North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

V

The horses stood at the door early the next morning for a drive to Temacin, some thirteen kilometres south. We were soon out of town, travelling beside an oasis on the left and going in the open desert; a boy joined us from the oasis and excitedly struggled to keep up with the carriage, no difficult task, for the route was heavy with sand; two other boys on donkeys ahead were having a race; and the route had always some touches of travel. The openness of the view was boundless, and I had not seen finer sands, stretching away in long rolls and ridges, and mounded into splendid dunes, with palms here and there for horizon lines. There were always groups and little strings of camels, isolated but living, in the expanse over which the eye roamed; we passed from time to time within view of clumps of lost palms, little oases buried and left in the sands, half-submerged, derelicts; now there were Bedouin tents, low, striped shelters, by ones or twos, pitched on the sterile waste, looking infinitely solitary, at a distance from a small village on a ridge, that itself seemed a heap of ruined and ribbed walls left abandoned. The morning was hot, the sun beat down, and every line and tracery of the wind was visible on the sand. The surface of the dunes was beautiful—light and full of the spirit of fantasy; the modulation was exquisite, ribbed and fretted, furrowed in lines and touched all over with little disks and curves, like the imprint of small shells; and their mottled and wavy surfaces broke the monotony of the vast slopes and dunes like an infinite enamelling of nature. It was the land of the blue distance, the simple in the grand, the apotheosis of paucity in the means, of poverty in the substance, elemental, abstract, superb: the glory of the desert. I never so felt it as on that morning. I watched the slender, film-like, far-off minaret of Temacin take body and height as we drew nearer and nearer, and saw plainly and distinctly at last the boldly perched, irregular oblong of walls and roofs that topped a rising ridge of the sands, with its minaret like a dark, mediæval tower standing in heaven with a lance-like solitude. Its top was bordered with a broad frieze of colored tiles and capped with a pyramidal head or balcony pierced with slim Moorish arches. There were men working under the wall; but the town looked marvellously silent and alone, dark and withdrawn, like an impenetrable earthen ruin, incommunicable; it rose as if made of the earth itself, with the dilapidation of old earthworks, forbidding and melancholy, with no touch of life except the gleam of its tiled minaret; in all that sun it seemed sunless—ruinous, decadent, infinitely old. Soon after we passed another heap of earth walls on a sand-mound, a small village, and came almost at once to Tamelhat, the zaouia, which we had set out to see.

High walls surrounded the enclosure, which was extensive. Tamelhat is a holy village, a chief seat of the religious order of the Tidjania and daughter of the mother zaouia at Aïn Madhi, near Laghouat, with which it shares the devotion of this important brotherhood, one of the most influential of the Moslem associations in North Africa. The zaouia is a sort of monastery or abbey; but I was not prepared to find it so large an establishment. We left the carriage at the gate and passed in to a second gate, and I was struck by the ornamental work and texts on them and on the walls. A straight avenue led down to an open space where the mosque stood on the right side of the street as we turned sharply upon it. Three square windows set in little ornamented arches in the centre broke the broad white space of the wall, and there were other windows irregularly placed. A little to one side was a heavy door, with a double row of faience set over its square top and descending on beautiful onyx pillars. An octagonal dome, tipped with a shaft of three golden balls, completed the building above. It was a pretty exterior with a touch of art in the line of windows, and as I passed into the interior by the lovely onyx columns it seemed like a reminiscence, almost a renaissance, to find before my gaze the familiar blue and green tiles, plaques of wrought plaster in arabesque, pretty bits of faience adornment—forms of the ornament and color so delightful to me. The interior was roomy, with good spaces, and lofty above; in the main fore part a palanquin was in one corner, and a few tombs were placed here and there; but the shrine, the tomb of the Marabout who founded the zaouia, stood in the space to the left, directly under the dome, as in a chapel. It was heavily covered with stuffs, as usual, and overhung with many banners; a grill ran round it, and outside of that a wooden rail; the tomb also bore Arabian texts. The whole effect, notwithstanding the bareness, the few elements, the uncostly materials, had the grand simplicity of the Moslem faith; it was impressive—imposing to a simple soul; but, beyond the restful sense of the neighborhood of beautiful and sacred things in that far and desert solitude, what pleased me most and the feature I carried away to be my memory of it was the ample lights in the cool spaces by the open windows above the tomb toward the street, where the birds were continually fluttering in and out, unfrightened and undisturbed, as if this was their quiet home.

I thanked the Arab sacristan who stood looking at me with old and tranquil eyes, and we went out and walked up the street, which seemed like a long cloister. There were grilled windows on the well-built walls at intervals; a few men sat here and there on benches along the way; it seemed a place of peace. The street, which was quite long and straight, ended in a large court near which was the dwelling of the Marabout. Hamet asked me if I would like to see him, and I gladly assented. After a brief interval an Arab came to us, to whom I gave my coat and what things I was carrying; and leaving them below, he guided us up an irregular stairway, as in an old house, and took us into a rather large, high room, plainly plastered and bare. The desert saint—such he was—was seated on the floor in the middle of one side by the wall on a rug; he was old and large, white-bearded, with a heavy look, as if he were used to much repose and was aged. He gave me his hand as I stooped down to him, and after a word or two invited me to be seated at a plain table before him in the middle of the room; and attendants silently brought food. There was already in the room the caïd of Temacin, a stout and prosperous-looking Arab, to whom Hamet presented me, and the three of us sat down to what turned out to be a hearty breakfast. Two or three other tall Arabs, apparently belonging to the family, sat by the wall to my left, as I faced the Marabout, and at a doorway in the corner on the right stood a group of different ages, younger, with one or two boys, intelligent and bright-eyed. The caïd and myself talked in low tones, and no one else spoke, except from time to time the Marabout gave some direction to the attendants, apparently of a hospitable nature, as each time it resulted in fresh dishes. There was pastry that resembled rolls, and after a few moments, served in another form, hot with sugar, it resembled pancakes, but I dare say it was something quite different, and the Marabout urged it upon me; there was another combination that reminded me distantly of doughnuts, with which the hot food ended; but there was a dessert of French cakes, almonds, and a dried aromatic kernel like peas, and much to my surprise there were oranges that must have come on camel-back from Biskra. There was coffee, too, with a curious pot and sugar-bowl, and the whole service was excellent, the attendants kindly and pressing, though very quiet. It appeared afterward that no one ever sees the saint eat; his food is brought and left, and he takes what he likes alone. I observed him through the meal, and occasionally he addressed a sentence of inquiry or interest to us. The impression he made on me was one of great indolence, as if he had never done anything for himself, and also of what I can only describe as a somnolent temperament, heavy and rousing himself at times; but it may have been only age. The profound silence and atmosphere of awed respect were remarkable; the few words spoken were hardly above a whisper, and the caïd and I used low tones. It was a hospitable and generous breakfast, however, and the manner of it wholly pleasant and friendly; and as I again took the old Marabout’s large, soft hand, and expressed my pleasure and thanks for having been thus received, he seemed to me very cordial and kind; and for my part I was glad that I had found the unusual experience of breakfasting with a saint so agreeable. The caïd and I parted below, and I walked back through the tranquil street and by the mosque with the bird-haunted windows and the onyx portal, well pleased with my morning in such a place of peace and good-will.

We drove back through the hot horizons of a burning noon; by sombre Temacin with its far-seen tower, old watcher of the desert; by the distant western oasis with its two gleaming koubbas, that seemed to dissolve between the sands and the blue; by the Bedouin tents crouched in the long drifts below the brow of the earthen ruin whose walls gaped on the hill with fissure and breach. We passed a bevy of bright-colored Bedouin women hurrying in their finery to some Marabout to pray. The long slopes and mounded dunes had not lost that wonderful enamel of the breath of the wind. All nature seemed to stretch out in the glory of the heat. It was spring on the desert; it was a dreaming world. “Le vrai Sahara,” said Hamet, half to himself. And slowly over the palmy plain, beyond the lost oasis, the tower and minaret of Tougourt, slim lines on the sky, grew distinct in their turn, and solid, and near, and we drove in through the garden green as over a threshold of verdure. It was a great ride.

The day ended lazily. I had the pleasure of a few courteous words with the agha of Tougourt, to add to my hospitable distinctions. “He is an Arabian prince,” said Hamet proudly, as we walked away. Along the arcade I saw a Jew seated cross-legged, with his back to the jamb of his shop; he held a heavy folio volume on his lap and seemed to peruse it with grave attention; that was the only time I ever saw a native reading a book in North Africa, and I looked curiously at the fine venerable face. The boys were playing leap-frog before the hotel as I came back from my walk; they had thrown off their haiks, or jackets, or whatever their upper garment might be. How they played! with what strong, young sinews and vivacity of rivalry and happiness! though the children of the street seemed often poor, destitute, and with faces of want. I photographed two of these Bedouin boys, with whom I had made friends. In the evening I sat outside and watched the camp-fires burning by the camels in the square. I thought of the massacring of the French garrison here forty years ago, and of the protests that a military interpreter, Fernand Philippe, records from the lips of the soldiers when a year or two later the government contemplated withdrawing from this advanced desert post. It was a place of home-sickness, of fever, and of utter isolation; but the soldiers wished to stay—withdraw? never!—and all this peace and prosperity that I had witnessed was the French peace.