North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

VI

I seek in vain the secret of the charm that Tunis lays upon me. Coming back to it, one feels something intimate in the city, such as there is in places long lived in and cherished, impregnated with memories, subtilized by forgotten life and feeling. It has sunk deeper into the senses, the affections. Can the charm be merely its soothing air, its weather, which, after all, is our physical element? It has a marvellous sky; all hues that are celestial and live in heaven are there. What clarity! Its changeable blues excite and call the eye from hour to hour; and on rainy days its grays are soft, enveloping mantles for the sight. Its peculiar trait is a greenish tint in the blue, pervasive but not defined, an infusion of clear emerald, translucent, such as one sees in winter sunsets in New England; but here in early summer you will distinguish it at high noon, after the rainless days of late spring. Tradition associates heat with this coast, as with the Mediterranean generally; but that is an illusion of the foreigner. Tunis is often chilly, bitterly cold at times, though without the fall of snow; it lies under the heights of the Atlas, and the winds bring down the snow-chill on their wings. I remember one February when there were no trains from Algiers for five days, the snow blocking the road; it lay, at some places on the line, nine feet deep. But whatever may be the weather, the atmospheric charm remains; it is soothing, and has narcotic quality.

A fine landscape in fine weather is always captivating and assimilates the traveller to the land. One is always at home in the sun; and a noble view finds a friend in every eye. One or two such experiences will make the fortune of a whole journey and after a while be its whole memory. But in some regions, some cities, the spell is perpetual; it is so at Tunis. The prospect is broad, and wherever one turns the eye wanders off delightfully. The most complete view is from the western hill, where is a beautiful great park of rolling land with woods whence you will see the white city southward; it lies like a great lily on its pads of green background, with its motionless blue waters round about—a lake-country scene; level waters like a flood, all floored and streaked with purple and blue bands and reaches—a water prairie—to where Carthage gleams white on its own green hill, amid an horizon of snowy villages dazzling in the sun; and between, nearer, isolated roofs that flash emerging from their obscure green gardens and tree-clumps, here and there; farther still to the southeast, as the eye travels out over the long lake into the gulf and the sea, rises a mass of mountain blues that bound the entrance to the land and its harbors. It is a view fit for a Greek amphitheatre.

Wherever you go, you are always coming out on these massive, spacious, beautifully colored prospects, white strips of city or village amid the spring, set in the master tone of blue that envelopes and combines them—sky, and lake, and sea, themselves infinitely changeable with the light and the distance and the hour. Even in the most unexpected places Heaven will open these far-off ways over a new land. I remember going into an obscure and blind street, in the Arab quarter, among buildings in all stages of apparent decay. I lifted the knocker at the lovely, nail-studded door of an ancient-looking house, and passed at once into an inner court with a fountain, beautifully decorated, cool, shadowy, exquisite in repose and the sense of luxury; and I was led on through a maze of stairways and passages till I came out on a large room below the roof with a balcony; and stepping forward, I saw unrolled as if by enchantment the whole sea-view. There must be many such commanding points of vantage in the houses on the crest of the thickly built hill—old Tunis, where the Arabs live. From this station I overlooked the lower city with all its roofs and streets. The multitude of green-tiled roofs on different levels made the color-ground, whence rose the numerous low, white domes, the slender minarets also touched with green or tipped with golden balls, the greater domes of the mosques, the mass of the citadel; broad French faubourgs and avenues were enclosing and defining lines, with irregular masses of foliage, and deep, narrow streets sank in the near scene, full of their native life. It was an architectural wilderness of form and color, arresting, vivifying, oriental in mass, feeling and detail, with the suggestion of a dream, of evanescence, and round it was poured on all sides the still blue element—sky, ocean, air. In Tunis, I noticed, everything seemed to end thus, in something beyond, in a mood; life constantly distilled its dream, and it was a dream of the senses.

The senses are constantly appealed to; they are kept awake, alert, attentive, and they are fed; they have their joys. We do not habitually use our senses for joy; and this is a part of the spell of Tunis, that there, under a Southern sky, the senses come into their own again. It is not merely the instinct of curiosity that is kept active by an ensemble so variously novel and insistent—for example, these pavilioned minarets, square with a cube above, ending in a green pyramid, or else octagonal in shape with the gallery and its awning, tipped by the three gold balls and crescent—haunting one like a strange sky; or the same instinct crudely excited by the ensemble of a population so foreign in physiognomy, garb, and physical behavior as the Arab in its multifarious aspects, its color and movement, all the unaccustomed surface of life. A street in old Tunis is truly seen only when there is no one in it; it is then that it is most impressive and yields up its spirit. What privacy! those blank walls! those rare high windows beautifully set! those discreet hanging balconies of latticed wood and iron! those nail-studded doors in exquisite patterns, that seem to have been rarely opened! An old house, set in some deep forest, is not more retired. And, if one passes within—silence, and soft footfalls, and refinement of all sense-impressions, the constant presence of delicately moulded handiwork, tiles cooling to the eye, wrought stucco, carved wood; and in those interiors, with their beautiful ceilings and wainscoting, are columns that seem of pagan purity, fountains as of woodland solitude, courts of garden peace. It is wonderful, how this effect of harborage and seclusion has been attained by an art so simple—flowers, water, plaster, wood, traceries, colored tiles. The city must be full of beautiful objects of this old art. It is not in this or that house only, nor in the public museums where rare examples are collected and massed, that one feels this artistic quality in the old race. It is felt in the handicrafts everywhere, the decoration of the surfaces, the enamelling, the gilding, the effort and liking for what is wrought in lovely patterns and relieved work of every description. There is a detail in the Tunisian sense of beauty, an omnipresent and conscious decorative spirit, something native and human. It is not only in the palace, but in the street, as one treads the narrow ways, and looks into the bright shops, and loiters in strange corners. It is an art of the senses—decoration is most obviously that. Rooted in barbaric taste? possibly; but most things human are rooted in barbarism. Unintellectual? perhaps, in the European sense. Unemotional? certainly not on the European scale of the emotions. Not developed from the beauty of the human form? of course. But there is a spirit of the senses as there is a spirit of the intellect; and it has its own art, a distillation of its life, as I intimated in speaking of the landscape that leads one into the mood of a dream—a dream of the senses. This art is akin to that landscape—it is of the life of the senses; and the Arabs were always frankly a sensual race. And, however it be, the city has an artistic temperament, to me; it has no factory qualities in its aspect, its wares, or its people; it is yet virgin of the future, a dying perfume of the past. This flavor that I find in its art is not Arabian, though it flowered from that desert root; it is Andalusian, and comes from the skill and temperament of those old exiles who were driven out from the southern shores of Spain in successive waves of the Moorish emigration, each in turn sowing broadcast seeds of the most exquisite Arab art all along the shores of North Africa, and richly here at Tunis. It was an hereditary art, in families of builders, wood-carvers, stone-cutters, stucco-moulders, painters, gilders, dyers, embroiderers, leather-workers, damaskeen-workers, illuminators—the Tunisian arts of daily life, that gave to life that brilliant and exquisite surface in dress, utensils, interiors, and also broad urban artistic effects of luxury in the look of its commerce, the display of its multicolored crafts, and the vistas of its minaret-haunted sky. Tunis, in fact, is not altogether native, not of the pure desert blood; from the thirteenth century well into the times of the Renaissance it had a flavor not unlike that of a Greek colony in Sicily or on old Italian coasts; it was grafted with the flower of Andalusian culture, transplanted in adversity and flourishing on the African soil—blooming, perishing, and leaving this exquisite memory of itself, this intuition of vanished refinement and elegance, like a perfume.

To this Andalusian infusion is also traced the charm of the manners of the Tunisians, that gentleness of breeding, softness, and urbanity, blended with an immovable dignity, which is so indescribable a racial trait. It is not the least foreign thing about them, and adds to the fond of mystery that they exude; for, notwithstanding all that can be seen or told, or gleaned from the past, mystery is of the essence of the traveller’s impression at his first contact with the Arab race. It is a silent landscape, a speechless folk, an incommunicable civilization; it is not only the closed mosque, the secluded house, the taciturn figures strange in garb and pose, immovably contemplative; but their life—all that they are—seems a closed book in an unknown tongue, a scroll unrolled but unintelligible. The feeling of racial mystery is intense, and all external impressions lead the traveller finally back to that—the insoluble soul of the race. It is not merely Islam. These shores from the dawn of knowledge have been one of the most fertile couches of the animal, man; here the young barbarian has been born and bred, and passed away, through all the centuries, and every civilization of the West has been seeded in conquest, and has flowered in cities, typical capitals, and withered away, leaving among the native race its ruins in their fields, in their blood, on their faces—like the Christian cross still tattooed on Kabyle foreheads. It is a race that assimilates but is not assimilated. It has taken the color and form, more or less impregnated with the spirit, of the genius of Carthage, Rome, Byzantium, Islam, France; it has felt the impact of Greek, Norman, Spaniard; but it was ever a race of inexhaustible resistant power, independent, tenacious, rebellious. It was never submerged or exterminated. It is a fine race. Tunis is one of its cosmopolitan cities, where it has drunk of every foreign stream and influence, has been civilized, softened, informed—a city of the various Mediterranean world, with great colonies of other folk in it, Italians, Jews, Maltese—a New York, as it were, on its own scale. In old Tunis, Arabized as it is, the desert race is itself only an infusion; yet so persistent is the ideal of race on its own soil, and so nomadic is the provincial population, that one feels the presence of that old racial soul, rightly or wrongly, into which the strength of the desert and the mountains has passed, which never breathed the breath of Europe, which remains in its own loneliness as in a fastness. It attracts and perplexes the human mind that would fain make acquaintance with it, but is oppressed by a feeling of impotence. And the exquisite personal demeanor of the Tunisians is enigmatic in its impression; it is like the charm of some Chinese painting or scroll that only emphasizes the unintelligibility, the incommunicability of the too variant spiritual past. With such delightful manners, such identical refinements of taste, it would be so easy to be friends! But no; it is more rational to think of it all as an artistic growth of a foreign culture, a part of the lovely Andalusian inheritance of the land.

To a mind with a historical background it is odd to find Tunis so completely a modern city. The Andalusian tradition is unconcentrated, and slight in its elements of reality, in things; its full experience is rather an imaginative memory; and of the times before that there is nothing left. In the suburban country there are more, though few, relics of past ages, but there the memory works more freely. One recalls, looking off to the sea-towering Mountain of the Two Horns, that on one of those peaks rose the ancient temple of Baal. The harbors of Carthage are fascinating to the eye of the imagination; but the specific remains there are scanty and mediocre; they arouse no reaction deeper than thought; and in the museum of Carthage one dwells most on the curious fact that what little has come down to us of that far-off life has found its way only by the grave itself; here, as in so many places, the tomb has been the chief conservator of life in its material aspects and what may be inferred from them of the soul of dead populations. It is rather in the neighborhood of the Cathedral that memory expands, for beside the near home of the White Brothers, who have spread their mantles and left their bones throughout the Sahara, a noble mission nobly done, here survives the only recorded anecdote of the history of this ridge, that must have been the place of innumerable tragedies—the marvellously vivid Christian story of Saint Louis’s death. The narrative is as fresh and poignant as if it were written yesterday; and on the spot one likes to remember that the chivalrous and good French crusader and king is a Moslem as well as a Christian saint. It is a symbol of peace and conciliation. The past, however, is here a barren field. Antiquity is felt, not in the survival of its monuments, but in the sense of the utter waste, the annihilation of the past, the extinction that has overtaken all that human life and its glory and struggle—Punic, Roman, Visigothic—the emptiness of the place of their battles, religions, pleasures, buildings, and tombs. It is all débris; it is of the slightest—little archæological heaps and pits in a vast horizon of silent sky and sea. The mind becomes merely pessimistic, surveying the scene; the mood of fatalism invades it—the mood of the frozen moon and the solar catastrophe—floods of the eternal nothingness—a mood of the pure intellect; and one is glad to come back to some nook like Ariana, a village midway between Carthage and Tunis, where ruin becomes again romantic and human. The very roses bloom there as in a deserted garden of long ago. It was there that the Hafsides, the rulers of the golden age of Tunis in the thirteenth century, had their country-seats—fair as the paradise at Roccada, where one “was gay without cause and smiled without a reason”—surrounded by gardens, with great lakes shadowed by pine and cypress, and gleaming with kiosks lined with marble and faience, with ceilings of sculptured wood gilded and painted, and cooled by the fresh waters of many fountains. The love of the country was always a trait here—an Arab trait—the rich like to get out of the city to some place of quiet, privacy and repose, such as La Marsa to-day by the sea near Carthage. The sense of the reposeful country mingles with that of the beautiful city in the past as well as now; and the Hafsides were great civilizers, builders, favorers of trade, patrons of the arts and of science. Their works and their gardens are gone alike. Time drives his ploughshare often and deep in an African city; and it is not alone on the green and shining levels of the suburban country, with its great spaces and imperial memories, where every maritime and migratory race has written some half-obliterated line of history, that the mountains look on the sea, and there is a great silence; but ruin is a near neighbor in the city as well. How many nooks and corners, full of the romance of places left to decay! That, too, is an Arab trait: to leave the old to decay and forgetfulness. It is natural that things should die, and be let lie where they fall. Oblivion is never far off.

What lassitude at last! Is it only the nerve-soothing weather, which cradles and lulls, week after week, the wearied Western mind? Is it only a renaissance of the senses, coming into their own, restored and vivified with strange forms and colors, accepting the impermanence of things human, and content to adorn and refine the sensual moment, to withdraw and enjoy? or is it a new world, a new mode of human life, with its own perceptions and intuitions and valuations, a new form of the protean existence of men on the earth, with another memory, psychology, experience? Whatever it be it is a spell that grows.