North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

III

It was the time of the April fêtes at Biskra, and I went out in the delightful warmth of the early afternoon to see. There were to be races, but I was especially attracted by the promise of a falcon hunt. A long line of white-robed Arabs streamed into the country fields, and I drove amidst them by a quiet road shimmering with dust, and when I turned by the great pen where the horses were kept, into the enclosure, the crowd was already assembled. It was a large, open plain whose side-lines were defined by the crowds of spectators who did not enter. In the field were many scattered groups. French soldiers, lining the course, and a squad gathered on a neighboring hill gave the picturesqueness of military color to the scene; a little group of soldier camels enlivened the foreground; and everywhere were boys leading fine horses, venders of all sorts, velvet-eyed children in gala clothes, grave Arab men. I wandered over to where a company of white Mzabites, girt with brown cords, sat in a circle, with guns in their hands, and a superb banner on a staff floating over them, and to the place where the Ouled-Naïls—some forty of them—displayed their charms and ornaments with holiday faces. It was an animated scene of waiting—festal, decorative; native and European soldiers, pawing horses, prancing cavaliers, crowds of white-robed Arabs, with ample spaces. The carriage of the caïd of Biskra, drawn by two beautiful mules, stood next to me; he was a grave old man, a mould of courteous dignity, and with him were some young children in gay vests—a charming party. But the brilliant note of color was given by the red cloaks of the caïds and sub-caïds, blowing in the wind as they rode here and there on beautiful and spirited horses. Then there was a drawing in to the course, and the races went on—tense moments of excitement as the horses sped by, pauses and waits, like races everywhere.

One scene stands out from the memories of that day. It was just before the hunting with the falcon began. It was a great and solemn scene, fit for a painter’s eye, but no earthly canvas could hold it. The landscape lines were all low and long, immense in extension, the rigid lines of the desert firm and broad. The scheme of composition was one of horizontal planes. In the eastern sky the pink range of naked rock, the Aurès, cut the liquid blue with its almost rosy edges, a bank of color reaching far away into the distance; in the foreground, perhaps half a mile off, a second line of red-toned sand-hills notched the range low down; beneath them, and below the horizon line of the earth, stretched a long row of white-robed Arabs massed standing in a continuous line, and grouped together as in a bas-relief. Every figure was distinct in the brilliant light poured from the descending sun on the vast distances round about. I had never seen humanity and nature posed in just that way. It was a processional bas-relief, immovable and majestic, sculptured on the sand-hills and the rock; it was monumental, architectural, Egyptian. The sight defined for me one quality of desert landscape which I had vaguely felt; it is the bas-relief of nature. The lowness of the visual plane, the clarity of the human figures, the framing of the scene against which everything is relieved, suggest to me the effects of bas-relief; the repose of the Arab, too, the fall of the folds of his garment, the simple actions, have more of the sculptural as a living-thing than I have elsewhere observed. This scene was a supreme example of my meaning and of the artistic intuitions involved; it simplified my perceptions and also universalized them. I saw in it the arts of Egypt on which the immensity of nature still rested, as truly a desert art as the Moorish arabesques at Tlemcen. It was under this splendid and glowing entablature that the black falcon was loosed in air.

The gazelle—delicate and fragile creature—ran a short way ahead; the horsemen followed behind; the bird circled above, sighted his prey, darted swiftly on, and swooped down, striking the animal’s head. The gazelle staggered and ran on as the bird rose, and from his height the falcon swooped again and struck; the animal fell, but sprang up and ran here and there terrified. Again—and again the little creature collapsed and bounded, ran on, but it was dazed and circled feebly; and again the black shadow shot down from the blue, and it was over. The horsemen ran in, and took the falcon from the convulsive body, killed the gazelle, and flung a piece of the flesh to the victor. It was brief and brutal; but it was the reality of life, not human life, but Life itself on earth—the spirit of life as it might be in the desert without a human eye. I drove back through the sunset cloud of dust among the solid press, and came out on long lines of white-robed figures in procession ahead by the countryside, vividly green with the warm spring. I had seen two visions: one, that seemed almost of the eternal; the other, of life’s moment—the living bas-relief on the mountain wall, the gazelle’s death agony in the sand. I think that the earth never seemed to me more like a great amphitheatre than then—a spectacle, solemn, inscrutable, fated.