It was midnight. The radiant moon poured down that marvellous white flood on the hollow of the desert where the little town lay low and gleaming, very silent. But I could not rid my mind of the soldiers’ lives. I thought of the torrid summer heats here in garrison, of the burning marches yonder in the south, of the days in sterile sands that make the sight of palm and garden a thing of paradise—incredible fatigues, mortal exhaustion, monotony. One cannot know the soldiers’ desert life without some experience; but some impression of it may be gained from soldiers’ books, such as one that is a favorite companion of mine, “Une Promenade dans le Sahara,” by Charles Lagarde, a lieutenant in the Chasseurs d’Afrique, a thoughtful book, full of artistic feeling, and written with literary grace, the memorial of a soldier with the heart of a poet, who served in South Algeria. In such books one gets the environment, but not the life; one touch with the Legion is worth them all. I fell to sleep for my last slumber at Beni-Ounif, thinking of soldiers’ lives, friendless men—
“Somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan.”
V
It was a brilliant morning. I went to the edge of the desert and looked off south with the wish to go on that all unknown horizons wake, but which the desert horizon stirs, I think, with more longing insistence, with a greater power of the vague, than any other; for there it lies world-wide, mysterious, unpenetrated, and seems to open a pathway through space itself, like the sea. All true travellers know this feeling, the nostalgia for the “far country” that they will never see; it is an emotion that is like a passion—mystical, and belongs to the deep soul. The desert horizon, like the sea’s, at every moment breeds this spell. But as I turned back, with the sense of the chained foot, my disappointment was tempered by the knowledge that I was to companion my friend, who had been ordered to Tonkin; and I had timed my departure to go with his detachment on its way north. As I went down to the train my Arab boy, with the infinite hopefulness of such attachés, brought me a dead wolf, if by chance I would like it; but I could not add it to my baggage, whereat he was sorrowful, but was comforted. The station presented a lively scene—many soldiers in their white duck trousers and red caps; there was a band; the air was filled with good-bys and laughing salutations; the car windows grew lined with leaning forms and intent faces; the music struck up, high and gallant, and with the last cries and shouts we were off on the line.
It was too short a ride, though the train climbed slowly up the incline, while the desert grew a distant outlook and was shut from view as we made into the winding valleys; and we mounted up through the black defiles, the desolation of the shivered rock, the passes of the toothed ranges, the blocking cliffs and columnar heights—all the petrifaction and fantasy of that naked and severe land; but I was less sensible of its enmity and melancholy than when I came through it alone, though it was harsh and wild, a terre perdue. My friend travelled with his comrades, but we had a long lunch in the train before Aïn-Sefra, and a longer dinner when night began to fall, with tales and talk. Tales of the mutiny of the batallion d’Afrique—Othello tales these, fit for fearful ears; tales of night surprises, Arabs crawling by inches for hours in the sands, the sentinels killed without a sound, the first alarm bayonets through the tents, and then the rouse, the square, the victory; tales of the desert madness, the cafard. Stirring tales. Talk, too, of home and friends left behind us in the world, of the dead and the living, and of what might yet be for both of us. He told me much of the Legion, for that interested me; but he never complained, and if he caught some unspoken thought on my face from time to time, “C’est le métier” he would say, and smile my sympathy away. He was a youth after my own heart; but the night fell darker and darker, and there would be an end. At the last station where it was possible, he came back to me. It was good-by.
TOUGOURT
IV
TOUGOURT