North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

IT was a cold dawn in late April at Biskra. The carriage, long and heavy, with three horses abreast, stood at the door. Ali, a sturdy Arab, young but with no look of youth, wound in a gorgeous red sash, sat on the box; and as I settled in my place, Hamet, the guide, followed me gravely and sat down beside me, and at a word from him we were briskly off on the long, uneventful drive to Tougourt, over the desert route of about a hundred and thirty miles southward, to be covered in two days’ travel. We were soon beside the sleepy silence of the oasis, and passed the old yellow slope that was once a fortress to guard it on the edge of the sands; we dipped along by little fields of fresh green barley and rose on the steppe of the bois, a tangle of low undergrowth, scarcely waist-high, of twisted and almost leafless shrub, that clothes the desert there with its characteristic dry, rough, tortured, and stunted but hardy vegetation. A few Arabs were to be seen in places cutting it for fire-wood. Camels, too, far away in almost any direction, loomed up, solitary and ungainly as harbor-buoys on a windless morning tide. On all sides lay the sharp black outlines of oasis clumps of palm-trees, distinct, single, solid, each a distant island, with miles to cross before one should land on its unknown shore; and behind us the range of the Aurès seemed to block out the world with the wild beauty of its precipices, which made one cliff of all the north as if to shut out Europe. It was like a wall of the world. All about us was the desert; everything seemed cold and gray and distant, lifeless, in the pallor of the morning; but with every mile the whole world brightened and warmed. Desert air intoxicates me; every breath of it is wine, not so much to my blood or my nerves, but to my whole being of man; and long before we reached Bordj Saada, the first halt, I was keyed to the day. It was a glorious day, cloudless and blue, and drenched with sunshine and radiance and warmth pouring on vast spaces; and the Bordj, a disused military post, a sort of large stockade for refuge and defence, standing solitary on its high ridge, was an old friend and a place of memory for me; there once I had turned back, and now I was going on. There was excitement in the moment, in the look ahead; and so it was only as we swept round the curve down into the valley of Oued Djedi and crossed its dry channel that I felt myself embarked, as it were, on my first true desert voyage. I had coasted the Sahara for a thousand miles here and there, like a boy in a boat; but now I should be at last out of sight of land.

We were quite happy voyagers, the three of us. Ali, on the box, sang from time to time some cadenced stave, careless as a bird, in a world of his own; indeed the drive was an adventure to him, for, as I afterward found, it was his first going to Tougourt; and had not Hamet, almost as soon as we started, lifting one intent, burning glance straight in my eyes—it was the first time I had really seen him, as a person—told me that I had brought him good luck, for that night his wife had borne him a boy? He was content. A fine figure, too, was Hamet; he answered, as no other guide but one I ever had, to the imagination; he filled my dream of what ought to be. A mature man, rather thick-set, with a skin so bronzed that in the shadow it was black, with the head of a desert sheik, noble, powerful; when he moved he seemed still in repose, so sculptural were all the lines of his figure, such dignity was in every chance attitude; he seemed more like some distinguished aid to attend me than a guide. His white burnoose fell in large folds, and as he threw it partly over me in the first cool hours, he disclosed some light, white underdress over whose bosom hung low a great gold chain with beads under; a revolver swung in a leather case, rather tightly drawn below his right breast with a strap over the shoulder; white stockings and slippers completed his garb. We talked of trifles, and the conversation was charming, not too fluent—talk of the road; but what I remember is my pleasure in finding again what often seems to me that lost grace of a fine natural demeanor in men. It is of less consequence to me what a man says than is his manner of saying it, and speech is not of the lips only, but of the whole man; and, in my experience, it is the unlearned who are also unspoiled, that, all in all, say things best. And ever as we talked or were silent the horses went on, the brilliant bare line of the Aurès sank slowly down, and round us was the waste of rock with its fitful tangle of tamarack and drin, the sea of sand with its ridged breadths, the near or distant horizon lines as the track rose and fell; and with the hours the panorama of the road began to disclose itself.

The road was really a broad, camel-trodden route on which the carriageway, winding about, found going as best it could; the railway that will some time be had been surveyed along it, and the telegraph-poles that already bore the wire far beyond Tougourt into the desert were seldom far away. On the earlier part of the journey the going was excellent in that dry season. It was not a lonely road, though for long stretches it was solitary. Over the brink of a rise suddenly would spring up a half-dozen human figures, sharp outlines on the blue sky, and a flock would come tumbling after as if clotted about their feet, and there might be a donkey or two; it was a Bedouin family on its northern migration to the summer pasturage. What an isolated fragment of human life it seemed, flotsam tossing about with the seasons, as little related to anything neighborly as seaweed, yet spawning century after century, living on, with the milk of goats, in such a waste; and how infinitely fresh was the simple scene! one or two men, a boy, women, children, and goats tramping in the desert toward water and green food, a type of humanity for ages—and it was such a wretched subsistence! But what a bodily vigor, what a look of independence, what a sense of liberty there was there, too! Now it would be two or three camels with the canopy in which women ride, with flocks, too, and more men and boys, more warmly clad, with more color and importance—some wealthier head man with his family going the same northward journey. Or, as the carriage crested some ridge, we would see miles ahead a long line creeping on toward us—a trade caravan; and after a while it would pass, the camels pouting in high air, under the loads of balanced boxes or bales laid across them, lumbering dumbly along in the great silence, like convicts, as it always seems to me, from another sphere of existence.

Many creatures give me vividly this impression of having haplessly intruded into a state of being not meant for them. The turtles in the swamps of my boyhood, leaning their sly and protruded heads out of their impossible shells, the fish that have great staring eyes in aquariums, frogs and toads and all centipedal sea creatures, are to me foreigners to life, strays, misbirths, “moving about in worlds not realized,” and all grotesque forms of life—even human deformity when it becomes grotesque—wake in me something between amusement and pity that they should be at all. I feel like saying as a guide, wishing to correct a friend of mine, once said: “Monsieur, you are a mistake.” But of all such creatures, the camel fills me with the most profound and incurable despair. He is the most homeless-looking of all creatures. He has been the companion and helpmate of man from the dawn of human life, and our debt to him through uncounted ages and in places where the human lot has been most penurious and desperate is untold; but man has never been able to enlighten him; he looks, on all occasions and under all circumstances, hopelessly bored with existence, unutterably sick of humanity. There is a suicidal mood in animal life, and at times one can see glimpses and intimations of it surely in the eyes of animals; the camel embodies it, like a stare. I wish they were all dead; and when I see their bones in the sand, as I often do, I am glad that they are gone and have left the ribs of their tabernacle of life behind them by the wayside. Every desert traveller writes a little essay on the camel. This is mine. I will not modify it even for the sake of the meharis that come down the route, overtaking us from Biskra; they are the racers that have just competed in the yearly trial of speed from Tougourt—aristocrats of the species; they have a clear gray tone and slender delicacies of flank and skin; all day they will be speeding ahead and dropping behind us; the desert is their cloth of gold and they its chivalry—splendid beasts they are, as native to this blown empire of the sand and the sun and the free air as a bird to the sky—and they lift their blunt noses over it with unconquerable contempt. It is amazing how the creature, supercilious or abject, refuses to be comforted. There is no link between him and man. If you seek a type for the irreconcilable, find it in the camel.

It is said that one meets his enemy in every place, and every traveller experiences these surprising encounters that prove the smallness of the world; but I better the proverb, for it is a friend I meet in the most solitary places. On the loneliest road of Greece a passing traveller called out my name; in the high passes of Algiers I came face to face with a schoolmate; and, however repeated, the experience never loses its surprise. Surely I had seen that gaunt figure pressing up on a stout mule from the head of the fresh trade caravan that was just approaching; that face, like a bird of prey, that predatory nose before the high forehead and bold eyes—yes, it was Yussef, my guide of years ago, with welcome all over his countenance and quick salutations to his old companion. He was a caravan man now, for the nonce, and coming up from the Souf. How natural it was to meet on the desert, with the brief words that resumed the years and abolished the time that had sped away and renewed the eternal now. But we must follow the meharis, slim forms on the horizon ahead, and we went on to overtake them at Aïn Chegga, a mere stopping place, where there was on one side of the way a sort of desert farm, and a relay of horses waiting for us, and on the other a small, lonesome building by itself where we could lunch from our own stores. The sun was hot now and the shade and rest grateful; but we had a long way to go. With thoughtless generosity we gave our fragments of bread to some adjacent boys, and started off rapidly with the fresh horses on the great plain.

The road was lonelier than in the morning hours; the solitude began to make itself felt, the silence of the heat, the encompassment of the rolling distances, the splendor of the sky. There was hardly any life except the occasional shrub, the drin. I saw a falcon once, and once a raven; but we were alone, as if on the sea. Then the Sahara began to give up its bliss—the unspeakable thing—the inner calm, the sense of repose, of relief, the feeling of separation from life, the falling away of the burden, the freedom from it all in the freedom of those blue and silent distances over sandy and rock-paved tracts, full of the sun. How quiet it was, how large, and what a sense of effortless elemental power—of nature in her pure and lifeless being! It is easy to think on the desert, thought is there so near to fact—a still fresh imprint in consciousness; thought and being are hardly separate there; and there nature seems to me more truly felt in her naked essence, lifeless, for life to her is but an incident, a detail, uncared for, unessential. She does but incline her poles and it is gone. Taken in the millennial æons of her existence, it is a lifeless universe that is, and on the desert it seems so. This is the spectacle of power where man is not—like the sea, like the vault of heaven, like all that is infinite. What a repose it is to behold it, to feel it, to know it—this elimination, not only of humanity, but of life, from things! The desert—it is the truth. How golden is the sunlight, how majestic the immobile earth, how glorious the reach of it—this infinite! And one falls asleep in it, cradled and fascinated and careless, flooded slowly by that peace which pours in upon the spirit to lull and strengthen and quiet it, and to revive it changed and more in nature’s image, purged—so it seems—of its too human past.

It was late in the afternoon. Hamet roused himself as we passed down to Oued Itel and crossed its dry bed, and Ali ceased from his vagrant music as the horses breasted the slope beyond. We came out on a high ridge. It was a magnificent view. The long valley of the great chotts lay below us transversely, like a vast river bottom; far off to the northeast glittered, pale and white, Chott Melrir, like a sea of salt, and before us Chott Merouan stretched across like a floor, streaked with blotches of saltpetre and dark stains of soil. The scene made the impression on me of immense flats at a dead low tide, reaching on the left into distances without a sea. It was a scene of desolation, of unspeakable barrenness, of the waste world; its dull, white lights were infinitely fantastic on the grays and the blacks, and the lights in the sky were cold; the solitude of it was complete; but its great extent, its emptiness, its enclosing walls of shadow in the falling day crinkling the whole upper plane of the endless landscape round its blanching hollows and horizontal vistas below, stamped it indelibly on my eyes. I was not prepared for it; it was an enlargement, a new aspect of the world. This was the southwestern end of the chain of chotts, or salt wastes, that lie mostly below sea-level and are the dried-up bed of the ancient inland arm of the sea that washed this valley in some distant age; they stretch northeasterly and touch the Mediterranean near Gabès and the suggestion is constantly made that the sea be let into them again by a canal, thus flooding and transforming this part of the Sahara. It may some time be done; but there is some doubt about the lay of the levels and whether such an engineering feat would not result merely in stagnant waters. Meanwhile it is a vast barren basin, saline, and in the wet season dangerous with quicksands, unsafe ground, a morass of death for man and beast. The ridge where I stood commanded a long view of this sterile and melancholy waste; but I did not feel it to be sad; I only felt it to be; it had such grandeur.

We went down by a rough descent and began the crossing of the chott before us, Merouan, on its westerly edge. The road ran on flat ground, often wet and thick with a coating of black mud, and there was the smell of saltpetre in the air; the view on either side was merely desolate, night was falling, it began to be chill; and by the time we reached the farther side the stars came out. It was a darkened scene when we rode into the first oasis of young palms, without inhabitants, which belonged to some French company. It was full night when we emerged again on the sands; a splendor of stars was over us and utter solitude around; it was long since we had seen any one, and as the second oasis came into view it looked like a low black island cliff on the sea, and as deserted. We drove into its shadows by a broad road like an avenue, with the motionless palms thick on either side, as in a park; there was no sign or sound of life. It was like night in a forest, heavy with darkness and silence, except where the stars made a track above and our lights threw a pale gleam about. This oasis, which was large, also seemed uninhabited; and we passed through it on the straight road which was cut by other crossing roads, and came out on the desert by the telegraph-poles. The going was through heavy sand, which after a mile or two was heavier; our hubs were now in drifts of it. Hamet took the lights and explored to find tracks of wheels, and the horses drew us with difficulty into what seemed a route; in ten minutes it was impracticable. We crossed with much bumping and careening to the other side of the telegraph-poles, and that was no better; forward and back and sidelong, with much inspection of the ground, we plied the search; we were off the route.

We drove back to the oasis thinking we had missed the right way out, and on its edge turned at right angles down a good road; at the corner we found ourselves in the dunes—there was no semblance of a route. We returned to the centre of the silent palm grove, where there were branching ways, and taking another track were blocked by a ditch, and avoiding that, coasting another and ruder side of the grove, again at the upper corner of the oasis struck the impassable; so we went back to our starting-place. Hamet took the lanterns and gathered up his revolver and set out apparently to find the guardian, if there was one. It was then Ali told me he had never been to Tougourt before; Hamet was so experienced a guide that it was thought a good opportunity to break in a new driver. These French oases across the old route, with their new roads, were confusing; and Hamet had not been down to Tougourt of late. The silence of the grove was great, not wholly unbroken now: there were animal cries, insect buzzings, hootings, noises of a wood, and every sound was intensified in the deep quiet, the strange surroundings. It was very late. We had spent hours in our slow progress wandering about in the sands and the grove in the uncertain light. Hamet was gone quite a long time, but at last we saw his waving lantern in the wide dark avenue and drove toward him. He got in, said something to Ali, and off we went on our original track, but turned sharply to the right before issuing from the wood, down a broad way; we were soon skirting the western edge of the oasis; branches brushed the carriage; the ruts grew deep, the track grew narrow, the carriage careened; we got out, the wheels half in the ditch, horses backing. Hamet threw up his hands. It was midnight. We would camp where we were. The route was lost, whatever might be our state; and I did not wonder, for as nearly as I could judge we were then heading north by east, if I knew the polestar. We were on the only corner of the oasis we had not hitherto visited; the spot had one recommendation for a camp—it was a very out-of-the-way place. The horses were taken out, and each of us disposed himself for the night according to his fancy. It was intensely cold, and I rolled myself in my rugs and sweaters and curled up on the carriage seat and at once fell fast asleep.

An hour later I awoke, and unwinding myself got out. It was night on the desert. Ali was asleep on the box, upright, with his chin against his breast. Hamet lay in his burnoose in the sand some little distance away. The horses stood in some low brush near the ditch. The palm grove, impenetrably black, stood behind, edging the long, low line of the sky; there was a chorus of frogs monotonously chanting; and before me to the west was the vague of the sands, with indistinguishable lines and obscure hillocks, overlaid with darkness. Only the sky gave distance to the silent solitude—such a sky as one does not see elsewhere, magnificent with multitudes of stars, bright and lucid, or fine and innumerable, melting into nebulous clouds and milky tracts, sparkling and brilliant in that keen, clear, cloudless cold, all the horizon round. I was alone, and I was glad. It was a wonderful moment and scene. Hamet stirred in his place, and I went back to my post and slept soundly and well.