VIII
I went out into the night on my last evening and wandered in the dark streets till the falling gleam of a Moorish cafe drew me into its shadowy spaces, where I drank a cup of coffee, listening to sudden snatches of native music and observing the swarthy and stalwart Arabs where they were banked up on a sort of high stage at my left. It was a characteristic but dull and lifeless scene. At a later hour I visited the moving pictures. The large, obscure shed was jammed full of rough-looking men and boys, French soldiers in many colors, and Arabs in hanging folds, with life-worn faces, often emaciated; but I noted as a general characteristic that self-contained, self-reliant immobility of countenance that is the type of border men; it was the crowd of a frontier town. I went back to my hotel under the keen midnight sky at last, thinking of the long and crowded life of the historic past in this old caravanserai of the desert tribes, of the scenes of which I had been reading—the Koran-led army, the battle of the women, the palace feasts, night-long, where pages swung rose censers among the guests and the revelry ended with the morning prayer; of the great figures—the scholar-saint, Sidi bou-Médyen, the ascetic revolutionary, Ibn Toumert, the Berber shepherd boy who found a kingdom, the world conqueror by the sea at Mahdia, the young princes drowned; of the desert courage that had flashed here, a sword from the scabbard, of the desert piety that had here flung away the jewel of life a thousand times, of the generations of desert idealists who in the crowded schools had walked the way of light as it was vouchsafed to them; and in the waking reality of the French border town, whose night scene had depressed me, it seemed an Arabian dream.
FIGUIG
III
FIGUIG