North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

VI

The fascination of the desert, that which makes a desert lover, is not in its incidents, voyages, sights; it is in its life. It is the life of nature. I do not mean the picturesqueness of its human traits, the passage of men and animals over a scene with which they are so sympathetically colored as to seem only a part of its flora and fauna, its transitory efflorescence; nor the landscape with its breadths, infinities, hallucinations, hierarchies of color, élans of the soul and poems of the eye, with which they are in conscious contact. It is a more intimate tie, and something that passes within—purifies, refreshes, and releases. The brain ceases to act; the nerves are put to sleep; the fever is over. The Old World has receded far away; years, decades have passed, dropping their burden of oblivion on all that was, and especially on what was acrid and fiery in the past. It is a return to nature in which she seems to have cast out devils. The senses bring their messages, but they have lost their material utilities. The soul rests in its sensations as a bird floats in the air. It is a foretaste of Nirvana. Thought has ceased; duty is silent; labor has vanished; and the life that is deeper than these and of which they were but mortal fragments, “unconcerning things,” resurges, vibrates, flowers. What a relief! what a transmigration! and what a new sense of vitality—almost of a new sort of vitality! It is the repose, the silence, the concentration of being within—the peace. In the Western world one may attain this at times; the desert imposes it as the habit of the soul that yields itself to its influences. But it is more than this. The cerebral weight is lifted and the physical life resumes its natural lethargies. It is not really lethargic. It is a new kind of existence—the life, unburdened by thought, that has moulded the fine physical nature of this race abounding in energies. What a sense of freedom, of nonchalance and timelessness! What a vigor as I draw in this pure air! The world without a thought has a life of its own, a strange vivacity; it is rich with fresh and unexpected pulses of being; and this renewal and invigoration does not come whip-like, as in the north, with a bracing winter stroke on the blood and nerves; but like a caress, with a softness and a secrecy, a tenderness of the solitude, something almost voluptuous.

These are the words of a desert lover and make no claim on the credence of others; but no words can express the peace, the liberty, the vitality I felt in my desert voyages. The symbol and image of the mood and life I describe is to me the palm-tree. No other tree has ever so influenced my spirit except the cypress in a very different way. I would go out to the oued in the morning, for I could not spare to the day the initial sense of largeness, the tranquil desolation, the sea suggestion of the river bed, with its lonely koubba; and, as the sun warmed, I wandered into the palm gardens of the oasis, and sat on the rough soil, and, as it were, adored the palms. I would lie there for hours, and the sun shone above them. Occasionally Arab workmen would pass near, or a boy or a guardian would come and sit beside me. Otherwise there was only the solitude, the unbroken silence, the repose. The gardens are rude and unkempt, with earth ditches and humps of ground, and an arid look, except where the vivid green of some cereal here and there beneath the palms, or the softer form and foliage of low fruit trees amid their towering stems, give a brighter and more delicate touch to the general scene. There is no luxury of turf or anything garden-like in these precincts of earth and running waters and trees. There is no effeminacy in the palm. Severity is the artistic trait of everything in the desert. The long lines of the landscape here are rigid, solemn, sombre; the naked rock of the mountain ranges is stern, worn to the bone by wind and rain and sand; except for the diaphanous and veiling effects of atmosphere and heat, and the cloud and mist conditions that I have mentioned earlier, an austere sublimity governs the horizons and vistas all around. Even in the sands of the south about Tougourt, where every line the eye rests on is a curve and softens on the eye and lulls it like a diapason of great rhythms, this austerity is not lost from the desert scene. It is the nude in landscape—not mere nakedness of earth, but landscape sculptured and modelled in grand harmonies of line and color; and however it may become fiery with light and heat and darken with the violence of heaven, it always retains its look of bare and solitary power. There is no softness in the race either. Their bodies are cast in hard lines, but often with great physical beauty. There faces are, indeed, seldom of the nobler type; but their fine brown hands, their clear torsos and throats, the curve of strength and elasticity in their firm backs and limbs, with the weathered and sun-toned skin, their fierté, their perfection of repose, are objects of delight to an eye that values bodily beauty. To me this splendid vigor and careless abundance of the human beauty of life is one of the elements of the land. They have muscles of steel and lines of living bronze. It is daily art—art brought down from the vague of fancy and out of the museum to live with. The palm is like the land and the people; there is no softness in it; it is the most virile of vegetable growths. Its trunk, its leaves, its sway—but I will not trust myself to describe it. I am never lonely with a palm to look at. I lie on the ground for hours and gaze up at their massed green tops in the blue and the sun and the warmth—“their feet in the water, their heads in the fire.” I am never tired of looking. I do not notice the absence of thought. I am quiet, content, and doing nothing am very much alive if vaguely aware of my life. It is a new mode of living, this vital dreaming—a volupté without weakness, consciousness without meditation, vision without thought. That is the human aspect of this life of nature; and, in the world without, the palm over there symbolizes it for me.

The soldier-poet, Lieutenant Charles Lagarde, whose “Promenade dans le Sahara” I have already mentioned as at once the most realistic and best-portrayed book of the Sahara with which I am acquainted, well describes the palm:

“A monumental tree, puissant, royal; it shares in perfection form, majesty, elegance. Its isolated trunk fills a frame of five leagues and peoples a solitude. Its lift toward heaven has a magnificent simplicity, and it raises also the levels that surround it; it enlarges by contrast the vast sheets of sand on which it elongates at sunset its slender and unmeasured shadow. In groups it has attitudes full of grace; among the tufted shoots rise the unequal and diverging trunks which in turn depress and proudly hold up their plumes. The wind in the palms has strange modulations. Its oscillations have I know not what of the voluptuous; it is the sultana that sways, an attentive slave. The tempest tests it without shaking it; it bends like a bow and springs back with the strength of a sword-blade. All in it breathes primordial energies, and chants the canticle of the Orient.”