II
I woke at the first streak of dawn. Two beautiful morning stars still hung, large and liquid, in the fading night, but the growing pallor of daybreak already disclosed the wild and desolate spot where we had fortunately stopped. Drifts of trackless sand stretched interminably before us; the young palms showed low and forlorn in the gray air; the scanty brush by the ditch was starved and miserable; everything had a meagre, chill, abandoned look. As soon as it was light we reversed our course, and re-entering the oasis hailed a well-hidden group of buildings with a koubba that Hamet seemed to have discovered the night before. An old Arab gave us our bearings. We were seventeen kilometres short of Mraïer, the oasis which we should have reached; and now, making the right turn-off, we saw in another direction over the sands the black line of palms toward which we had gone astray. We soon covered the distance to Mraïer, which was a large oasis with a considerable village and a caravanserai whose gates were crowded with camels; here we got a very welcome breakfast, but we did not linger, and were quickly out again on the desert on the long day’s ride before us.
Since we passed the chott we were in the valley of Oued Rir, along which is strewn a chain of oases like a necklace as far as to Tougourt and beyond. We were really on the crust of what has been well called a subterranean Nile, formed by the converging flow of two Saharan rivers, Oued Igharghar and Oued Mya, whose underground bed is pierced by wells and the waters gathered and distributed to feed the oases. There are now forty-six of these palm gardens that lie at a distance of a few miles, one from another, spotting the arid sands with their black-green isles of solid verdure, making a fantastic and beautiful landscape of the rolling plain of moving sands, with many heights and depressions, stretching with desert breadth on and on under the uninterrupted blue of the glowing sky. The district has long been a little realm by itself, sustaining with much toil the meagre life of its people and periodically invaded and subdued by the great passing kingdoms of the north. Its prosperity, however, really dates from the French occupation. At that time the oases were dying out under the invasion of the unresting sands that slowly were burying them up. The French almost at once with their superior skill sank artesian wells, and the new flood of water brought immediate change. The number of the inhabitants has doubled; the product of dates, which are of the best quality, has increased many-fold; and new oases of great extent and value have been planted by French companies. This is one of the great works of public beneficence accomplished by France for the native population; and evidence of prosperity was to be seen on every hand all the way.
The route for the most part was sandy with occasional stretches of rock, often a beautifully colored quartz, whose brilliant and strange veins harmonized well with the deep-toned landscape; but the eye wandered off to the horizon and drifts of sand, as the heavens began to fill with light and the spaces grew brilliant; in that vacancy and breadth every detail grew strangely important and interesting; a single palm, a far glimmer of salt, a herd of goats would hold the eye, and, as the day grew on, the deceptive atmosphere gave a fresh touch of the fantastic, playing with the lines and forms of objects. We passed from Mraïer, leaving these island oases on the horizon as the route threaded its way more or less remote from them, and at intervals we would touch one—a palm grove on the right, and the village by itself on higher dry ground to the left. Two of these villages, of considerable size, were entirely new, having been built within two years; they were constructed of the sun-dried mud commonly used, but they did not have the dilapidated look of the ksar; they were clean and fresh, a new home for the people who had abandoned the old, unhealthy site that they had formerly occupied, and had made a new town for themselves; and Hamet, who told me this, said other villages had done the same, and he seemed proud of their enterprise and prosperity.
We went on now through heavy sand at times—and always there was the broad prospect, the gray and brown ribbed distance, the blue glow—a universal light, a boundless freedom, the desert solitude of the dry, soft air. “C’est le vrai Sahara” said Hamet, content. For myself I could not free my senses of the previous day’s impression of the great chotts as of the shore of a world, and the landscape continued to have a prevailing marine character. I do not mean that the desert was like the ocean; it was not. But the outlooks, the levels, the sand-colored and blue-bathed spaces were like scenes by the seashore; only there was no sea there. The affluence of light, the shadowless brilliancy, the silences, the absence of humanity and human things as again and again they dropped from us and ceased to be, were ocean traits; but there was no sea—only the wind sculpture of the sands, beautifully mottled and printed, and delicately modulated by the wind’s breath, only a blue distance, an island horizon. Even the birds—there were many larks to-day—seemed sea-birds, so lonesomely flying. But there was never any sea. It was the kingdom of the sands.
Here, not far from the route, I saw what was meant by the invasion of the sand. The oasis on its farther side toward the desert was half blown over with the white drifts of it that made in like a tide; the trunks of the palms were buried to a third of their height in it; the whole garden was bedded with it, and as we drew away from the place, looking back, the little oasis with its bare palm stems resembled a wreck driving in the sea of sands. Elsewhere I saw the barriers, fences of palm leaves and fagots, raised against the encroaching dunes, where the sand was packed against them like high snow-drifts. The sand grew heavier now, and as we came to Ourlana, about which palmerais lay clustering in all directions, the horses could hardly drag through the deep, loose mass up to the low building and enclosure where was our noon stopping place. The resources of the house were scanty: only an omelet, but an excellent one, and coffee; bread, too, and I had wine. The family, a small one with boy and girl, whom chocolate soon won to my side, was pleasant, and there was a welcome feeling of human society about the incident; but as I lit a cigarette and watched the fresh horses put in—for here we found our second relay that had been sent ahead some days before—I saw that, if the population seemed scanty, it was not for any lack of numbers. A short distance beyond our enclosure, and on a line with it, in the same bare sandy waste, stood another long building with a great dome, evidently a government structure, and at right angles to it before the door was forming a long line of young children; it was the village school—these were the native boys marching in to the afternoon session, for all the world like an American school at home. I had not expected to see that on the Sahara. I photographed it at once—a striking token of modern civilization; and I saw no happier sight than those playful little Arabs going to school.
We dipped ahead into the oasis by the long lines of palms lifting their bare stems far overhead and fretting the sky with their decorative border of tufts. Here and there were fruit trees, and occasionally vegetables beneath, but as a rule there were only the palms rising from bare earth, cut by ditches in which flowed the water; there was no orchard or garden character to the soil, only a barren underground, but all above was forest silence and the beauty of tall trees. It was spring, and the trees had begun to put out their great spikes and plumes of white blossoms in places, and the air was warm and soft. A palm fascinates me with the beauty of its formal lines; where two or three are gathered together they make a picture; a single one in the distance gives composition to a whole landscape. This was, notwithstanding the interludes of the oases, a continuously desert ride, and I remember it mostly for its beauty of color and line, and a strange intensity and aloofness of the beauty; there was nothing human in it. It seemed to live by its own glow in a world that had never known man; the scene of some other planet where he had never been. There was, too, over all the monotony and immobility of things, a film of changefulness, a waver of surface, a shifting of lights and planes; it was full of the fascination of horizons, the elusiveness of far objects, and the feeling of endlessness in it, like the sky, was a deep chord never lost. It was beyond Ourlana that I noticed to the southwest, a mile or two away, three or four detached palms by a lake; their tall stems leaned through the transparent air above a low bank over a liquid, mirror-like belt of quiet water, a perfect oriental scene. It was my first mirage; and two or three times more I saw it that afternoon—the perfect symbol of all the illusion of life. How beautiful it was, how was its beauty enhanced framed there in the waste world, how after a while it melted away!
Oasis after oasis dropped from us on the left and the right, and in the late afternoon we were climbing a sharp rise through the deepest sand we had yet encountered, so that we all got out and walked to relieve the horses, and ourselves toiled up the slope; and soon from the ridge we saw a broad panorama like that of the day before; but instead of that salt desolation, here the eye surveyed an endless lowland through which ahead ran a long, dark cluster of oases, one beyond another, like an archipelago; and Hamet, pointing to one far beyond all, on the very edge of the horizon, said: “Tougourt.” We descended to the valley, passing a lonely old gray mosque, or koubba, of some desert saint by the way—very solemn and impressive it was in the failing light, far from men; and we rolled on for miles over land like a floor, as on a Western prairie; and the stars came out; and at intervals a dark grove went by; and we were again in the sands; and another grove loomed up with its look of a black low island, and we passed on beside it. I thought each, as it came in view, was our goal, but we kept steadily on. It was nigh ten o’clock when we saw, some miles away, the two great lights, like low harbor lights, that are the lights of the gate of Tougourt. Ali was perceptibly relieved when we made sure of them; for they were unmistakable at last.
Then, in that last half-hour, I witnessed a strange phenomenon. The whole sky was powdered with stars; I had never seen such a myriad glimmer and glow, thickening, filling the heavenly spaces, innumerable; and all at once they seemed to interlink, great and small, with rays passing between them, and while they shone in their places, infinite in multitude, light fell from them in long lines, like falling rain, down the whole concave of night from the zenith to the horizon on every side. It was a Niagara of stars. The celestial dome without a break was sheeted with the starry rain, pouring down the hollow sphere of darkness, from the apex to the desert rims. No words can describe that sight, as a mere vision; still less can they tell its mystical effect at the moment. It was like beholding a miracle. And it was not momentary; for half an hour, as we drove over the dark level, obscure, silent, lonely, I was arched in and shadowed by that ceaseless, starry rain on all sides round; and as we passed the great twin lights of the gates, and entered Tougourt, and drew up in the dim and solitary square, it was still falling.