North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

VIII

I had loitered for the last time in the street of the blueness and lingered in the souks of the Djerba merchants and especially in the little shop of a mild-mannered Soudanese dealer where I gathered up the curious objects that had been slowly collecting there for me to serve as mementos—things of gourd and hide, of skin and straw, a few ostrich plumes. I had photographed the baker’s shop, and stopped at the intersection of the four corners to look once more at the ever-passing figures of the inscrutable and conglomerate crowd, the float of the desert life. I had called on my friend and kind adviser at the French Consulate, and my British host, to both of whom I owed so much of the pleasure and variety of my traveller’s sojourn. In one respect it was unique in my wanderings. I had never seen so many strata of culture, so many diverse kinds and stages of human life, in one place. I had had a last talk with Seyd, the boy from Fezzan, and with the negro guards of the gate and the boys at the door who were eager rivals for my morning favors. Now it was over, and I stood on the deck with Absalom. I was sorry to part with him. What a faithful watch he had kept! No matter at what hour I stepped out into the street, he was there, seated by the wall; wherever I left my consular friends, in some mysterious way he was instantly there in the street at my side. He had tempted me to a longer stay with lures of hunting in the desert where he calmly explained he would watch with a gun while I slept, and then I would watch, though there would be two others with us, but it would be better if one or the other of us were always awake, for one did not know what might be in the desert; and he had planned a voyage to Lebda, the city of Septimius Severus—it might be a rough voyage in a boat none too good, but was not he a pilot? He had brought me one day all his pilot papers; there were hundreds of them, each with the name of the craft and the signature of the captain whose ways he had safely guided on this dangerous coast in the years gone by. But my voyage in North Africa was finished; it was done; the much that I had left unseen, and I realized how much that was—for wherever one goes, new horizons are always rising with their magical drawing of the unknown—all that was for “another time.” So, knowing the end had come, he took both my hands in both his for our warm addio, bent his head, and went slowly down the ship’s side.

I watched the scene as we drew away. The central mass of the fort stood in shadow, and the sunset light streamed over the eastern side of the city, the beach and bluffs; slender minarets islanded the sky; the blue crescent of the bay lay broad beneath; the oasis rose over the banked earth, and stretched inland, and the high horizon line was plumed with tall single palms tufting the long sky. I watched it long, till the beautiful city in the fair evening light lessened and narrowed to a gleam, and at the end it was like the white crest of a wave that sank and was seen no more.