North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

I emerged the next morning from the arcaded entrance of the hotel, which was one of a continuous line of low buildings making the business side of the public square, and glancing up I saw a great dog looking down on me from the flat roof. There was little other sign of life. The square was a large, irregular space which seemed the more extensive owing to the low level of the adjoining buildings over which rose the massive tower of the kasbah close at hand on the right and, diagonally across, the high dome of the French Bureau, with its arcaded front beneath, filling that eastern side. A fountain stood in the midst of the bare space, and beyond it was a charming little park of trees; and still farther the white gleam of the barracks, through the green and on either side, closed the vista to the south. The Moresque architecture, which the French affect in the desert, with its white lights and open structure, gave a pleasing amplitude to the scene; and the same style was taken up by the main street straight down my left, whose line was edged by a long arcade with low, round arches, and the view lost itself beyond in the market square with thick tufts of palms fringing the sky. A few burnoosed figures were scattered here and there.

Hamet joined me at once, still content; he held in his hand a telegram from his new boy, or those who could interpret for him. We turned at once to the near corner by the kasbah, where was the entrance to the old town and the mosque—a precinct of covered streets, narrow, tortuous ways, with blank walls, dim light. There were few passers-by; occasionally there was a glimpse of some human scene; but the general effect, though the houses were often well built, was dingy, poor, and mean, as such an obscure warren of streets must seem to us, and there was nothing here of the picturesque gloom and threatening mystery of Figuig. I remember it as a desert hive of the human swarm; it was a new, strange, dark mode of man’s animal existence. This was a typical desert town, an old capital of the caravans. It had been thus for ages; and my feeling, as I wandered about, was less that of the life than of its everlastingness.

We went back to the mosque and climbed the minaret. It was a welcome change to step out on the balcony into the flood of azure. The true Sahara stretched round us—the roll of the white sands, motion in immobility; and all about, as far as one could see, the dark palm islands in the foreground and on every horizon. The terrace roofs of the old town lay dark under our feet; off there to the west in the sand were the tombs of its fifty kings; eastward the palm gardens, bordering and overflowing into the new quarter with its modern buildings, lifted their fronds; and near at hand the tower of the kasbah, and here and there a white-domed koubba, rose in the dreaming air; and the streets with their life were spread beneath. Tougourt, at the confluence of the underground streams, is the natural capital of the Rir country, a commanding point; on the north and west it is walled against the inroad of the sands; south and east is a more smiling scene, but the white sand lies everywhere between, like roads of the sea; it is the queen of the oases, and one understood in that sparkling air why it was called a jewel of the desert. I went down to the gardens, where there were fruit trees and vegetables among the palms, but for the most part there was as usual only the barren surface of earth, fed with little canals and crossed by narrow, raised footways, over which sprang the fanshaped or circular tufts of swarded green. On that side, too, was a native village—dreary walls of sun-dried earth with open ways; they seemed merely a new form of the naked ground shaped perpendicularly and squared—windowless, sealed, forlorn. I entered one or two. Indeed, I went everywhere that morning, for the distances were short.

In the afternoon I sat down by a table near a café in the market square, and I remained there for hours over my coffee, watching the scene. All Arab markets are much alike, but this was prettily framed. On my right a palm grove rose over a low wall; on the left, across the broad space, the low line of shops, with a glistening koubba dome in their midst, broke the blue sky; and all between, in front, was the market-place. In the foreground were a few raised booths, or tables, and at the near end by a group of three or four palms was a butcher’s stock in trade, the carcasses hanging on the limbs of a dead tree. Farther off to the left squatted a half-dozen Bedouins round little fagots of brushwood spread on the ground, and beyond them a group of animals huddled; in the centre, on the earth, one behind another into the distance, were many little squares and heaps of country goods, each with its guardian group as at a fair—vegetables, grains, cloths, slippers, ropes, caps, utensils, that together measured the scale of the simple wants of the desert. The place, though not crowded, was well filled with an ever-moving and changing throng, gathering into groups here and there—turbaned people of every tint and costume, young and old, poor and prosperous, picturesque alike in their bright colors or worn rags; but the white or brown flowing garments predominated. There were Arab and Berber faces of purer race; but in the people at large there was a strong negroid character, showing the deeper infusion of negro blood which one notices as he goes south of the Atlas. All the afternoon the quiet but interested crowd swarmed about; and round me at the close tables were soldiers and Arabs who seemed of a more prosperous class, drinking and talking, playing at cards, chess, and dominos, and some were old and grave and silent. At our table there was always one or two, who came and went, to whom Hamet would perhaps present me, a thin-featured cadi, a burly merchant, and we talked a little; but I left the talk to them and watched the scene and from time to time snapped my camera. A caravan came down the street, with great boxes strapped on the camels, and I thought the first two would sweep me, camera, table, and all, out of the way; but the long line got by at last, ungainly beasts with their pawing necks and sardonic mouths. At Tougourt one was always meeting a caravan. As I stood, at a later hour, in a lonely corner by the wall outside the gates, one was just kneeling down on the great sweep of the sand-hill to camp in the melancholy light that was falling from the darkening sky—a sombre scene; and when I came out of the hotel at night I found another sleeping, humped and shadowy, on the public square. The camel was as omnipresent as the palm, and belonged to the same dunes and sky; and as I sat watching there through the uneventful and unhurried hours, the market-place was a microcosm of the desert world.

IV

I spent the evening in the Café Maure of the Ouled-Naïls. They are la femme of the Sahara, daughters of a tribe whose centre is at Djelfa, not far from Laghouat, leagues away to the west, and thence they are dispersed through the desert, adept dancing-girls who perform in cafés; and in that primitive society, it is said, no reproach attaches to their mode of life, which yields them a dowry and brings them at last a husband. The custom is not peculiar to the Sahara; I have read of its existence in Japan and in the north of Scotland in the eighteenth century. I had met with them before, and was familiar with their figures, but always in a tourist atmosphere; here they were on their own soil, and au naturel, and I expected a different impression.

The room was rather large, with the furnace and the utensils for coffee in the corner near the entrance; four or five musicians, on a raised platform, were discoursing their shrill barbarian art, but it pleases me with its plaintive intensity and rapid crescendos, in its savage surroundings; a bench went round the wall, and there were tables, at one of which Hamet and I sat down, and coffee was brought. There were not many in the room—a sprinkling of soldiers, mostly in the blue of the tirailleurs, Arabs, old and gray-bearded, or younger and stalwart like Ali, whom I had lost sight of and now found here, much more attractive than I had thought possible, with a desert rose in his mouth and a handsome comrade. A few women with the high head-dress and heavy clothes they wear were scattered about. Close behind me, and to my left, was a wide entrance to the dark shadows of the half-lighted court whose cell-like rooms I had inspected in the morning, and men and women were passing in and out, singly and in groups, all the evening. For a while there was no dancing—only the music; but at some sign or call a full-grown woman, who seemed large and heavy, began the slow cadence and sway of the dance. I had often seen the performance, but never in such a setting; at Biskra and in the north it is a show; here it was a life. She finished, and I beckoned to a young slip of a girl standing near. She came, leaning her dark hands on the table, with those unthinking eyes that are so wandering and unconcerned until they fill with that liquid, superficial light which in the south is so like a caress. I offered her my cigarettes, and she smiled, and permitted me to examine the bracelets on her arms and the silver ornaments that hung from her few necklaces; she was simply dressed and not overornamented; she was probably poor in such riches; there was no necklace of golden louis that one sometimes sees; but there were bracelets on her ankles, and she wore the head-dress, with heavy, twisted braids of hair. A blue star was tattooed on her forehead, and her features were small but fine, with firm lines and rounded cheek and chin; she was too young to be handsome, but she was pretty for her type and she had the pleasant charm that youth gives to the children of every tint and race. She stood by us a while with a little talk, and as the music began she drew back and danced before us; and if she had less muscular power and vivacity than the previous dancer, she had more grace in her slighter motions. She used her handkerchief as a background to pose her head and profile her features and form; and all through the dance she shot her vivid glances, that had an elasticity and verve of steel, at me. She came back to take our applause and thanks, and talked with Hamet, for her simple French phrases were exhausted; there was nothing meretricious in her demeanor, rather an extraordinary simplicity and naturalness of behavior; she seemed a thing of nature. The room began to fill now; three women were dancing; and she went over to the bench by the wall opposite, and I noticed a young boy of eight or ten years ran to sit by her and made up to her like a little brother. There were three or four such young boys there.

The scene was now at its full value as a picture; not that there was any throng or excitement, and to a European eye it might seem only dull, provincial, rude; the rather feebly lighted room was obscure in the corners and the walls were naked; the furnace corner, however, was full of dark movement, the sharp music broke out afresh, the dance was almost sombre in its monotony, seen mechanically and without any apparent interest by the Arabs, wrinkled and grizzled, banked together or leaning immobile on the bench by the wall; and the cavernous shadow of the court behind me made a fine background to the figures or groups that disappeared or emerged, or sometimes stood stationary there in the semi-obscurity. To my color and shadow loving eye it was an interesting scene; and its rudeness enhanced its quality. I noticed many a slight thing: a tall negro stalked along the opposite wall with a handful of candles which he offered to a woman and found no welcome for, and he went away apparently exceeding sorrowful. And I sat there long in the midst of it, thinking of striped tents by the city wall in the sand near the graves; of streets in the Orient and the north where the women sit by the door-post like idols; and especially reconstructing in imagination the scenes of a romance by an Arab, which I had lately read, depicting the life of an Ouled-Naïl along these very routes where I had been passing, a book full of desert truth—“Khadra,” it is called. Toward ten o’clock we rose to go, and I caught the eye of the young girl I had talked with, and had a smile for good-by.

V

The horses stood at the door early the next morning for a drive to Temacin, some thirteen kilometres south. We were soon out of town, travelling beside an oasis on the left and going in the open desert; a boy joined us from the oasis and excitedly struggled to keep up with the carriage, no difficult task, for the route was heavy with sand; two other boys on donkeys ahead were having a race; and the route had always some touches of travel. The openness of the view was boundless, and I had not seen finer sands, stretching away in long rolls and ridges, and mounded into splendid dunes, with palms here and there for horizon lines. There were always groups and little strings of camels, isolated but living, in the expanse over which the eye roamed; we passed from time to time within view of clumps of lost palms, little oases buried and left in the sands, half-submerged, derelicts; now there were Bedouin tents, low, striped shelters, by ones or twos, pitched on the sterile waste, looking infinitely solitary, at a distance from a small village on a ridge, that itself seemed a heap of ruined and ribbed walls left abandoned. The morning was hot, the sun beat down, and every line and tracery of the wind was visible on the sand. The surface of the dunes was beautiful—light and full of the spirit of fantasy; the modulation was exquisite, ribbed and fretted, furrowed in lines and touched all over with little disks and curves, like the imprint of small shells; and their mottled and wavy surfaces broke the monotony of the vast slopes and dunes like an infinite enamelling of nature. It was the land of the blue distance, the simple in the grand, the apotheosis of paucity in the means, of poverty in the substance, elemental, abstract, superb: the glory of the desert. I never so felt it as on that morning. I watched the slender, film-like, far-off minaret of Temacin take body and height as we drew nearer and nearer, and saw plainly and distinctly at last the boldly perched, irregular oblong of walls and roofs that topped a rising ridge of the sands, with its minaret like a dark, mediæval tower standing in heaven with a lance-like solitude. Its top was bordered with a broad frieze of colored tiles and capped with a pyramidal head or balcony pierced with slim Moorish arches. There were men working under the wall; but the town looked marvellously silent and alone, dark and withdrawn, like an impenetrable earthen ruin, incommunicable; it rose as if made of the earth itself, with the dilapidation of old earthworks, forbidding and melancholy, with no touch of life except the gleam of its tiled minaret; in all that sun it seemed sunless—ruinous, decadent, infinitely old. Soon after we passed another heap of earth walls on a sand-mound, a small village, and came almost at once to Tamelhat, the zaouia, which we had set out to see.