North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

I

IT was in my early days in the desert, and Yussef told me tales. There was a Bedouin camp—indicated vaguely in the distance by a gesture; a real desert encampment. “Were there many tents? Twenty? A hundred?” “There might be—thousands!—who could know?” It was near an old French fort where some relative, variously designated as little brother, step-brother, nephew, cousin, was in charge; we would be welcome; there would be cous-cous, real cous-cous, made in the desert. It was mid-winter; but a caravan had come in last night—the roads were good.

So we set out on a bright, cold morning with a heavy carriage and two large, strong horses, with wraps and rugs in plenty, and some Christian stores, and drove out by old Biskra as the low sun began his great circuit over the extended plain. It was my first venture into those long reaches of the waste, with their interminable roll into the horizons. The beautiful cliffs of the Aurès began to stand up in their true grandeur, detaching themselves from the level, massing their long line and isolating the range in blue heaven—a wall of the world; the desert floor spread out like endless shallows of a sea of marshes, rising and falling with a vast undulation of shadows, far away; the winter desolation solemnized the quiet scene. The road was good enough at first, firm, though muddy; but the amount of water was surprising, and after a few kilometres, when old Biskra was only a dark-ribbed reef behind us, not to be distinguished from the other oases that dotted the distances about, the scene suggested more than ever an archipelago. It was soon heavy going continuously, and we were at our best when we could keep the edge of a ridge along which a lively brown stream poured turbulently. The land was wet, soaked, but not submerged; and on all sides, at varying distances, were living objects—flocks, camels, men—and the herds, though they were really far apart, gained an effect of number from the great spaces that the eye took in. Except for the character of the landscape, it would have been a monotonous drive; and it was high noon when we drew up at the old French fort, Bordj Saada.

I went toward the brow of the hill. A solitary Arab, an old man, was doing his devotions, and after I had passed, I turned and looked at him. It was the first time I had seen an Arab praying in the desert. With his face toward Mecca, he extended his arms and made his genuflexions, prostrating himself, oblivious to all about him; he was alone with his God. The ease and immediacy with which an Arab withdraws into his religion, independently of time, place, and circumstance, is one of the primary traits of the physiognomy of the land. I kept on to the crest of the rise, and as my eyes ranged over the great circuit of the field of vision the impressions that had vaguely fed me all the morning came to a climax and, as it were, focussed; it was a scene of the patriarchal age. It was as if the dark film of my memories had suddenly developed in my eyes the picture of Biblical life—the Scriptural landscape. The sky was filled with gray clouds in strata, spotting the expanse, where tracts of light interchanged with the shadows; and in the eternal vacancy, scarcely disturbed by the far, dark line of some emerging oasis, everywhere in the sea of light and distance were herds of camels, standing thin and tall, but distinct, in the long perspectives, solitary or netted wanderingly together, and straggling flocks with Bedouin boys in couples; here and there a low, brown Bedouin tent crouched to the soil; yonder was a brace of horsemen riding; the long line of a caravan behind me was rounding the sweep of the hill up from Tougourt, with its dwarfed camel leaders rudely clad. Few elements, but widely distributed. Flocks and herds and weather; the life close to nature; the lowly companionship of animals; the deeper feeling always intensified in broad prospects, of the spiritual brooding of nature around—in the blue and the sun and the cloud, in the distant mountain range, and in land and water: the simple, early, primitive world. It lay unfolded in such infinite silence, with such an effect of agelessness and continuity, of the elemental thing—human life on earth! To me it was early centuries made visible. It was desert life first grasped by my eye—primary, quiet, enduring; and how humble in its grandeur! The impression did not pass quickly away, but persisted long afterward; however obscured by the superficial incidents of the day, it emerged again; the mood was always there within. It is not unusual for me, and I suppose not for others, to live thus at times in a double consciousness of the outward and the inward life, a twofold stream of being whose currents never mix, whose fountains are different; but on that day I especially marked the preoccupation and excitement of the deeper element. It was as if from some Pisgah height I actually saw the old Scriptural world.

Yussef came to tell me that the cous-cous was ready, for we had been much delayed and everything was more than prepared when we arrived. I went back to the old French post, an extensive four-walled structure, built like a fondouk, with stables and rooms on the inner sides, as a military rallying-point for storage and harborage, and commanding the route to Tougourt. It had been long disused and was in charge, apparently, of Yussef’s “little brother,” who turned out to be a full-grown man with a wife. She had cooked the cous-cous, and as I sat down to my meal in one of the bare interior cells looking on the great yard, it was brought in smoking. It is made of farina with small pieces of lamb mixed with it, and was piled up in a great, yellowish cone, enough for twenty appetites; and it was hot, not only in the ordinary sense of fragrant fuming, but it had bowels of red pepper. It was excellent, and I formed a liking for this pièce de résistance of an Arab feast that has never since betrayed me. Afterward there was coffee, with dates and an orange. So far as the meal was concerned, our plan had been a brilliant success. I lit a cigar with contentment, leaving Yussef and the rest to their own share of the improvised fête, and when he appeared again I said impassively, “Well, the camp”; for I had not seen any signs of that Timbuctoo which had lured me forth on the winter desert. “Do you want to see the camp?” said Yussef. “Yes,” I answered; “where is it?” It was close by.

He led me out down the northern hillside a short distance, toward a small enclosure on the slope, stopped, and said “Voilà!” There was one Bedouin tent. A low hedge of fagots surrounded it, on which a yellow dog frantically volleyed defiance. “Well,” I said, “come on; I want to see it.” But he stayed in his tracks; and, as I looked back questioningly, he said with great solemnity: “Too much dog!” A woman appeared, and he hailed her, and we went off to halloo to her husband, who presently approached and very willingly led me toward the tent. The woman had collared the dog, and the man shouted to him, but he was irreconcilable. The last word in my vocabulary of abuse—that beyond which nothing can go—is “the manners of a Kabyle dog”; and this one was a fair specimen. As I came into the enclosure and stooped to enter the tent, his fury knew no bounds. The woman, bending down, held him securely with her arm tight about his neck, and the daughter, a young and pretty girl, clutched his hind legs in a firm grip; and he howled as well as he could. This was the central group in that low interior; and the woman, with her black hair and full, gleaming eyes, a face that in shape resembled that of an Indian squaw, heavy silver hoops in her ears, and a short, muscular, full-bosomed frame, was a striking and vital figure as she half strangled the beast and cheerfully and with interest guided my undue curiosity. I looked over the rude cooking arrangements, the bed, the strange implements—all the scanty furnishing of that human nest, almost hidden in the wet ground of winter, close to the earth. They were all polite and kindly and let me see and handle what I would. The space was small, and one could not stand upright. This was “their toil, their wealth”—I thought of the Syracusan fishers of the old idyl; and as I came away with snatches of it in my head, and the faithful watch-dog again danced and barked maniacally on the fagot-fence, I was glad that the poor fishers “had no watch-dog”; and I forgot to reproach Yussef for his tale of Timbuctoo—numbers are vague things at best, and in Africa quite indescribable in their behavior.

While the horses were being harnessed, I sought out my hostess, the “little brother’s” wife, and found her in a deep, large kitchen in one corner of the enclosure. She was dressed to receive me in all her finery. She was tall and gaunt, and garbed like an Ouled-Naïl—bright stuffs, rings, necklaces, ornaments, a barbaric vision to my then unfamiliar eyes, and with the tinsel a good deal rubbed off in places. She did the honors with touches of coquetry, and showed me the place where the cous-cous had been concocted, the cradle with the baby, and the ménage, and she took me up a dark, winding, stone stairway to the bedroom above. It was triste there—a place for a traveller’s murder, I thought, in some French romance of feudal journey; when we descended, the cavernous gloom and rude largeness of the kitchen, in which a good many chickens were wandering about, seemed almost like a return to sunshine and life. Then we said good-by to the little group of various persons who had served us with so much good-will, and drove off by another route, westward, toward the oasis of Oumach, a dark line far away.

We swept into the country on higher ground, under a clearing sky, and the panorama came back—the primeval story of shepherd and herding races, in the immutable grandeur of the great lines that framed it. We were going toward the sun, and there seemed no limit to the scene before and about us. It was the plane of its extension that was wonderful—and everywhere the intensity of the silence, the clarity of distant objects, and that quality of the infinite which no words, but only a real memory, can convey. Flocks and herds and men, scattered at great intervals, lessened behind us and drew near in the offing. The road was mud, but by no means the slough of the morning. We met no one; only we were abroad in the wet waste. We passed but one house, where there was an Arab—also with dogs, but not of the Kabyle variety—who gave us coffee; and the sun was westering far when we came to the angle where we struck the Biskra route and turned homeward. The dense blackness of the Oumach palms showed like an island in the dying day, as we passed them, near at hand; it was too late, too wet to stop there; and shortly afterward the sun went down in a clear sky, immense and red on the desert edge. Then I saw what was to me a remarkable phenomenon: a sunset on the earth instead of in the heavens. The ground, more or less overgrown with scattered vegetation, sloped upward in a long, bold, westerly swell, and cut the horizon clear with its whole breadth; and this wide-flung earth surface through its entire width flamed scarlet, like a low prairie fire, burning with light; the ground glowed rosy red, and the plants and shrubs and every growing thing stood up, distinct in every twig and blade, as if on fire with gold, burning unconsumed, and slowly all turned to scarlet and faded to rich crimson, softened, paled and died. It was all on the earth; at least, if there was any color in the clear sky above, except the long horizon glow, I did not see it. I remembered a line of Keats that had always troubled me, because I did not know what he meant:

“While barrëd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.”