seemed to be walled out of a thick, fertile, and beautiful grove; but they had only the same dry mud for their bed that was under our feet in the narrow, tortuous way. The sun had begun to be hot before we left the plain, and now, in spite of the shelter of the walls, the heat began to make itself felt; there was the dust of the country, too, which, slight as it was that day, is omnipresent; so, being both very thirsty, my friend and I dismounted at a place where the running water came fresh from the yellow ground, and we drank a very cooling draught of its brown stream. It is the scene that I remember best. It was like a defile in a narrow place; the way broadened here by a bend in the steep ascent; one saw the brimming gardens below, and the view was closed above by the turn of the walls; and there, in the hollow, my friend and I leaned over the cascading water and, turning, saw the spahi, as he tightened the girths of my saddle which had loosened, under those walls, brown in the shadow and an orange glow in the sun, with the spring green starred with white blossoms like a tender hedge above their yellow tops, and the leaning palms in the blue. It had a strange charm; and the water made music, and it was solitude, and everything there was of the earth, earthy—and beautiful.

We came out shortly at the top of the ascent in an open space before a round archway in a wall, and dismounted in a scene of Moors passing in and out, whom I photographed; and then we walked on through the low-browed little street, which offered nothing remarkable except its strangeness, and found ourselves at the other side on a high rocky floor, quite mountainous in look, stretching off and off nowhere, which is the neutral ground lying about all the ksars; it looked as if the sun and wind had worn it out, and it had a rugged grandeur; a distant horseman on it seemed uncommonly tall and as solitary as a ship at sea. I got a slim palm wand from a group of Arab boys to use as a switch; but my show of copper coin drew some beggars about me, very insistent, and when we mounted and rode off stones followed us. I have been stoned in various parts of the world and did not mind. The spahi, however, after the incident, took up his station behind. We soon reached another wall with a gate, on one side the inevitable cemetery, with its pointed stones, and on the other the Morocco army in the shape of a small squad of soldiers in soiled gorgeousness, lying about on the ground near their guard-house. They did not have a very military appearance, and paid no attention to us as we rode into the ksar and struck the narrow street, which was the main thoroughfare. It was quite animated, with many passers-by, whose oriental figures were sharply relieved on the walls in the sun or grew dark in the shadow. The houses were low, one against another, and their wall space was broken only by rude doors; here and there were higher buildings, often with little oblong windows aloft, with the effect of a ruined tower, or broken-arched façade, or square donjon; but these elements were rare, though at times they gave an architectural ensemble to little views against the sky with their fine shadows. Poor habitations they are, dilapidated and meagre they look, forlorn and melancholy to the mind, rubbishy, tumble-down, and ruinous to the eye; yet the air of ancientry everywhere dignifies the poor materials, and the sun seems to love them; human life, too, clothes them with its mysterious aura. The crude object partakes of the light it floats in, and every impression fluctuates momentarily through a whole gamut of sense and sensibility; for there is a touch of enchantment in all strangeness.

We dismounted in the middle of the street, half blocking the way with our horses, by a café, whose proprietor, a humble and life-worn old man, set himself to prepare us a cup of the peculiar Morocco tea that is flavored with mint. There were a few passers-by, and I busied myself with my camera. The café was a mere hole in the wall, of preternatural obscurity, considering its small size and shallow depth; the furnace and the teakettle seemed to leave hardly room for the old Arab to move about. I found a camp-stool and sat down opposite the low, dark opening, and, the tea being ready, was drinking it with much relish; it was truly delicious with its strong and fragrant aroma of mint, and was also uncommonly exhilarating. I was thus engaged when two particularly ill-favored Moors, each with a long gun over his shoulder, appeared, and planted themselves, one on either side behind my shoulders, as close as they could get without actually pressing against me, and gazed stolidly and fixedly down at me. I paid no attention to them, but drank my tea, and from time to time dusted my leather leggings with my little palm wand. It was a picturesque group: my friend in his shining white uniform, unarmed, leaning carelessly against the wall in the sun, the tall spahi opposite in the shade regarding us, the two Moors hanging over me motionless, and no one said a word. After a while they seemed to have had enough of it, and went away with a sullen look.

We said good-by to our host and walked on, the spahi following on horseback at a distance of several yards, well behind, and two boys leading our horses. We were soon in the covered ways, where it was often very dark; we met hardly any one—a negro boy or a woman; the doors were shut, and it was seldom that one left ajar gave a scant view of the interior; narrow alleys ran off in all directions, down which one looked into darkness; but if we stopped to peer into them, or showed curiosity, the metallic voice of the spahi would come from behind, “Marchez,” and at the frequent turnings of the way he called, in the same hard voice, “À droite, à gauche”; and so we made our progress through those shadowy vaults, silent, deserted, in the uncertain light. It was like a dead city, motionless, hypnotized, as if nothing would ever change there, with a sense of repose, of negligence of life, of calm, as if nothing would ever matter; occasionally there were figures in the recesses sunk in the wall, silent, motionless—dreamers; one white-bearded old man, seated thus under an archway in a dark corner, seemed as if he had been there from the beginning of time and would be found there on the judgment-day. It was weird. We turned a corner in the darkness and came on a large group—perhaps a score—of young children at play in the middle of the street. I never saw such terror. They fled, screaming, in all directions, swift as wild animals; it was a panic of such instant and undiluted fear as I had never imagined. I cannot forget their awful cry, their distorted faces, their flight, as if for life, the moment they caught sight of us; it was a revelation.

A few minutes later we came out on a crowded square, full of shops, men working at their trades, others lying full length on the ground; it was a small but busy place—not that much was being done there, but there were people, and occupations, and human affairs. It was the gathering seat of the assembly of the elders, before whom the affairs of the ksar are brought for judgment. No one paid us the slightest attention; and after looking at the little stocks of leather and grains and odds and ends, and glancing at the reclining forms that gave color and gravity to the ordinary scene of an Arab square, we entered again on the darkness and somnolence of the winding streets, where there was no sun nor life nor sound, but rather a retreat from all these things, from everything violent in sensation or effort or existence; places of quiet, of cessation, of the melancholy of things. We emerged by a mosque, and near it a cemetery on the edge of the ksar—such a cemetery as they all are, blind, dishevelled heaps of human ruins marked by rough, naked common stones, the desert’s epitaph on life, inexpressibly ignominious there in the bright, bare sunlight. We mounted and rode down through gardens, as at first, on a ridge that commanded now one, now another view of the palm and orchard interiors with their dry beds, a strange mixture of barrenness below and fertility above, a rough but pleasant way; and all at once we saw the great palmerai stretching out below us in the plain, like a lake bathing the cliff, a splendidness of dark verdure; black-green and blue-black lights and darks filled it like a sea—cool to the eye, majestic, immense, magnificent in the flood of the unbounded sunlight, a glory of nature. It was a noble climax to the strange scenes of that morning journey; and soon after we dismounted to make the steep descent on the gray-brown rock of the cliff. The two boys, who had rejoined us, brought down our horses, and we left the half-fallen towers and crumbling walls in their yellow ruin behind us, with the young Arabs still looking, and rode through the hot desert to Beni-Ounif.

This was the mysterious Figuig of old travellers. I had seen it, but it still seemed to me unrealized, though not unreal. A vision of palm-topped garden walls on crumbling mountain paths; of a wind-blown, sunburnt high plateau; of a sun-drenched gully of a street with a strange-windowed, lonely ruin looking down on horses that hang their heads; a maze of darkened passages with a sense of lurking in the shadows, of decay in the silence, of apparition in the rare figures; a closed city of hidden streams and muffled noises, walled orchards and shut houses, sunless ways, yet held in the sun’s embrace, the high blue sky, the girdling mountains, the open desert; and with its stern and rocky gardens of the dead, too; a soil and a people made in the image of Islam, impregnated with it, decrepit with it, full of lassitude and melancholy and doom, mouldering away; yet set amid living fountains, lighted by placid reservoirs where the tall palms sun themselves in the silent waters as in another sky; queen, too, of that dark-green sea of the palmerai, a marvel of nature; and last a vision of long-drawn walls and dismantled towers crumbling in the red sun. It is so I remember it; and it seems rather a mirage of the desert imagination than a reality, a memory.