IX
Tunis is the gateway by which I entered this world—the new world of France, the old world of the desert. It was almost an accident of travel that I had come here, refuging myself from the life I had known, and seeking a place to forget and to repose, away from men. I had no thought of even temporary residence or exploration; but each day my interest deepened, my curiosity was enlivened, my sympathies warmed, and slowly I was aware that the land held me in its spell—a land of fantastic scenery, of a mysterious people, of a barbaric history and mise en scène, a land of the primitive. I coursed it from end to end.
The best description of North Africa as a visual fragment of the globe is that which delineates it as a vast triangular island, whose two northern horns lie, one off Spain at Gibraltar, the other, with a broader strait, off Sicily—with a southward wall overlooking the ocean-like Sahara, and running slantingly to the Atlantic, whose seaboard makes the narrow base of the triangle. This immense island is gridironed through its whole mass with mountains, ranging southwest and northeast, and hence not easily penetrable except at those remote ends; it is backed by table-lands of varying breadth between the Northern and the Saharan Atlas, which form its outer walls, and the conglomeration of successive ranges at varying altitudes, with their high plateaus, is cut with deep gullies, valleys, pockets, fastnesses of all sorts—a formidable country for defence and of difficult communication. Under the southern edge of the Saharan Atlas, like a long chain of infrequent islands, runs the line of oases in the near desert from the northeasterly tip of the lowlands of the isle of Djerba southwesterly the whole distance to the Atlantic, and here and there pressing deep into the waste of sand and rock; under the northern wall stretches the arable lowland here and there on the Mediterranean coast where lie the mountain-backed ports. At the highest points, in Morocco, lies perpetual snow, and the land is snow-roofed in winter.
Among these wild mountains in antiquity lived an indigenous blond race, whose blue-eyed, clear-complexioned descendants may still be met with there, and mixed with them a darker population from the sunburnt desert and lowlands, the Getulae and Numidians of history, of whom Jugurtha was a fine and unforgotten type; on these original and tenacious races, whose blood was inexpugnable, poured the immigrant human floods through the centuries from north and south, west and east, but the natives maintained their hold and the stock survived. The Punic immigration, with its great capital of Carthage, only touched the coast; the Romans established a great province in Tunisia, founded cities and garrisoned the country as far as the desert and into the Riff, and made punitive expeditions among the nomads to the south; the Visigoths flocked from Spain, overran the whole country, and passed away like sheets of foam; the Byzantines rebuilt the fortresses, and their hands fell away; the Arab hordes in successive waves carried Islam to the western ocean, and, settling, Arabized great tracts of the Berber blood, and made the land Moslem, but with a deeper impregnation than when it had been Romanized and Christianized; while through all the years of their slow and imperfect dominance new floods of fresh desert blood poured up from the Sahara, much as the barbarians fell from the north upon Rome. The massive island was thus always in the contention of the human seas, rising and falling; yet the Berber blood, the Berber spirit, continually recruited from the Sahara, seems never to have really given way; taking the changing colors of its invaders, it persisted—a rude, independent, democratic, fierce, much-enduring, untamable race. It wears its Islam in its own fashion. It keeps the other stocks, that dwell in it, apart; the Jews, the Turks, Italians, Maltese, Spaniards, are but colonies, however long upon the soil, and even though in some instances they adopt native costumes and ways. And now it is the turn of France—that is to say, of dominant Western civilization in its most humane and enlightened form.
How many interests were here combined! A land of natural wildness, of romantic and solemn scenes, of splendid solitudes and varying climates; a past dipped in all the colors of history; a race of physical competency, savage vitality, where the primitive ages still stamped an image of themselves in manners and actions and aspect; the fortunes of one of the great present causes of humanity, to be paralleled with Egypt and India, a work of civilization! It could not but prove a fine adventure. And so I turned nomad, and fared forth. Bedouin boys, rich with my last Tunisian copper, gave me delighted good-bys as they ran after my carriage, screaming bright-eyed; and I felt as if I had already friends in the lonely, silent land as the long level spans of the high aqueduct marched backward, and the train sped on.
TLEMCEN
II
TLEMCEN