North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

We came out shortly at the top of the ascent in an open space before a round archway in a wall, and dismounted in a scene of Moors passing in and out, whom I photographed; and then we walked on through the low-browed little street, which offered nothing remarkable except its strangeness, and found ourselves at the other side on a high rocky floor, quite mountainous in look, stretching off and off nowhere, which is the neutral ground lying about all the ksars; it looked as if the sun and wind had worn it out, and it had a rugged grandeur; a distant horseman on it seemed uncommonly tall and as solitary as a ship at sea. I got a slim palm wand from a group of Arab boys to use as a switch; but my show of copper coin drew some beggars about me, very insistent, and when we mounted and rode off stones followed us. I have been stoned in various parts of the world and did not mind. The spahi, however, after the incident, took up his station behind. We soon reached another wall with a gate, on one side the inevitable cemetery, with its pointed stones, and on the other the Morocco army in the shape of a small squad of soldiers in soiled gorgeousness, lying about on the ground near their guard-house. They did not have a very military appearance, and paid no attention to us as we rode into the ksar and struck the narrow street, which was the main thoroughfare. It was quite animated, with many passers-by, whose oriental figures were sharply relieved on the walls in the sun or grew dark in the shadow. The houses were low, one against another, and their wall space was broken only by rude doors; here and there were higher buildings, often with little oblong windows aloft, with the effect of a ruined tower, or broken-arched façade, or square donjon; but these elements were rare, though at times they gave an architectural ensemble to little views against the sky with their fine shadows. Poor habitations they are, dilapidated and meagre they look, forlorn and melancholy to the mind, rubbishy, tumble-down, and ruinous to the eye; yet the air of ancientry everywhere dignifies the poor materials, and the sun seems to love them; human life, too, clothes them with its mysterious aura. The crude object partakes of the light it floats in, and every impression fluctuates momentarily through a whole gamut of sense and sensibility; for there is a touch of enchantment in all strangeness.

We dismounted in the middle of the street, half blocking the way with our horses, by a café, whose proprietor, a humble and life-worn old man, set himself to prepare us a cup of the peculiar Morocco tea that is flavored with mint. There were a few passers-by, and I busied myself with my camera. The café was a mere hole in the wall, of preternatural obscurity, considering its small size and shallow depth; the furnace and the teakettle seemed to leave hardly room for the old Arab to move about. I found a camp-stool and sat down opposite the low, dark opening, and, the tea being ready, was drinking it with much relish; it was truly delicious with its strong and fragrant aroma of mint, and was also uncommonly exhilarating. I was thus engaged when two particularly ill-favored Moors, each with a long gun over his shoulder, appeared, and planted themselves, one on either side behind my shoulders, as close as they could get without actually pressing against me, and gazed stolidly and fixedly down at me. I paid no attention to them, but drank my tea, and from time to time dusted my leather leggings with my little palm wand. It was a picturesque group: my friend in his shining white uniform, unarmed, leaning carelessly against the wall in the sun, the tall spahi opposite in the shade regarding us, the two Moors hanging over me motionless, and no one said a word. After a while they seemed to have had enough of it, and went away with a sullen look.

We said good-by to our host and walked on, the spahi following on horseback at a distance of several yards, well behind, and two boys leading our horses. We were soon in the covered ways, where it was often very dark; we met hardly any one—a negro boy or a woman; the doors were shut, and it was seldom that one left ajar gave a scant view of the interior; narrow alleys ran off in all directions, down which one looked into darkness; but if we stopped to peer into them, or showed curiosity, the metallic voice of the spahi would come from behind, “Marchez,” and at the frequent turnings of the way he called, in the same hard voice, “À droite, à gauche”; and so we made our progress through those shadowy vaults, silent, deserted, in the uncertain light. It was like a dead city, motionless, hypnotized, as if nothing would ever change there, with a sense of repose, of negligence of life, of calm, as if nothing would ever matter; occasionally there were figures in the recesses sunk in the wall, silent, motionless—dreamers; one white-bearded old man, seated thus under an archway in a dark corner, seemed as if he had been there from the beginning of time and would be found there on the judgment-day. It was weird. We turned a corner in the darkness and came on a large group—perhaps a score—of young children at play in the middle of the street. I never saw such terror. They fled, screaming, in all directions, swift as wild animals; it was a panic of such instant and undiluted fear as I had never imagined. I cannot forget their awful cry, their distorted faces, their flight, as if for life, the moment they caught sight of us; it was a revelation.

A few minutes later we came out on a crowded square, full of shops, men working at their trades, others lying full length on the ground; it was a small but busy place—not that much was being done there, but there were people, and occupations, and human affairs. It was the gathering seat of the assembly of the elders, before whom the affairs of the ksar are brought for judgment. No one paid us the slightest attention; and after looking at the little stocks of leather and grains and odds and ends, and glancing at the reclining forms that gave color and gravity to the ordinary scene of an Arab square, we entered again on the darkness and somnolence of the winding streets, where there was no sun nor life nor sound, but rather a retreat from all these things, from everything violent in sensation or effort or existence; places of quiet, of cessation, of the melancholy of things. We emerged by a mosque, and near it a cemetery on the edge of the ksar—such a cemetery as they all are, blind, dishevelled heaps of human ruins marked by rough, naked common stones, the desert’s epitaph on life, inexpressibly ignominious there in the bright, bare sunlight. We mounted and rode down through gardens, as at first, on a ridge that commanded now one, now another view of the palm and orchard interiors with their dry beds, a strange mixture of barrenness below and fertility above, a rough but pleasant way; and all at once we saw the great palmerai stretching out below us in the plain, like a lake bathing the cliff, a splendidness of dark verdure; black-green and blue-black lights and darks filled it like a sea—cool to the eye, majestic, immense, magnificent in the flood of the unbounded sunlight, a glory of nature. It was a noble climax to the strange scenes of that morning journey; and soon after we dismounted to make the steep descent on the gray-brown rock of the cliff. The two boys, who had rejoined us, brought down our horses, and we left the half-fallen towers and crumbling walls in their yellow ruin behind us, with the young Arabs still looking, and rode through the hot desert to Beni-Ounif.

This was the mysterious Figuig of old travellers. I had seen it, but it still seemed to me unrealized, though not unreal. A vision of palm-topped garden walls on crumbling mountain paths; of a wind-blown, sunburnt high plateau; of a sun-drenched gully of a street with a strange-windowed, lonely ruin looking down on horses that hang their heads; a maze of darkened passages with a sense of lurking in the shadows, of decay in the silence, of apparition in the rare figures; a closed city of hidden streams and muffled noises, walled orchards and shut houses, sunless ways, yet held in the sun’s embrace, the high blue sky, the girdling mountains, the open desert; and with its stern and rocky gardens of the dead, too; a soil and a people made in the image of Islam, impregnated with it, decrepit with it, full of lassitude and melancholy and doom, mouldering away; yet set amid living fountains, lighted by placid reservoirs where the tall palms sun themselves in the silent waters as in another sky; queen, too, of that dark-green sea of the palmerai, a marvel of nature; and last a vision of long-drawn walls and dismantled towers crumbling in the red sun. It is so I remember it; and it seems rather a mirage of the desert imagination than a reality, a memory.

IV

Beni-Ounif was dull. There was nothing interesting there except the mise en scène. It was pleasant to be dining with officers, for they were the principal patrons of the hotel, with whom stars and crosses were as common as watch-guards in New York; and it was stimulating to see the ensigns of the Legion of Honor where they were something more than the international compliment of a ribbon twisted in a black buttonhole and had their heroic meaning, a decoration on an officer’s breast. The crosses I saw stood for acts of bravery on the field of battle. There were a few other guests who came and went, a French hunter, a Belgian professor who told me of the prehistoric cabinets he had seen farther south, an officer’s remarkable collection, and explained to me the geology of the Sahara in brief and interesting lectures. The town itself never lost for me the vacant and makeshift frontier look that it had at first sight; one could walk from end to end of it in a few minutes and come out on the desert, which was monotony petrified. Nothing happened except the arrival and departure of the daily train. Once I met on the edge of the desert the goum, a compact small body of native Arab cavalry attached to the French arms, a splendid squad of fighting men; rather heavy and broad-shouldered they looked, wrapped in burnoose and turban, mature men whose life was war, black-bearded, large-eyed, grim—predatory faces; and they were in their proper place, with the naked mountains round and the desert under their horses’ feet—a martial scene of the old raiding race. I should not like to see them at work, I thought; their trade is blood, and they looked it—strong, hard, fierce—pitiless men. But usually there was nothing uncommon to my eyes. Once in the café, where we sat over our long glasses of the fortified liquors and tonic drinks of which there is so great a variety in desert towns, some one brought in a beautiful great dead eagle. It was as if he had been killed in his eyrie to see him there on the desert among the soldiers. We returned to our glasses and our talk: tales of Paris, tales of Odessa in the Revolution, tales of long Algerian rides, encounters, anecdotes of the road—what tales! And other men’s tales, too—Anatole France, Pierre Loti, Maurice Le Blanc, Claude Farrère, Pierre Louÿs—all my favorites, for my friend knew them better than I did, and made me new acquaintances “in the realm of gold” that I like best to travel. What happy talk! and the time went by. I went out alone to see the full moon rise over the solemn desert by the reddish hills in the chill air, and fill the great sky with that white flood of radiance that seemed every night more ethereal, more remote from mankind, more an eternal thing; and at the hotel we would meet again to dine late, for my friend being a private soldier, we waited till the officers were gone; and then again the tales and the happy talk, and good night. That was life at Beni-Ounif.

“Would I like to go to the theatre?” I repeated, for it was an unexpected invitation. “You might not think so, but there is a theatre at Beni-Ounif,” said my friend. So it appeared that the Legion, among the multitude of things it did, occasionally gave a performance of private theatricals for its own amusement, and my friend himself was to play that night. It was a beautiful evening with a cold wind. I made my way through the burly military group wrapped in heavy blue cloaks, with here and there a burnoosed spahi or tall tirailleur, and entering the small hall was given a seat in the front row among a few ladies and very young children, two or three civilians, my Belgian acquaintance being one, and half a dozen officers with their swords and crosses. “The tricolor goes well with the palm,” I said to myself, as I turned to look at the prettily decorated, not overlighted room, where trophies of the colors alternated with panels of palm-leaves on either side and at the rear, giving to the scene a simple, artistic effect of lightness and gayety with a touch of beauty, especially in the palms. It was characteristically French in refinement, simple elegance, and color; there was nothing elaborate, but it was a charming border to the eye, and no framework could have been so fit for that compact mass of soldiers as was this lightly woven canopy of French flags and the desert palm on the bare walls of that rude hall. But it was the men who held my eyes. The room was packed with soldiers of the Legion; a few spahis and tirailleurs stood in the rear or at the sides; there was no place left to stand even; and I looked full on their serried faces. My first thought was that I had never seen soldiers before. I never saw such faces—mature, grave, settled, with the look of habitual self-possession of men who command and obey; resolute mouths, immobile features; there was great sadness in their eyes that seemed to look from some point far back, heavy and weary; they had endured much—it was in their pose and bearing and on their countenances; they had ceased to think of life and death—one felt that; but no detail can give the human depth of the impression I felt at the sight—faces into which life had fused all its iron. And there was, too, in the whole mass the sense of physical life, of hardship and hardihood, and of bodily power to do and bear and withstand—the fruit of the desert air, long marches, terrible campaigns in the sands. It was a sight I shall always remember as, humanly, one of the most remarkable I ever looked on.

The Foreign Legion is commonly believed to be made up of broken men who have in some way found themselves eliminated from society, thrown out or left out or gone out of their own will, whether by misfortune, error, disappointment, or any of the various chances of life, and who have joined the Legion to lose themselves, or because they did not know what else to do with their lives. They come from all European nations and are a cosmopolitan body; and, no doubt, here and there among them is a brilliant talent or a fine quality of daring gone astray; but I imagine a very large proportion of them are simply friendless men who at some moment of abandonment find themselves without resources and without a career, and see in the Legion a last resource. I believe there are great numbers of such friendless men in our civilization. Among the thousands of the Legion there must be, of course, every color of the human past; the losers in life fail for many reasons, and in their defeat become, it may be, incidentally or temporarily, antisocial, or even habitually so, as fate hardens round them with years; but in a great number of cases, I believe, society has defaulted in its moral obligations to them before they defaulted in their moral obligations to their neighbors; and, holding such views, it was perhaps natural that, so far from finding the Legion a band of outcast adventurers and derelicts, I found them very human. I did not read romance or virtue into them. I know the hard conditions of their lives. If there be an inch of hero in a man, he is hero enough for me. The story of the French occupation of Algeria is largely the story of the Legion. For almost a century it has been one of the most effective units of the French army all over the world; and here in Algeria it has been not only a fighting force of the first order, but also a pioneer force of civilization. The legionaries have built the roads, established the military and civil stations, accomplished the first public works, drained and planted; they have laid the material foundations of the new order; they have not only conquered, but civilized in the material sense, and the labor in that land and climate has been an enormous toil. The reclamation of Africa is a great work, sure to be looked on hereafter as one of the glories of France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and I thought, as I turned and the band began the overture, what a comment it was on society that in this great work of the reclamation of Africa from barbarism and blood and sodden misery so large a share was borne by this body of friendless men for whom our civilization could find no use and cared not for their fate. What a salvage of human power and capacity, turned to great uses, was there here! and from moment to moment I looked back on that body of much-enduring men with a keen recurring sense of the infinite patience of mankind under the hard fates of life, of the infinite honor and the infinite pity of it all.

To-night all was light gayety and pleasant jollity. The Legion has one characteristic of a volunteer regiment—its men can do everything, so various are the careers from which it is recruited. Its music is famous, and the orchestra played excellently; and as the first little play began, “Mentons Bleus,” the players showed themselves good amateurs. The audience responded quickly to the situations and the dialogue; there were brightened spirits and much laughter, easy, quiet enjoyment and applause. The second part was a series of songs, done by one performer after another, each doing his stunt with verve and the comedy of the variety stage; there was a full dozen of these light-hearted parts. In the intermissions the men stayed in their seats, though about the doorway there would be a little movement and changeful regrouping, but it was an audience that sat in their places ready for more; there was no smoking. The last number of the programme—a small, pretty double sheet, like note-paper, done by some copying process in pale blue, with a sword, rifle, and cap on the ground before two palms lightly sketched in the lower corner of the title leaf—was another one-act play, “Cher Maître,” and was received with a spirit that seemed only to have been whetted by the previous amusement; and when it was over the evening ended in a round of generous applause and a smiling breaking up of the company after their three hours’ enjoyment. It was pleasant to have been with the Legion on such a night, and to have shared in its little village festa, and I stood by the doorway and watched the men go by as they passed out, till all were gone.