North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

There was a knock at my door: “Monsieur, some one to see you.” It came with a shock, for the solitude had begun to seize me. I went toward the office. A young soldier of the Legion approached me, full of French grace, with a look of expectancy on his fine face. “I heard there was an American here,” he said in English; “I did not believe it,” he added; “I came to see.” “Yes,” I said, “I am an American.” “There hasn’t been one here in two years—not since I came,” he spoke slowly—keen, soft tones. “South American?” he ventured. “No,” I said, melting. “Truly from the United States—where?” His look hung on my face. “I was born near Boston,” I replied, interested. “I was born in Boston.” I shall never forget the gladness of his voice, the light that swept his eyes. A quick, soldierly friending seized us—the warmth that does not wait, the trust that does not question. In ten minutes he was caring for me like a younger brother, introducing me with my letters at the Bureau Arab, doing everything till he went to his service. In the evening we met again, and so the lonely journey of the day ended in an African sunset, as it were, of gay and brilliant spirits, for I know of no greater joy than the making of friends. He was of French parentage, and the only American in the Legion; at least, he had never seen nor known of another. And I went to bed thinking of the strange irony of life, and how the first thing that the terre perdue gave me was the last thing I expected in the wide world—a friend.

II

I went by myself to visit the old ksar, the native village which had occupied this site before the coming of the French and the rise of the new town about the railway. It lay some little distance to the west of the track—a collection of palm-trees, with a village at the farther end, backed by a white koubba. My Arab boy, who had never lost sight of me, had me in charge, and led the way. We crossed into the strip of barren country and saw the ksar with its palmerai before us, like a rising shoal in the plain. Accustomed as my eyes are to large horizons, this country had an aspect of solitariness that was extraordinary. The sand-blown black rock, the hamada, lies all about; the mountains of the Ksour that back the scene to the northeast are reddish in color and severe in outline, and the mountains of Morocco, cut here by three passes, block it to the north and west with their heavy and wild masses, while other detached heights are seen far off to the south. From this broken ring of bare mountains, red and violet and gray, the rocky desert floor, blown with reddish sand, makes out into the open distance interminably to horizons like the sea. In the midst of this the little ksar with its trailing palm-trees, Beni-Ounif with its slender rail and station, its white redoubt and low buildings, with the Bureau Arab and its palms a little removed, seem insignificant human details, mere markings of animal life, in a prospect where nature, grandiose in form and without limit in distance, exalted by aridity, is visibly infinite, all-encompassing, supreme. The sun only, burning and solitary, seems to own the land. The moment one steps upon the windy plain it is as if he had put to sea; he is alone with nature, and the harshness of the land gives poignancy to his solitude.

We walked over rough ground awhile, and then crossed the dry bed of a oued, one of the channels that in time of flood lead the waters down to the Zousfana, whose shrunken stream flows in its wide rocky bottom some distance to the north of the ksar toward the mountains; and we climbed up on the farther side by crumbling footpaths that run on little uneven ridges of dry mud, twisting about in a rambling way, with small streams to cross, which groove the soil; and so we came into the gardens. The aspect, however, is not that of a garden; the background of the scene is all dry mud, whose moulded and undulating surface makes the soil, while the little plots are divided by mud walls, high enough at times to give some shade and meant to retain the irrigating waters. There are a few patches of barley, very fresh and green; but for the most part the plots are filled with trees—fig-trees, old and contorted, with their heavy limbs, the peach and almond with fragile grace and new tender green, the pomegranate and the apple, and rising above them the palms whose decorative forms frame in and dignify the little copses of the fruit-trees, and unite them; but the dry mud makes an odd contrast with the branching green of varied tints and gives a note of aridity to the whole under scene. The plots vary only in their planting, and were entirely deserted. We came through them to the ksar itself with its wall. It is built of dry mud, which is the only material used here for walls and houses alike. The rain soon gives them a new modelling at best, and this ksar is old and ruined, half abandoned now that the French town is near. The outer wall is much broken, with the meandering shapelessness of abandoned earthworks—scallops and indentations, the smooth moulding and mud sculpture of time on the golden soil; and off beyond it stretches the endless cemetery, with the pointed stones at the head and foot of the graves, a tract of miserable death, so simple, naked, and poverty-struck, and yet in such perfect harmony with the sterile and solitary scene, that it does not seem sad but only the natural and inevitable end. It belongs to the desert; it is its comment on the trivial worthlessness of human life, whose multitude of bones are heaped and left here like the potter’s shard. The sun beats down on the wide silence of that cemetery; the sand blows and accumulates about the rough stones that seem to lie at random; there is no distinction of persons there, no sepulchral apparelling of the mortal fact, no illusion, no deception; it is the grave—“whither thou goest.” And it is not sad—no more than the naked mountains of the Ksour, the dark Morocco heights, the silent sunlight; it is one with them—it is nature. On its edge toward the ksar rises the koubba of the saint, Sidi Slimanc bou-Semakha, the ancient patron of the country; it is the only spot of this old Moslem ground that no infidel foot has trod; there his body reposes in its wooden coffin, hung with faded silks within its carved rail in the white chamber, secluded and sacred, and the faithful sleep in the desert outside. It is a world that has passed away.

The ksar itself was like all others in this region. They are walled villages adjoining the palmerai that feeds them; the houses are built of sun-baked earth supported on small palm beams and lean serried one upon another in continuous lines and embankments; narrow alley ways and passages honeycomb them, often with a roofing of the same palm beams, so that one walks in underground obscurity; externally, owing to their old and weather-worn aspect, they have a general ruinous look. The walls on the street are blind; here and there in dark corners a seat for loungers is hollowed out in the side; there is somewhere a square for judgment where is the assembly of the elders, and by the mosque or koubba an open space. There is always a life outside the walls, a place for market, for caravans to stop, encampments of all sorts. All have a look of dilapidation. But this old ksar had more than that; it was obviously in a state of ruin and abandonment. Walls had fallen, exposing the wretched interiors, cave-like, mere cellarage. There was no one there. I passed through some of the covered ways—blank obscurity, with holes of naked sunlight. I did not see half a dozen living figures; they were unoccupied, listless, marooned. It was still—a stillness of death. I found the sources, the underground streams that supply the little oasis; there were three or four young negro girls standing in the water in discolored bright rags; they pointed out to me the blind fish in the water. “C’est défendu,” said my Arab boy when I asked him to catch one. Life seemed défendu. The air was moribund. It was a decadence of the very earth. I was glad to have the hot sun on my back again by the tall palms and green fruit-trees springing out of their dry-mud beds, and I sat down on a crumbling wall, amid the amber deliquescence of the rich-toned soil, and looked back on that landscape of decay, and sought to reconstruct in fancy the desert life of its silent years.

It was an old human lair. Its people, the ksouriens, who lived here their half-underground life, sheltered from the burning blasts of the summer sun and the bitter winds of winter, were a settled townfolk, with their oasis agriculture and simple desert market. The ruling race were the descendants of some Marabout; for the Moslem saint was a patriarch, and one finds whole villages that claim to be originated from some one of them; these men were the proprietors of the gardens, which were tilled by native negroes or Soudanese slaves and their progeny, a servile breed; and there were Jews, who were compelled to live apart, a pariah caste. Outside were the Berber and Arabized nomad tribes, scattered and living in fractions, who went from place to place for the pasturage of their flocks; their chiefs and head men were desert raiders, who took toll by tribute or pillage of the caravans traversing their country, and made forays on their neighbors; the people of the ksar held a feudal relation to these desert lords. The most secure units of property in the land were the zaouias, or monasteries, bound to hospitality and charity, and ruled by Marabout stocks; their gardens and flocks had a protective character of sacredness, the goods of God. Society was in a primitive form of uncohering fragments, very independent, self-centred, uncontrolled; though it was of one faith, hostility pervaded it; feuds were its annals; it had pirate blood. A pastoral, marauding, sanguinary world, with elements of property and aristocracy, but democratic within itself, with slaves and outcast breeds; a world of simple wants but always half submerged in misery; a world of the strong arm. In such a world the ksouriens lived here by the mountain passes. They saw those old nomad tribes go by that mounted to Tlemcen and drank the bright cup of the Mediterranean for a season; but the ksouriens had forgotten them; their passage was only a wrinkling of the desert sand. Caravans stopped by the brown walls; raiders rode by to the desert; the seven ksars of Figuig fought petty wars, one on another, on the hill opposite; mountain women pitched their striped tents by the cemetery wall; the Jews worked at little ornaments of silver and coral; there was a coming and going to the fountain, secret and ferocious love, the woe of poverty and hate—the Arab life of violence and ruse and silence, in the palm gardens, the underground passages, the darkened streets; a life of obscurity and somnolence; and the ksouriens grew pale like wax, with their black beards and corded turbans, and the old Arab vitality melted in their bones. The hours that no man counts rolled over the languid ksar, where white figures sat in the seats in the earthen wall along the covered streets in the silence; the unborn became the living and the stones multiplied in the cemetery; and there was no change. I could almost hear the bugle note yonder that brought a new world of men. And now the ksar was dead.

The moon, almost at the full, was growing bright in the eastern sky; the mountains of the Ksour, that still took the setting sun, glowed with naked rock, rose-colored; on the left the mountains of Figuig lay in black shadow, with the violet defiles between, clear-cut on the molten sky. As I stepped on the rise of Beni-Ounif it was already night; the brilliant white moon flooded the hard landscape with winter clarity; the unceasing wind blew cold. It was a solemn scene.

III

“Monsieur, le spahi.” I went out in the early morning air and found my escort for Figuig, a tall, dark Arab, almost black, his head capped with a huge turban wound with brown camel’s rope in two coils, and his form robed in a heavy white burnoose that showed his red trousers beneath; he held two horses, one tall and strong, for himself, the other, smaller and lighter, a mare, for me. My friend soon joined us with his mount, and, glancing at my mare as I also mounted, warned me not to rein her in straight with that bit, as it was thus that the Arabs trained their horses to rear and caper, and a strong pull might bring her up unexpectedly on her hind legs, and that, he said, was all I need be careful about. We trotted off easily enough down the street toward the railway, and in a few moments turned the last building and were on the route westward over the open plain. The old ksar lay far off to the left, the Zousfana to the north, and between was the unobstructed stretch of the rocky hamada, herbless and strewn with small and broken stones, to where we saw a line of straggling palms beneath the Morocco hillside. The air was brisk and cool—just the morning for a gallop. The temptation was too great for my mare, who showed no liking for her neighbors, and, after a few partly foiled attempts, struck boldly off the trail to the left. I minded my instructions and had no desire to see what she could do on her hind legs. I had neither whip nor spur. I gave her her head. I was likely to have a touch of the Arab fantasia, and I did. I settled myself hard in the saddle as she flew on; she was soon at the top of her speed; it was the gallop of my life. Her feet were as sure as they were fleet on the pathless, rocky plain; she avoided obstacles by instinct; and if she came to a dry, ditch-like channel now and then that cut the level, with a slight retardation for the spring she jumped it, as if that were the best of all. But it was a pace that would end. After a mile or so she breathed heavily, and I, seeing some Arab tents pitched not far away, turned her toward them, thinking she might regard it as a friendly place, and so brought her up quite blown and with heaving sides. Three or four Arabs, very friendly and curious, ran up, and I dismounted. “Méchante, méchante,” they kept saying; and I looked at the shallow glitter of the mare’s eyes, as she turned them on me to see the rider she had got the better of, and for my part I said “Furbo”—something that I learned in Italy. My friend came riding up after a little to know where I was going, and said he thought I was “having a little fun”; and the spahi rode in, and, dismounting, also with a “méchante” changed horses with me. I said good-by to the friendly Arabs, and we rode off straight north to the route from which I had involuntarily wandered; but it was a fine morning gallop.

We came without further incident to the line of scattered palms, amid a very broken country, where the ascent makes up to Figuig, enclosed in a double circle of walls. Figuig is the name of the whole district. It includes a lower level where is the ksar of Zenaga and its vast palmerai, and a higher level on which are scattered the other six ksars amid their gardens. All are built of sun-dried mud, as are also the two walls, the inner being furnished with round towers at frequent regular intervals. We went on amid a confusion of gardens—fruit-trees with vegetables under them, such as beans and onions, and plots of bright barley in the more open places, but mostly palms, with little else, all springing out of the dry mud; we were past the ruinous-looking stretches of the brown, sunbasking wall, and began to be lost in a narrow canyon, as it were, up which the rude way went between the enclosed gardens. There was hardly width for our horses as we rode in single file on the uneven, climbing path that seemed something like the bed of a torrent, and indeed every now and then water would break out from underground and pour down like a cascade or swift brook, with a delicious sound of running streams. On either side the garden walls rose a great height far over our heads, and above them brimmed branches of fruit-tree tops with the splendid free masses of palms hanging distinct and entire in the bit of blue. We seemed to be walled out of a thick, fertile, and beautiful grove; but they had only the same dry mud for their bed that was under our feet in the narrow, tortuous way. The sun had begun to be hot before we left the plain, and now, in spite of the shelter of the walls, the heat began to make itself felt; there was the dust of the country, too, which, slight as it was that day, is omnipresent; so, being both very thirsty, my friend and I dismounted at a place where the running water came fresh from the yellow ground, and we drank a very cooling draught of its brown stream. It is the scene that I remember best. It was like a defile in a narrow place; the way broadened here by a bend in the steep ascent; one saw the brimming gardens below, and the view was closed above by the turn of the walls; and there, in the hollow, my friend and I leaned over the cascading water and, turning, saw the spahi, as he tightened the girths of my saddle which had loosened, under those walls, brown in the shadow and an orange glow in the sun, with the spring green starred with white blossoms like a tender hedge above their yellow tops, and the leaning palms in the blue. It had a strange charm; and the water made music, and it was solitude, and everything there was of the earth, earthy—and beautiful.