North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

III

I emerged the next morning from the arcaded entrance of the hotel, which was one of a continuous line of low buildings making the business side of the public square, and glancing up I saw a great dog looking down on me from the flat roof. There was little other sign of life. The square was a large, irregular space which seemed the more extensive owing to the low level of the adjoining buildings over which rose the massive tower of the kasbah close at hand on the right and, diagonally across, the high dome of the French Bureau, with its arcaded front beneath, filling that eastern side. A fountain stood in the midst of the bare space, and beyond it was a charming little park of trees; and still farther the white gleam of the barracks, through the green and on either side, closed the vista to the south. The Moresque architecture, which the French affect in the desert, with its white lights and open structure, gave a pleasing amplitude to the scene; and the same style was taken up by the main street straight down my left, whose line was edged by a long arcade with low, round arches, and the view lost itself beyond in the market square with thick tufts of palms fringing the sky. A few burnoosed figures were scattered here and there.

Hamet joined me at once, still content; he held in his hand a telegram from his new boy, or those who could interpret for him. We turned at once to the near corner by the kasbah, where was the entrance to the old town and the mosque—a precinct of covered streets, narrow, tortuous ways, with blank walls, dim light. There were few passers-by; occasionally there was a glimpse of some human scene; but the general effect, though the houses were often well built, was dingy, poor, and mean, as such an obscure warren of streets must seem to us, and there was nothing here of the picturesque gloom and threatening mystery of Figuig. I remember it as a desert hive of the human swarm; it was a new, strange, dark mode of man’s animal existence. This was a typical desert town, an old capital of the caravans. It had been thus for ages; and my feeling, as I wandered about, was less that of the life than of its everlastingness.

We went back to the mosque and climbed the minaret. It was a welcome change to step out on the balcony into the flood of azure. The true Sahara stretched round us—the roll of the white sands, motion in immobility; and all about, as far as one could see, the dark palm islands in the foreground and on every horizon. The terrace roofs of the old town lay dark under our feet; off there to the west in the sand were the tombs of its fifty kings; eastward the palm gardens, bordering and overflowing into the new quarter with its modern buildings, lifted their fronds; and near at hand the tower of the kasbah, and here and there a white-domed koubba, rose in the dreaming air; and the streets with their life were spread beneath. Tougourt, at the confluence of the underground streams, is the natural capital of the Rir country, a commanding point; on the north and west it is walled against the inroad of the sands; south and east is a more smiling scene, but the white sand lies everywhere between, like roads of the sea; it is the queen of the oases, and one understood in that sparkling air why it was called a jewel of the desert. I went down to the gardens, where there were fruit trees and vegetables among the palms, but for the most part there was as usual only the barren surface of earth, fed with little canals and crossed by narrow, raised footways, over which sprang the fanshaped or circular tufts of swarded green. On that side, too, was a native village—dreary walls of sun-dried earth with open ways; they seemed merely a new form of the naked ground shaped perpendicularly and squared—windowless, sealed, forlorn. I entered one or two. Indeed, I went everywhere that morning, for the distances were short.

In the afternoon I sat down by a table near a café in the market square, and I remained there for hours over my coffee, watching the scene. All Arab markets are much alike, but this was prettily framed. On my right a palm grove rose over a low wall; on the left, across the broad space, the low line of shops, with a glistening koubba dome in their midst, broke the blue sky; and all between, in front, was the market-place. In the foreground were a few raised booths, or tables, and at the near end by a group of three or four palms was a butcher’s stock in trade, the carcasses hanging on the limbs of a dead tree. Farther off to the left squatted a half-dozen Bedouins round little fagots of brushwood spread on the ground, and beyond them a group of animals huddled; in the centre, on the earth, one behind another into the distance, were many little squares and heaps of country goods, each with its guardian group as at a fair—vegetables, grains, cloths, slippers, ropes, caps, utensils, that together measured the scale of the simple wants of the desert. The place, though not crowded, was well filled with an ever-moving and changing throng, gathering into groups here and there—turbaned people of every tint and costume, young and old, poor and prosperous, picturesque alike in their bright colors or worn rags; but the white or brown flowing garments predominated. There were Arab and Berber faces of purer race; but in the people at large there was a strong negroid character, showing the deeper infusion of negro blood which one notices as he goes south of the Atlas. All the afternoon the quiet but interested crowd swarmed about; and round me at the close tables were soldiers and Arabs who seemed of a more prosperous class, drinking and talking, playing at cards, chess, and dominos, and some were old and grave and silent. At our table there was always one or two, who came and went, to whom Hamet would perhaps present me, a thin-featured cadi, a burly merchant, and we talked a little; but I left the talk to them and watched the scene and from time to time snapped my camera. A caravan came down the street, with great boxes strapped on the camels, and I thought the first two would sweep me, camera, table, and all, out of the way; but the long line got by at last, ungainly beasts with their pawing necks and sardonic mouths. At Tougourt one was always meeting a caravan. As I stood, at a later hour, in a lonely corner by the wall outside the gates, one was just kneeling down on the great sweep of the sand-hill to camp in the melancholy light that was falling from the darkening sky—a sombre scene; and when I came out of the hotel at night I found another sleeping, humped and shadowy, on the public square. The camel was as omnipresent as the palm, and belonged to the same dunes and sky; and as I sat watching there through the uneventful and unhurried hours, the market-place was a microcosm of the desert world.